Some Candy Talking- The Jesus and Mary Chain Reunion
After the Parisian clamour of earlier acts, the finale of the first night of The Rite of Spring was watched in stunned silence. Following the sound and the fury of the forty worst protestors being ejected during the opening passages – and once the anger had been trampled and beaten out of the bourgeoisie – the onlookers were left to lick their wounds.
Whether it was Nijinsky’s shouted stamps or the storm and the stress of Stravinsky’s own dissonance, these pictures of a pagan Russia took the conventions of classical music and thrust them through a thunderstorm, leaving this newly machined music to rust on the stage. Whatever was left demanded a reaction of the audience. Whether this was a riot or a round of applause didn’t matter. The reaction was the most important part.
The earliest concerts by The Jesus and Mary Chain were similar examples of stolen and riotous emotions. Fuelled by antipathy and amphetamines, the band would arrive at a venue, lie to the owner about being the support act and play a few numbers with their backs firmly to the crowd.
Twenty minutes later, they would scramble their things together and leave. These performances under false pretences may not have been the most popular, but they served to prepare a range of audiences for the aural assault which would become the band’s first album, Psychocandy.
While other records had made use of distortion to cultivate a certain sound, Psychocandy was a tribute to guttural feedback. The band poured their collective knowledge of pop music into the mix, like offal measured into a meat grinder.
The guitar sound is iconic and iconoclastic. Taking Phil Spector’s wall of sound approach to music and ensuring that the band’s pop sensibilities sounded stressed, sinister and serrated, with distorted guitars becoming everything in the listener’s world as they cut apart the simple chords of a few riffs.
Opening the album with Just Like Honey is the band hammering their Lutheran credentials to the cathedral door. There is no ornate decorations, no dressed up linguistic tricks or turns, and no deference to anything other than the beauty of pop music and the all-consuming importance of their white-noise guitars.
The first track even steals whole heartedly from the Ronettes’ Be My Baby; the thud-thud-pound of the familiar bass and drum pattern introduced and then immediately drowned beneath waves of crashing fuzz.
Released nearly thirty years ago, the band is reuniting to perform the record in full at a series of London concerts. Early gigs were aggressive, hideous affairs. Duplicitous deliverance of unfamiliar sounds, where it was common for fights to break out among the audience and members of the band themselves.
Just like Stravinsky’s music is now best known for its inclusion in Disney films and advertisements, the legacy of Psychocandy often robs the music of its aggressive and confrontational debut. For those who want to relive the violence and the impact, the Jesus and Mary Chain will be performing the album as a whole at Troxy on the 19th and 24th of November. Check out their Website for tickets.
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