The Jesus and Mary Chain
170 Russell, Sunday 6 March 2016
Writer: Fiona Hile
Live photo by Reuben Acciano, full gallery here.
A blue nineteenth-century haze surrounds The Jesus and Mary Chain vocalist Jim Reid as he leans into the crowd on a humid Sunday night in Melbourne. A disembodied mop of curly backlit hair is all that’s visible of his brother William, the much-emulated guitarist behind the high-pitched wail of sound that way back in 1983 caused Creation Records impresario Alan McGee to sign the young Scottish band on the spot.
Performative, alcohol-fuelled violence and twenty-minute sets were part of the deal. ‘There’s never been a group good enough to play any longer,’ Reid claimed. The paint-stripping hysteria of songs like “Upside Down” and “Never Understand” helped catapult the band to worldwide share-house fame. Their fourth single, “Just Like Honey”, a languid ballad that sounds like The Velvet Underground injected a Shangri Las record and washed it down with a crate of chainsaw, is one of the reasons we’re all here tonight, thirty years after its release, for the anniversary tour of its host album, Psychocandy.
Though latter-day Reid is polite and punctual he’s not completely reformed. ‘If you’re looking for skinny young kids in a strop, kicking their guitars,’ he warned Guardian readers in 2014, ‘stay at home.’ It’s not quite the ‘Joy Division were shit’ biliousness of yesteryear but he’s still the boss. The show begins as advertised at 9.30pm on the dot with “April Skies” – a relatively innocuous Beach Boys ditty with lyrics that could shatter your relationship if uttered at high noon (Darklands, 1987).
The mostly middle-aged audience gazes enraptured as Reid and his invisible band sway through “Head On”, “Blues From a Gun” (Automatic, 1989) and “Reverence” from 1992’s Honey’s Dead. Lyrics like ‘I wanna die just like Jesus Christ / I wanna die on a bed of spikes’ got the song banned by Top of the Pops execs but these days The Jesus and Mary Chain is pretty tame stuff. It’s easy to forget they practically invented this unlikely conflagration of 1960s pop, 70s art rock, New York punk and intolerably high-pitched feedback. And that an apocalypse of zombies went on to factory-farm the sound until original and copy became virtually indistinguishable.
Exactly twenty-five minutes in, the band take a short break before springing back to play Psychocandy from start to finish. The writer Herman Melville’s famously indifferent character Bartleby, with his counter-capitalist insistence that he’d ‘prefer not to’, had nothing on Reid who barely dents the air with his laconically economical gestures. It’s as if he already knows what we have only just begun to suspect. These songs could play themselves. All Reid and his band need to do is keep out of the way.
Through the pre-slackerite geologies of “Taste the Floor”, the industrial vacuum cleaner chic of “In a Hole”, the sepulchral Romanticism of “Some Candy Talking”, the erotic schoolyard taunts of “You Trip Me Up” it seems clear that The Jesus and Mary Chain could perform infinite variations on what is essentially one song, all night if they felt like it. Instead, they finish with a seven-minute version of “It’s So Hard” featuring an extended guitar event that brays, squawks, trumpets and generally registers an intoxicating glow. Seeing The Jesus and Mary Chain live is a bit like checking out a friend’s illicitly snapped photograph of a famous French painting. It’s not the original exactly but for most of us it’s as close as we’re going to get.
