Psychocandy WB rating out of 100

In April this year, the second V-Festival will grace Australia's shores, bringing a host of acts that could disparagingly be termed ‘nostalgic’. Like this year’s Big Day Out and last year’s V-Festival, many main acts on the bills made their names eons ago. While snaring the Pixies and the Pet Shop Boys may have been a significant coup in ’07, this year it is indie stalwarts that are in the offing; The Smashing Pumpkins, Duran Duran and Scottish icons The Jesus and Mary Chain the highlights.

It would be easy to interchange ‘nostalgic’ for ‘backwards thinking’ in the first paragraph. ‘Backwards thinking’ sounds negative, suggestive of a dirty pleasure in, if not liking, then wanting to see these acts live. We live in a past-obsessed age, however, and there is a definite allure in seeing reformed bands on stage – namely that many fans would have been a mere twinkle in their mothers’ eye at the time of the band’s previous existence. As well as wondering whether one wants to actually see the band live, the prospect presents another intellectual task for the music lover; relistening and rethinking the band’s landmark recordings.

The question is, of course, whether a reformed band can withstand the hype they bring forth from the depths of historical mythology. For The Jesus and Mary Chain, the mythology is certainly there, and continuing steadily into the naughties.

It is there in the book and film High Fidelity, when the record store snob Barry berates a customer for not owning Psychocandy, and it is there in the iconic use of ‘Just like Honey’ over the final climatic scene of Lost in Translation. Thus, it is a curious feeling to rethink a classic album over two decades old, just as the moment of seeing the band in the flesh looms nearer every day.

Today, the experience of listening to Psychocandy is still as intoxicating as it probably would have been in 1985. On the other hand, recent footage from the reunion shows indicates a more progressed symptom of intoxication: nausea. Witness Jesus and Mary Chain’s middle-aged vocalist Jim Reid on Letterman singing about taking drugs and rhyming “I hope I don’t die” with “I hope I don’t fry” and watch Scarlett Johansson’s horrid backing vocals on ‘Just Like Honey’ at Coachella. Now, go back in time and watch the music video for ‘Just like Honey’. Have a look at the 43 pages of comments that video has provoked.With such a continuing reaction, no wonder the band have put themselves (or been put) back together. Sadly, the reformed Jesus and Mary Chain is most things the music video for ‘Just like Honey’, and Psychocandy as a whole, is not.

To simultaneously account for both the ‘now’ and the ‘then’— an act my former linguistics professor Nick Evans terms ‘panchronic’— we must ponder everything the record ‘is’, how it would have sounded in 1985, and what it says today. With panchronic hindsight we see Psychocandy as a perfect moment in pop music history; coming as it did between Punk and ‘90’s Alternative/Britpop. Shoegaze as a term did not yet exist, and while The Jesus and Mary Chain have been marked as one of the first shoegaze bands, they are so much more. Though bits of Psychocandy are obvious rehashes of their influences, it is the genre bending and blending element of their sound, together with the underlying presence of Jim Reid, which crucially mark the album’s potency. Fashion-punk was just about cold in the ground, and The Jesus and Mary Chain’s approach to this watershed movement was poppy and fresh and mostly reminiscent of the genre’s early forebears the Stooges and the MC5. American influences run deeper; ‘The Living End’, ‘In a Hole’ and ‘My Little Underground’ have Jim Reid doing his best Joey Ramone, many of the song structures are Ramones-like progressions, and primitive drumming by Bobby Gillespie coupled with William Reid’s jangly guitar suggests the Velvet Underground.

The Ramones themselves were lovers of ‘50’s rock n’ roll and much of Psychocandy features drum beats and atmospherics straight out of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound aesthetic. Here though, reverb is augmented by feedback and it is in the Reid brothers’ production that Psychocandy is perhaps most striking. Amazingly dissonant, where the squalls of noise meet a more measured pace, one is able to lose themselves in the pop majesty of The Jesus and Mary Chain. It is this that gives ‘Just like Honey’ its ongoing classic status.

Arguably, no band can reach classic status without a charismatic and omnipresent frontman. While two thirds of the vocals are equal parts Joey Ramone and Lou Reed, the final and most significant third is the Scotsman, Jim Reid. In Reid, The Jesus and Mary Chain have an undoubtedly pervasive presence, full of youthful swagger and plagued by mystical sexual notions. He is a great frontman, despite some questionable lyrics (see ‘The Living End’, an almost hilarious ode to motorcycle riding: “I'm moving so fast that I can't control the wheels, yeah, I'm going for a tree, yeah it's going for me, yeah
my head is dripping into my leather boots”). Yet it’s rock n’ roll through and through, and they pull it off with the typically triumphant traits of self-assurance and vigour.

Watch the video for ‘Just like Honey’ again. Now skip forward 23 years and imagine that song being played by middle-aged men on a huge, festival stage. With or without Scarlett Johansson, I’ll be there, albeit with a suspicious grin planted smugly on my face.