33 1/3 Part 17
Jesus and Mary Chain -’Psychocandy.’ (Blanco y Negro, 1985)
Once again, I cannot claim that this was an album that I was listening to when it came out. [Yes, I'm very impressed that your nine year old child regurgitates all the music you ask them to listen to instead of what their peers are. So sorry to hear that they're not fitting in at school.] And in fact my route to this album was quite a long one, hearing several of their later albums before I got this album out of the library at school when I was eighteen.
Yes, amazingly, as well as trying to educate middle-class thugs about rugby and the like, my school got itself a library in which there was a CD library. You could only take out one CD at a time, but it had all the Smiths studio albums, the Cure, Lloyd Cole, Blur…and this was 1994 so it wasn’t bad, really. Every school should have one -as well as someone who makes sure that the kids can all have jotters (or exercise books as the sassenachs call ‘em) before the staff get laptops.
Sorry…I was distracted there. Anyway…YES. Psychocandy. A slightly different beast on CD, being as it has ‘Some Candy Talking’ midway through. The song that was their breakthrough hit (apart from the fact Radio 1 banned it because it was ‘obviously’ about heroin). But an album that opens with the sublime ‘Just Like Honey’ a song bathed in honey, sweet, sweet feedback, as the twin gods of the Velvet Underground and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd make love and produce something utterly sublime. Nearly twenty years later it made my heart soar as this played out over the closing moments of Lost In Translation.
Feedback is the name of the game here -and while by 1994 we had had grunge so knew music didn’t need to be clean-sounding - this was a revelation. And it still is, years later. I picked up a cassette copy a year or so after I left school and it was frequently in the walkman at uni, accompanying me up and down the hill in my battered biker jacket, mad hair and army boots, trying to resemble a cross between Ian McCulloch, Robert Smith and of course the Reid brothers (not very trendy in 1998, but at least I wasn’t listening to those infernal Ministry of Sound comps). It’s not just the singles, but the singalong choruses as they drift along in those feedback drenched waves of sound. It’s an album to lose yourself in and then find yourself in, alternately, or maybe even at the same time.
I never saw the Mary Chain live; they broke up at the tail end of the nineties, though they did reform for some dates in 2007. And while some will debate the merits of later albums -and they all have many, to these ears, the Mary Chain never topped this. But because I discovered it later, I guess I didn’t find myself disappointed by subsequent albums. It still makes this heart fly, and that ancient tape still lives in the car, while a second-hand vinyl copy lives on the shelf and a digital copy on the iPod. An albums for all seasons and all time.
Jesus and Mary Chain -’Never Understand.’ mp3
Jesus and Mary Chain -’You Trip Me Up.’ mp3
Jesus and Mary Chain -’Just Like Honey.’ mp3
I can never resist a Psychocandy post. I got into them a few months before they released Automatic, so just in time for their long, slow decline. I saw them twice. The first time in 1989, they played to a crowd of about two thousand on a dark November night. When I left the venue steam billowed off me and I was deaf for three days. The second time was in 1998 and they played what was basically a pub - the doors were open throughout the show and it was a bright sunny day outside. Despite all the disappointment I too had the Lost in Translation moment: “It’s Just Like Honey! It’s Just Like Honey!” I yammered, to my wife’s utter indifference.
Some gigs can do that to your hearing…when mogwai played ‘Like herod’ at one gig in Edinburgh I thought I would never be the same again!
Sounds like a great gig or two : )
I bought “Barbed wire kisses” while my friend bought “Darklands” which has always been my favourite mary chain album. I’ve discovered “Psychocandy” after “darklands” and it always sounded to me more… like a mess with diamonds like “Just like honey” but to much feedback and too noisy. There something more classical and much more well produced in their second LP, … but nevermind this one more important band in the indie music… It was the beginning of creation reccords and those new indie labels… I mean that before them it was the end of the mid eighties with some hudge band like the cure, the smiths, echo and the bunnymen but those bands were less exiting as 2 or 3 years before… The jesus & mary chain began a new aera.
i think i borrowed this of you in cassette form back in the day. Along with Big Star.
SW
It’s taken a while for me to get to like them. I saw them on TV pretty early on and found the feedback impenetrable. However, someone pointed out the fact that hiding in there were TUNES! Ever one for a good tune, I could (just about) accept them. OK I still find them hard going, but Just Like Honey is pretty sublime, (thanks to your earlier post) so they’re still in the playlists…
Jalal - definitely!
Scott - you did indeed borrow it, or rather, I thrust it at you to listen to, which is more or less the same thing… : )
Ken - still hard-going?!
JAMC performing “in a hole” on the whistle test is the finest t.v moment ever
Will have to check you tube…
I got into the mary chain back in the day, but like you never got around to seeing them live. My wife never got them at all until she got me tickets to see them at the camden roundhouse a couple of years ago. Her comment of ‘It all makes sense now’ along with the disapearance of the singles CD to her car speaks volumes!
Psychocandy is up there in my top 10 albums and never fails to transport me back, and raise a grin.