The Jesus and Mary Chain, February 1985
Get an outrageous name, swear a lot, forget everything you ever heard that wasn't the Stooges and The Sex Pistols. Above all, offend.
An early appearance of The Jesus and Mary Chain. Either it was me or a Melody Maker subeditor who struggled to get the band’s name right. Or maybe both.
The 1980s wasn’t like now when you could look up a band on the internet. Sometimes I’d get sent a press release in the post (not this time, obviously). Otherwise, as a reviewer you had to rely on what you’d heard on the radio or read in the music press. The same as everyone else.
For a while, the university students’ union put on bands in the small basement bar. (It was where I saw Billy Bragg for the first time, too.) When I was a student it was called the Sphinx. In the 1980s it was, inevitably, renamed as the Mandela Bar.
First impressions are always intriguing to look back on. From what I can remember, this was one of those shorter-than-normal gigs where everyone is quite relieved when it’s over.
JESUS AND THE MARY CHAIN
Liverpool University
Melody Maker, 9 February 1985
HALF way through the set the voices start. "No fun" shouts the first one in an intermittent punctuation that's the only thing of shape we've heard so far.
It could have been a request, or description of the group's obvious influences, or perhaps just a description of what was happening.
If the last, it wasn't quite true: there was entertainment, of a perverse sort, emanating from the stage, at least until you remembered the vulnerability of ear drums.
Jesus And The Mary Chain make noises that hurt. Yet they look harmless enough, barely old enough, in fact, to be otherwise. They don't even look particularly like punks, not the sort you get today anyway, the leather and hairspray brigade that make up most of tonight's audience. But then, in their golden age, most people didn't look like that.
If Jesus And The Mary Chain were wearing safety pins in 1976, it was probably in their nappies. What they do to their instruments and their audience is their revenge for not being there. It's an ideal recreated through guess work and history.
They remind me of that era alright, though not because of the feedback, incoherence and thrash that pass for anarchy (delightful though they are). What they do remind me of are all the people who read in the papers what real punks did and believed it: the people who spat at the right groups, fought the right enemies, and wore the right clothes, because that made them the genuine article. While the originators carried on originating, punk stultified and the result is the uniformed audience tonight and the group that's playing to them, by the rules. Oddly, the two are at odds.
Jesus And The Mary Chain's rules are: get an outrageous name, swear a lot, forget everything you ever heard that wasn't the Stooges and The Sex Pistols, act amateur. And above all, offend.
What they've forgotten is that you can be as offensive as you like but it's no good offending your audience. Despite the uniforms, this audience turns out to be no fools and they recognise acting when they see it. The final destruction of equipment is the combination of a short but extremely powerful series of miscalculations. It doesn't impress.
The group's final, stubborn silence gives victory to the voices, most of them perceptively unprintable. The anger was tangible. Are Jesus And The Mary Chain a con? They're probably conning themselves.
Ha! Just been discussing with mates gigs we were at where the band turned on the audience. Although this was more a case of the audience turning on the band, they definitely incited and it all got pretty close to a violent conclusion as I remember it…
"In their nappies"- I howled a little at that one. I worked with two brothers in Akron, OH in 1994 or so who worshipped TJMC (I was there to play stuff more like RIDE, but it never came out). Anyway, the brothers upped sticks and moved to Wolverhampton; where I could easily imagine them getting the same reception the Reid brothers got at this gig. What a sharp encapsulation of several large discussions going round at the time; and thanks for letting these scenes back into the light of day again.