40 years ago today: The Jesus and Mary Chain released their debut album Psychocandy

Originally published in Hot Press in 1994:

“If we’d done Darklands first and then done Psychocandy, our career would have gone in a totally different fucking way and everybody would love us, because they’d see the greatness in a band that could make Darklands and then Psychocandy. Unfortunately Psychocandy came first, so people somehow thought this quieter, mellower record was a sell-out. Not just a great piece of fucking music, but a sell-out, because the one before it was loud and noisy.”

This is William Reid of The Jesus and Mary Chain talking. He is tired, he is slightly paranoid, and if the number of empty wine bottles on the table is anything to go by, either a wee bit drunk or in possession of the strongest constitution this side of a bull elephant.

“I think that’s the problem in our whole career,” he continues. “People have not understood that we love both things. We love loud and quiet, good and bad, soft and hard. I think everybody does in their ordinary everyday life, but something weird about musicians when they start a band is that they feel they’ve got to have only one emotion, one feeling, and your personality’s different.

“What kind of person are you? I’d hazard a guess that you’re a nice person, a quiet person, but I’d also say that you’re a horrible, moody, bad-tempered fucker and both descriptions of you would be true, ’cos you’re both things, and that’s what music should be. I think what it is is that most bands are cowardly, because when you’re hard, you get respect. You make loud guitar noise, you get respect. You suddenly strip it all down and become quiet and mellow and then you lay yourself open to abuse and criticism.”

He may be tired, he may be slightly paranoid, he may be way out of line with that ‘horrible, moody, bad-tempered fucker’ bit, but otherwise he’s got it just about right. The Jesus And Mary Chain released Psychocandy in 1985. It was promptly heralded as LP of the year and subsequently, one of the most important of the decade, and since then, although they’ve been consistently successful abroad, they’ve never managed to excite anything like the same critical response in Britain, and it clearly irks them. They are irked as hell. It doesn’t take much prompting to get them to admit that they think their new album, Stoned And Dethroned, has been reviewed harshly in Britain.

“Not just harshly, but unfairly,” opines William.

“Definitely,” agrees Jim.

And do they have any idea why?

“Yeah, the reason for that is the same reason that Darklands got reviewed harshly,” says Jim. “We’re not well thought of and we never really were. Even the reviews of Psychocandy, they were very good indeed, but if you go back and look at some of those reviews it was like the reviewers were saying ‘the daggers wee sharp and we were ready to knife these bastards, but fuck it, this record is so good we can’t slag it’. It was that sort of tone.

“We’ve never been well thought of, never. People have grudgingly given us good reviews when we come up with something that they consider to be so excellent that they can’t give it a bad review. I don’t think we’ve ever been well thought of in Britain. I don’t know why, do you?”

“Nah, I don’t know why,” shrugs William.

“I think it’s because of that early period when we put noses out of joint all over the place through lack of experience in the music business,” suggests Jim. “We just thought you make good records and have a bit of fun along the way. We didn’t realise that everyone you come across in the music business has an ego probably about four thousand times bigger than your own. We just thought that we’re in a band, we’re making music, we can say whatever we want to. We didn’t realise that everybody out there across the whole fucking industry is getting mega offended by anything we say that isn’t Sunday school language.

“It was scary. One particular review said ‘this is a great record, they should split up now before they blow it’. We kind of thought about that, that this is what people are thinking about the band. That kind of pressure thrown on a band who months ago were signing on the dole, suddenly they’ve got a record out everybody loves, and then it’s like, ‘don’t make another record ’cos we’ve got no faith in you at all’,”

“With this album, we’ve laid ourselves open to abuse and criticism and we’ve got it, and it hurts, but in the long run it doesn’t matter a fuck, because it’s a good record and people who love music only love music, they’re not snobbish,” says William. “We kind of grew out of snobbishness a long time ago, and I think that’s why, when we were making Psychocandy, we were coming back to our flat and listening to Herb Alpert and Dusty Springfield and stuff like that, because we’re not snobs.”

Alright, it has to be said. Aren’t they taking reviews a little too personally?

William: “Personally I feel if I was stronger I wouldn’t read reviews, but I’m weak. Your album’s just been released and you know it’s reviewed in NME and Melody Maker and Q. And if I was strong I’d say, I don’t give a fuck, if it’s a good or bad review I don’t want to read it, but I’m not, I’m weak.”

Jim: “The reason that it really affects us or winds us up is that a lot of people read a review and accept that that review is a fair description of a record that they are never going to hear, and that annoys us. You spend a year making a record and someone dismisses it in a one and a half inch column in a music paper, and people are going to form an opinion on a record they’re never going to hear based on that review. If people do hear our music and don’t like it, you’ll never find us arguing or objecting.”

It’s difficult to believe that ten years’ worth of the music business hasn’t made them more resilient in the face of criticism. In fact, it’s difficult to believe that The Jesus and Mary Chain have been around for ten years at all.

“I didn’t see ten years into the future, I couldn’t imagine it,” says Jim. “When this band started I was 22, ten years before that I was 12. It was such a jump from one point to the other, I just couldn’t imagine me at 32, just like now I couldn’t imagine me at 42. If I try, I just don’t like the images that come flashing into my brain.”

“We knew it was going to be a long term,” continues William, “but to be honest, and he’d probably say the same, we didn’t really think of how long it was gonna be. People say ten years and it sounds like such a fucking long time, because it’s a third of his life, and almost a third of mine we’ve been in this fucking band. That’s kind of bizarre. When we started doing interviews people said, ‘so what’ll you be doing in five years time?’ and you could only answer, well, I’ll be making records, because I’m a musician and a songwriter, and then that question started to feel like the biggest fucking insult anybody could ever give us. It’s almost like saying, you’re a piece of shit, you’re not going to last in this business.”

Before another bout of paranoia sets in, we flick back through the Mary Chain’s scrapbook for highs and lows of the past decade.

William: “The lows were all dumb stupid incidents at gigs where people got hurt, and it might even have been me that hurt them. I don’t know if you know about that incident in Toronto – it was widely reported at the time – where I got arrested for hitting a guy in the audience. That was dumb, and if I could erase anything, I’d erase that. ’Cos that’s just like what I’d expect Guns n’ Roses to do, it’s not what I’d expect any member of the Jesus And Mary Chain to be getting up to. That was stupid, and sometimes when we drink we are, and that’s the problem, but I don’t think there’s been any incidents like that for a few years now.”

“We’ve grown up a bit,” agrees Jim. “The first couple of years, we really didn’t know what the hell was going on. You’re on the dole in East Kilbride, and suddenly people are asking you what it feels like to be a pop star. You get a little bit freaked out by it and go out and get drunk and behave rowdy. I wish that somehow we could go back in time and visit us then and explain, it’s cool, it’ll happen, you don’t have to force it.

“You’re allowed to be a weirdo, you’re allowed to do anything. You can walk backwards down the street naked and people go, god, it’s alright, he’s in a band. You can be a brat, you can be spoiled, and people just excuse it. That’s a good thing, but it’s also one of the worst things about what we do, because you start to live your life that way and wonder why everybody acts weird around you, and it’s because people too many times make allowances for you. People indulge people in bands too much, and I wish they didn’t, because it makes for a brat-like person at the end of it all.”

“But not only are you allowed to be a weirdo, you’re allowed to express yourself in a lasting way,” counters William. “I know everybody can express themselves by just saying something, but it’s just vibrations that go through the air, and we make records and write songs, and they’re recorded and will last for a long time. That to me is the greatest satisfaction, to know that you can express certain things about yourself, and some people will associate with that, and be moved. I love writing songs, but to be honest, if I wrote songs knowing that nobody was ever going to hear them, I don’t think I could do it. It would be unnatural.”

It transpires that The Jesus And Mary Chain often read Hot Press. Inevitably, they want to know how their album was reviewed, but I’ve forgotten. William eyes me suspiciously, clearly not believing a word, but then continues.

“Our engineer Dick comes from Dublin, and I’m always amazed that near the back there’s two pages of gay sex ads. What’s happening in Dublin, is it the gay capital of the fucking western world?”

Well, not really, in fact no.

“Being from Scotland, we have an idea what it’s like in Ireland,” he continues. “In England, Catholics and Protestants go to the same school but in Scotland there’s Catholic schools and Protestant schools, and Scotland and Ireland are very close as far as bigotry goes; incredibly close. It’s all fake, because at the core of religion is spirituality, and most people who are religious aren’t spiritual. They go to church, and they say I’m a Catholic or a Protestant, but at the core of their soul they don’t have a lot of spirituality. I’m more spiritual than I am religious. That may sound horribly hippy. In fact,” he shudders, “it probably does if you write it down.”

“Organised religion as a whole, it’s a crude notion,” muses Jim. “It’s an outdated idea of what could happen to you after you die. Personally I don’t think that’s got any relevance in this particular age we live in. What are the guidelines? Look at the Bible, it’s full of stuff about one man and his twenty concubines. Do you remember the film of A Clockwork Orange? There’s a bit where he’s in prison and he’s trying to reform and the prison chaplain thinks he’s a model prisoner because he’s sitting in the library reading the Old Testament. And then it shows you what he’s thinking, and it’s him lying surrounded by concubines, and then him as a Roman Centurion whipping Jesus as he’s carrying the cross. That’s the fucking Bible for you, full of violence and sex.”

The original intention behind Stoned And Dethroned was to invite other vocalists to sing on all the tracks. The brothers came up with a shortlist, and Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star and Shane MacGowan were the first two to be asked.

“Then we kind of went off the idea,” says Jim. “For one thing, we thought it might come across as a bit novelty-ish, and the other thing is what happens if somebody sings on one of your tracks and you think they’ve done a dreadful job? It puts you in an awkward position. So we went off the idea but we’d already asked Hope and Shane and still thought that was a good idea, because with Hope and Shane’s voices, there’s not really that much room for error. You can see that it is gonna work before you’ve ever done it. With Shane though we did have a bit of work . . .

“It was hard to get him to the studio at the right time and stuff. Shane is quite often drunk, and so are we – Jesus, we’re sitting surrounded by bottles of wine right now – but if you get a bunch of guys sitting guzzling down wine, it takes a bit of a while to get the record done.”

“Shane and Hope are both great singers, in different ways,” says William. “Technically, Hope’s a brilliant singer, and Shane technically isn’t but his voice just sounds fucking great. And those people just aren’t used to being told or shown how to sing a song – in their bands what they do is write the words and the music, and they just do it. We had to direct Shane and Hope and it was awkward for us, awkward for them, but sometimes while we were recording I would just get tingles up and down my spine, and think fuck, this is great.”

Both Shane and Hope sang with the band at a gig/party held several weeks ago, at which Shane helped out on ‘Ghost Of A Smile’, which the band have recorded as a b-side.

“It was quite funny because Shane rolled up at the soundcheck and was kind of swaying from side to side the way Shane does,” says Jim, “and you’re thinking, oops, he’s gonna be too drunk for this show. Then it came to the gig and we were swaying even more than he was, and we were fucking up all over the place, and he was looking at us like he wanted to kill us.”

“We were very fucking drunk,” explains William, sheepishly. “I’d made up this loud guitar part for the end of the song which I loved, and I was just dying to play it, and when it came to it I played it in the wrong fucking key. I just felt so bad about it, because for that whole gig I was just looking forward to playing that part.”

“Shane was totally together at the gig,” recollects Jim. “Sang it perfectly, got all the parts right, because although it’s his song he wasn’t used to our arrangement of it. As it turned out he was even less used to the arrangement we played. But it was a good night. A good time was had by all. Even the audience. That’s how good it was.”

That good. My God. Maybe even the critics enjoyed it. But I don’t like to ask. Just in case...

Revisit Psychocandy below: