The Chain gang

Press, 23 September 1988, Page 29

The Chain gang

MARK MORDUE, in Sydney, {alks to the Jesus and Mary Chain, who play here tonight.

Seated in a Kings Cross motel, the nucleus of The Jesus And Mary Chain are laid back to the point of contempt, every inch the British rock group ever ready for the music industry parade of fools and cynics. Singer Jim Reid sports green polaroids, while older brother and guitarist William has a pair of black wrap-around sunglasses perpetually nailed to his face. Lean and reluctantly articulate, they’re pop stars with a negative charge, undercutting themselves in areas of pretension where you’d expect them to attack, asserting the certainty of their attitude whenever taking them seriously seems in danger. Bassist Douglas Hart accompanies them, and is the most overtly good natured, almost fragile in his friendliness. With them from the beginning, Hart’s presence at the interview adds weight to The Jesus And Mary Chain’s consciously mythical desires to present themselves as an archetypal rock group, rather than an individual with supporters. The brothers’ Reid like that classical feeling. It all seems a blur now, but they arrived on the scene around 1985 with a hypercharged air of anarchy and danger. They

were noisy and vicious successors to The Sex Pistols' bad boys mantle almost a decade after punk’s first tremors. An intentionally crude video at the time, one of the many aspects to their stylish primitivism, had them looking ill and alien on some bleached-of-life British beach front, the proverbial men who fell to earth. Live shows went on for as little as 15 minutes, critical hyperbole ran riot even more than their angry or over-enthusiastic audiences, and to many the band’s sound was akin to a kind of sexually nihilistic wounded jet engine. Their debut album, “Psychocandy,” clarified the range of their psy-chotically-tinged desire just as, much later, their second album, “Darklands,” revealed a sick-ened-soul romanticism. Their influences drew on everything from The Beach Boys to Suicide and the Velvet Underground. “When we first started making records, we seriously thought we were going to be competing with the likes of Wham and Duran Duran. But what we realised is that

you’ve got to make a certain type of record to compete with that lot. And we don’t want to,” William says.

“We expected to be like the 80s version of The Rolling Stones — fairly loud, fairly outrageous and fairly huge sales. But the 80s are different from the 60s. Things like that could happen then. The pop media was in its infancy, and fairly naive. And because of that, experimentation was the order of the day. Conservatism has crept in, immensely.” If there has been compromise for The Jesus And Mary Chain, it has come with their recognition of limits, of the way a place like America can de-activate their radicalism simply by consigning the group to university radio stations, the “alternative” market. Since, as William so delicately puts it, they “don’t want to water down the music and kiss lots of arse,” the band has turned to the tactics of survival and quality. "We’ve been disillusioned with the starchasing stuff, the hits. It’s not important anymore. Making good records is.

“After ‘Psychocandy,’ too, we withdrew a lot from the public gaze. Just for that reason. We wanted people to listen to the records rather than the ‘ha-hoo’ as you called it.” I point out that he means hoo-ha, and everyone cracks up laughing, moderate evidence that the band aren’t as morbidly humourless as their dark image might imply. Seeing them live, you certainly could be forgiven for thinking so, particularly as Jim Reid disenchantedly swaggers through a night without uttering a word: Be that as it may, The Jesus And Mary Chain are far from being a washedout British underground pop-rock band touring in their twilight. Sell-out Australian East Coast shows and two brooding nights in Sydney that saw audiences rushing the stage, indicated something else again: a band on the way to maturity, combining cool aggression with atmospheric introspection. That inward energy is apparent on “Darklands,” which saw the band drained of their original cocksure savagery, the music was more fatalistic and exhausted in its sense of beauty and shadowy tones. Not unsurprisingly, the distant, more subdued feeling left the group similarly removed from

the spotlight. What was really happening was their metamorphosis for Warholian 15-minute-of-fame shock troops into a rock band with a long fuse. One year later they’re touring with a resentful, spiteful sense of longevity and an injuringly good album of singles and studio outtakes called "Barbed Wire Kisses.” As always the dangers lay in the fine line between classical poses and cliches. For The Jesus And Mary Chain, their ability to remain a little difficult, a little ambitiously antagonistic, raises them out of a mire that could reduce them to cartoon parodies of their favourite symbols: the leather trousers, the sunglasses, the guitars, the moody silhouettes of rock rebellion.

Jim Reid is just a little pissed off by the implications. "You seem to think that subversion in pop music is nonsense. I think its incredibly important. I’m not saying we’re subversive. I’m just saying that groups can be and have been. “It might seem like a pile of shit when you look back on it, but as a young teenager listening to The Sex Pistols and The Clash, it changed they way I saw things. “I was headed towards the factory life. But that influence, even if it started off on a kind of trivial level, led me into something else. And I think that’s subversion.” Jim Reid puts his Polaroid sunglasses back on. Contempt and idealism make for a strange rebellion.