Long-haired skinny white boys mumbling angsty songs about sex and drugs;
it all started with The Jesus and Mary Chain, and their era-defining album Psychocandy. Sounding like almost nothing that had come before, the 1985 release dragged melancholy, disinterested rock into a sea of 80s electro-pop. Over the hum of amp feedback and distorted vocals, the East-Scottish duo planted the seeds of the shoegaze subgenre and moved towards a downbeat style and full-bodied, abrasive sound that later spawned grunge and Britpop. Despite abandoning this epochal sound on later albums, the band never outran its impact, and their recent reunion tour saw them performing exclusively material from this, their debut album.
It begins with the now iconic opening beats of ‘Just Like Honey,’ taken from the Ronettes’ classic ‘Be My Baby’. Then the delicate, warm melody starts to wander in and out of the fuzzy ball of noise at the song’s centre, and a whole new subgenre of music is born. The band switches gears for the second song — the aggressive, confrontational ‘The Living End’. “My mood is black when my jacket’s on / and I’m in love with myself” morphs into “My head is dripping into my leather boots.” It’s a cautionary tale of joyous narcissism made all the more urgent by the manic, wailing melody and distorted, shredded buzzing that makes the song’s two-minute run time such a chore. Whereas ‘Just like Honey’ used distortion to evoke the warm, inebriating feeling of desire, the same effect is used again to disorientate, frustrate and provoke.
Paired with the then pioneering wall-ofsound style, the album’s kind-of-but-not-quite impenetrable lyrics capture the hangover of adolescent frustrations spilling over into early adulthood. ‘A Taste of Cindy’ seems to be about being slumped in the corner of a room, spying on an ex through the end of a beer bottle as a mediocre house party winds down at 4am. But like all great pop songs, it’s kind of probably about drugs too. “Knife in my head is the taste of Cindy” we’re warned as the song rattles to a bitter close. Elsewhere, ‘Cut Dead’ offers possibly the sweetest description of being totally ignored by your crush ever uttered; “Why can’t you see / You got me chasing honey bees / Call me your messed up boy” drones Jim Reid over one of the album’s least obscured arrangements, a delicate guitar line recalling the melody of the album’s gentle opening track.
So whilst it was the band’s marrying of pop structures with a groundbreaking, reverb heavy sound which planted the album’s flag along the winding path of rock music’s history, it’s the oscillation between aggression and introspection that means the album has remained such a good one to listen to. It keeps the listener on their toes, and the band themselves from every crossing over into the wrong side of whiny bratdom.
Stories of amphetamine-fuelled 20 minute sets ending in carnage only seemed to fuel a band who by the time of the album’s release were already hurtling to international attention. Between fawning coverage from the music press, moral panics from the tabloids and stories of rock star antics wherever they went, The Jesus and Mary Chain cemented their sound in the public consciousness, and their imitators have been hanging on ever since. Ranking on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list amongst a plethora of other accolades and positions, Psychocandy is a worthy milestone for modern music.
