Album 560.
The Jesus And Mary Chain...............................Psychocandy   (1985)











This album was one weird listen for me, the reason I've taken so long to post about is I couldn't get past the first 3 or 4 tracks without turning it off as I found it pretty painful on the old lugs. This went on night after night and I couldn't post without listening to the whole album, I did think there was good songs in there but the distortion/feedback/fuckin' noise/rammy that accompanied it was deffo not for me.


Now, I'd never listened to TJaMC before but I wasn't expecting that, could it just be me, that I hadn't listened to this genre before, and as they were seemingly the originators of Shoegaze (another term I hadn't come across before) and this style and should I persevere?


Well I did for another couple of nights and still couldn't finish the album, then the weirdest thing happened, my other halfs favourite saying is " I think (pick any area in the house) can do with a freshen up" there and then I know it's a "fait accompli" as usually she's already bought the paints and brushes/rollers but stashed them out of sight so she can pick her moment.


So I started pentin' the walls on the stairs (I'm sure they are a lot narrower these days with the ammount of coats she's made me put on them over the years) but that's when I had a bit of an epiphany moment, I thought might as well listen to some music while I'm at it, so decided to put this album on, fuck me what a revelation, now I don't know if I was in a different frame of mind, or because I was working away and not totally concentrated on the album, but I ended up playing it all the way through, not just once but several times on the trot.


I mentioned this to a mate down the pub, and he said he had a similar experience with a band called My Bloody Valentine, he said he listened to them through his earphones and couldn't hack more than a few tracks, but when he played it (without earphones) while working in his garage he ended up loving them, a strange phenomenon!


Anyways, what's the bottomline here, for me it's never listen to this band while sitting on your erse, but if I've got some work to do, slap this album on and enjoy, a cautionary note to self never listen through earphones, eventually I did enjoy this album but not enough to purchase it.


This album wont be going into my collection, but it will be getting downloaded as "her who must be obeyed" wont be finished setting me tasks any time soon.


BTW, loved the album cover, so iconic.





Bits & Bobs;
Brown Acid Black Leather: The Story Of The Jesus And Mary Chain's Psychocandy



Julian Marszalek , November 8th, 2011 06:49


Jim Reid and Douglas Hart give Julian Marszalek the low down on the making of one of the best rock albums of the 1980s, Psychocandy

The tension in the packed venue was not only palpable but also worrying. The date was September 9, 1985 and the Jesus And Mary Chain were scheduled to headline Camden’s Electric Ballroom, a date that was to be the culmination of a year of riots, violence and notoriously short sets that had been left in the band’s shambolic yet thrilling wake. That trouble was going to erupt was a given. With the release of Psycho!candy still two months away, the band’s music had only been tentatively revealed via a number of incendiary singles, most notably 1984’s ‘Upside Down’ and its follow-up, ‘Never Understand’. Swathed in feedback and all-out sonic terror, the noise that fuelled the singles somehow managed to compliment the melodies that lay at their heart.


 As a live band, the Jesus And Mary Chain had garnered a reputation for frustratingly compact shows that were high on belligerence and low on musical competence. The riot that accompanied their gig at North London Polytechnic in March of that year did much to seal their reputation as the enfants terribles of the British rock scene and the threat, or rather the promise of ructions at their gigs, did much to make sure that their music became a secondary concern in favour of increasingly violent and terrifying concerts.


 Arriving over an hour late at the Electric Ballroom, a drunken Jesus And Mary Chain played a 15-minute set of indeterminate white noise hampered by a faulty PA that added to painful din emanating from the stage. Having staggered from the stage, it wasn’t long before cans, glasses and bottles began to rain down upon the stage. At one point the lighting rig found itself loosened from its moorings as it hung ominously over a section of the audience towards the front of the venue. Soon, the stage had been mounted with disgruntled and drunken members of the audience smashing up the band’s equipment.



“My overriding memory is of this guy standing on stage waving part of the lighting rig around,” recalls Quietus scribe Steve Jelbert. “It was simultaneously memorable and unmemorable. If you listen to a tape of it, the most interesting part of it is the riot because the music sounded fucking terrible.”

 Unlike the well-organised and generally well-behaved gigs of the 21st century, concert going in the early 1980s were frequently fraught affairs. With tribalism at its height, punch-ups were a regular occurrence but there had been nothing like the mess that the Mary Chain had left behind. With their reputation preceding them, the Electric Ballroom was always going to end in tears but no one could have predicted just how violent this gig was going to be. Indeed, this writer, though a fan of the singles that had been released during the previous year, went with the intention of witnessing the trouble that was going to happen but didn’t expect anything quite on this scale. In addition the curious observers and voyeurs milling around the Electric Ballroom was a heavy contingent of squatters, people who’d dropped out of mainstream society in the wake of punk rock as well as some faces more at home fighting on football terraces rather than a gig.


 “It was great standing there knowing it was going to go off,” continues Jelbert. “I’d seen them before at the ICA and that really did stink; they were totally clueless. The atmosphere at the Electric Ballroom was very odd and I felt that it was almost like a pantomime riot; if there had been custard pies then they would have been thrown at the stage. People wanted to kick off because no one really knew the Mary Chain’s music. They came out late and there was this really horrible humming noise coming out through the PA all the way through which went over the racket the band was making.”


 Adding to the melee were members of the Metropolitan Police who came running into the venue as the violence increased in its intensity and with them came the realisation that things had come to a serious head. This was no longer the kind of event that generated column inches in the music press used to create a mythology around the band but a descent into darkness and uncontrollable chaos. Something had to give.


 “That was the end of that period and it had stopped being funny,” bassist Douglas Hart tells The Quietus. “[Band manager] Alan McGee had sorted out body guards for that gig but I remember that on the second date of that tour, one of them got knocked out with a scaffolding pole and he quit because he couldn’t handle the heaviness of it all. And I think he’d been ex-SAS and had been one of the guys who’d gone through the window at the Iranian embassy. He was like, ‘No amount of money can make me put up with this.’”


 It wasn’t until the release of Psychocandy in November 1985 that the Jesus And Mary Chain’s musical objective came gloriously into view. The hype, hoopla and carnage generated by both the band and manager Alan McGee obscured the fact that they were not only radical sonic visionaries but masterful songwriters capable of creating a classic debut album that not only captured the mood of the age but would also stand the test time while creating a new template for rock & roll.


 Politically and culturally, 1985 was a watershed year. After nearly 12 months, the miner’s strike collapsed in March. Bitterly divisive, the defeat of the NUM by Margaret Thatcher’s government was an event whose ramifications are felt to this very day. The violence that had marred the dispute slipped into other sections of society. Brixton and Tottenham in London and Toxteth in Liverpool were engulfed in riots within a week of each other in the autumn. Earlier in May, pre-match rioting between Liverpool and Juventus fans resulted in the tragic deaths of 39 Italian football fans when they were crushed to death at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, an event that was broadcast live on TV.


 The pop landscape of 1985 had become increasingly grim. Daytime radio was fronted by any number of goons more concerned with their own increasing fame than the music they played and pop itself was becoming increasingly sterile. No longer a haven for outsiders and misfits, pop did its best to play safe as it increasingly relied on the promotional video becoming an end in itself. Smack in the middle of all this was Live Aid. As a genuinely altruistic event, Live Aid and its preceding single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ by Band Aid, can’t be faulted. An incredible event, it was watched by a global audience of some 1.5 billion people and raised in the region of £40m for the starving of Ethiopia. At the centre if it was Bob Geldof. Though his own pop career with The Boomtown Rats had come to an end, Geldof’s Herculean efforts to do the job that governments had failed to do did much to alleviate the suffering of millions.


 Despite Geldof’s protestations, as a cultural event Live Aid was a stinker with huge implications for pop music. Suddenly, bands that should have been out to pasture – indeed, many of them had been – were now welcomed back with open arms, mainly by people for whom pop was little more than light entertainment. Millionaire hippies were back while others such as Queen and Status Quo who’d made money from African suffering by breaking the cultural embargo on South Africa and playing the segregated environs of Sun City were now supposed to be helping starving Africans. Their record sales were boosted as a result and none, if any, of the revenues generated made it to the starving millions. Disgracefully, the London leg featured just one black act in the shape of Sade and the whiff of self-satisfaction – witness Phil Collins jumping on to a Concorde so he could play on both sides of the Atlantic – was overbearing.


 “I was very suspicious of the whole thing at the time and I still am,” Mary Chain vocalist Jim Reid tells The Quietus. “If money came out of it that went to the right people then so be it but I think a lot of people did it for the wrong reasons.



 “It did create a change in people’s perceptions of what a pop could be and then it seemed alright to be an iconic figure. A lot of those bands became something that went from being a dinosaur to being iconic and a lot of people did it to sell records.


 “I remember at the time, I knew people who worked at the Virgin Megastore who’d say things like Simple Minds’ albums were selling five times the amount they were the week before and you were thinking, ‘Well, are they going to send that extra money to the starving millions? How can they live with that?’”


 “I remember the Live Aid thing,” adds Douglas. “We thought that punk had shaken things up; we really believed in that and we couldn’t believe it when we met people who said they were going to go to Live Aid and we’d be thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ I suppose we then tried to compete on their terms and it made us work harder. We figured that if you’d get kids listening to that kind of shit then you’d get kids hearing us. It made us more determined to be bigger.”

 For a generation that was too young to appreciate punk on its first outing but had grown up on pop charts that regularly featured outsiders, seemingly sexual deviants and the kind of acts that would have parents frothing at the mouth during Thursday night’s airing of Top Of The Pops, the Jesus And Mary Chain were a godsend. Combining the sonic fury and melodicism of The Velvet Underground – a band whose resurgence in popularity during the early 1980s cannot be overstated – and the sensibilities of pop at its most classic with a surliness that suggested that anyone could do this, JAMC’s seismic arrival in pop’s barren wasteland couldn’t come quick enough. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of vacuum that galvanised Jim and William Reid into action.


 “Music of that period pretty much appalled us,” says Reid as he recalls the motivating factors behind the formation of the band. “A lot of people talk about the things that we were into that caused us to form a band but it was as much the bands that we detested that caused it too.


 “I remember the NME going gaga about Kid Creole & the Coconuts and we thought, 'Fuck this!' That just didn’t make sense in the pages of the NME. I wouldn’t say that was the turning point but round about then there seemed to be so much garbage and we thought, 'Fuck it, there’s no one making the kind of music that I wanna buy so let’s go out and do it and make a band.'”


 Jim and guitarist brother William Reid were raised in the East Kilbride of the 1960s and 70s, one of the 14 New Towns built after the Second World War to help alleviate the problems of post-war inner city overcrowding. Though portrayed in books and TV as places of awful alienation, Jim’s early memories of his hometown aren’t as bleak as they’ve been subsequently made out to be though its isolation from the centre of the pop universe proved to be another catalyst in forming the band.


 “I’ve probably given East Kilbride a bad rap over the years,” he admits. “Basically, it wasn’t a bad place to grow up but it was maybe on the boring side. If you were into music, you couldn’t help but feel that the other side of the world was where it was all happening. We kinda read about punk through the NME and it seemed so remote to us; we bought the records but they seemed as if they were from another planet or something. It wasn’t a bad place but it wasn’t at the centre of things and that’s where we wanted to be. It was all right if you liked Rambo or Stock, Aitken and Waterman was your taste in music.”


 Though subsequent accounts of the band’s origins paint the brothers as a pair of wastrels zombified by hours of watching too much TV, the siblings had made previous attempts of moving to England’s capital with a view to starting a band though with little success.


 “Me and William had tried together and separately tried to move to London unsuccessfully,” he reveals. “We kinda went down there for a few months but we couldn’t get it together and ended up back in East Kilbride.”Famously given a Portastudio by their father who’d spent his redundancy money on it, the Reid brothers set about recording a series of demos in their bedroom. But, as Jim reveals, the classic Jesus and Mary Chain sound came about more through accident than design.


 “To be honest with you it was kind of a make-do sound,” he admits. “We were recording four-track demos in our bedroom. It wasn’t ideal and I think we had more of an orchestrated sound and there’s only so much you can do with a four-track, a guitar and a foot pedal in a bedroom and that was kind of it. We thought it would be enough to get people’s interest but it was a sketch of what we had in mind.”


 Finding kindred spirits in the provincial surroundings of East Kilbride was to prove problematic and it wasn’t until the appearance of bassist Douglas Hart that things began to take shape. Four years younger than Jim Reid, Hart shared the same taste in pop culture as the Reid brothers and despite a lack of musical proficiency, the trio soon bonded to form the nucleus of the Mary Chain.


 “I used to hand around with Jim and we kind of started a band,” recalls Hart. “William was around and had his own songs but they were living in a fucking tiny bedroom and fighting all the time. So me and Jim did this thing where we did two of Jim’s songs but at this stage not much was happening.”


 Though the core of the band had formed, the Reids and Hart, in common with many bands at the formation stage, still had the problem of finding a drummer.


 “We befriended Douglas Hart years early simply because there weren’t that many people in East Kilbride that were into the music or literature or movies that we were,” continues Jim. “It seemed that everyone was moving in the same direction and the people that moved in the opposite direction were easy to spot. There weren’t many of them. There were me and William and Douglas but we couldn’t get a drummer. We had Murray Dalglish and he was OK but he was just a kid and he wasn’t really like us and it was never going to work.



 With the initial line-up in place and a rough sonic blueprint in place, they set about attempting to get some kind of rehearsal into place in order to work on their sound. However, this being the Mary Chain, a band built on tension and antagonism, their rehearsals offered a prescient glimpse of what was to come.



 “We used to rehearse in a community centre and on Tuesday nights it’d be old ladies playing bingo and the following night the Jesus And Mary Chain would go in and rehearse,” laughs Jim. “It was about half a mile away from where we lived and we needed to get the guitars and amps down there. We stuck castors on the bottom of the amps and we’d wheel this stuff half a fucking mile with guitars piled on top. People would look out of their windows and see these skinny guys with sunglasses on pushing all this fucking stuff down the road. And we’d get there and argue for half an hour and then go home.”


 Having then recorded a set of demos on their Portastudio, the nascent rock group set about conquering their next challenge: playing a gig and attempting to attract record company interest. As was common, the Mary Chain’s pleas for gigs in Glasgow went unnoticed much to the band’s extreme displeasure.



 “We couldn’t get a gig in Glasgow. Nobody would give us the time of day,” explains Jim. “At the time in Glasgow there was an incestuous music scene that we were no part of; it was very difficult to get a foot in the door. They all wanted kind of white soul boy bands and we didn’t sound like that so no one would give us a gig. We were getting despondent about the whole thing and the McGee thing happened at the right time because I don’t know how much longer we could’ve kept going in the face of such a lack of enthusiasm.”


 The “McGee thing” – an all-important gig at the Creation Records club night at the Roebuck pub on London’s Tottenham Court Road - was crucial to the development of JAMC and vital to setting this event up was Bobby Gillespie. Gillespie’s part in their rise is essential for it was he that first spotted their potential when given a copy of their demo tape from a Glasgow promoter who declined to put them on.



 “We tried to get this gig in Glasgow and gave this guy a tape,” says Douglas Hart as he takes up the story. “We couldn’t even afford a new tape so the other side of this demo was a Syd Barrett compilation that we’d already made. The guy didn’t like us and didn’t want to put us on but he gave the tape to Bobby, more for the compilation rather than our songs. Bobby played our songs and loved them and my number was on the front of the tape. I got home from school one day and my mum said, ‘Some guy phoned you about the tape and I asked if he’d seen you and he said, "Not yet”’ and I took that as a good sign!”



 He continues: “When Bobby phoned us he said, ‘I really love your tape and I’ve got a friend in London, Alan McGee.’ So the next thing, he sends the tape to Alan who got us down there.”


 Even after the passing of the years, Jim Reid is still convinced that the Mary Chain secured the gig with McGee on the strength of his friendship with Bobby Gillespie rather than musical merit: “I think McGee initially did it as a favour to Bobby!”



 And so, taking a fraught and tense journey from Glasgow to London, The Jesus and Mary Chain headed off to London to play a gig that would soon pass into rock & roll folklore.


 “We went down there on the overnight coach with no sleep and loads of alcohol and fighting which then carried on to the stage,” explains Hart.


 Arriving drunk and tired in London, the band’s spirits were hardly raised when they discovered that their debut gig in the capital was to be in the function room above the Roebuck pub. To their minds, they were set to play among the bright lights of the big city and not a down-at-heel boozer.



 “Basically, it was a hot day and we were kicking around in London waiting for the time to do the soundcheck. Soundcheck? That was just a joke. It was a room above a pub and the PA was basically a stereo,” remembers Jim of the event. “We’d done the soundcheck and we’d been bickering all afternoon and at that point it was the hot weather, getting on each others’ nerves and we just started screaming and lunging at each other within two minutes of meeting Alan for the first time and he thought, Fucking hell! These guys are nuts! We started playing and we were so unmusical that he thought we were just insane.”



 According to reports, the band’s set consisted of a number of cover versions including virtually unrecognisable versions of Pink Floyd’s still-unreleased ‘Vegetable Man’ and Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’. With the band hideously drunk and William’s amp feeding back beyond all control, the few people that caught the show were convinced that they had witnessed some kind of joke. Believing that they’d fucked up, the band was more than surprised when an overjoyed Alan McGee offered them a recording deal.


 “Alan used to get really animated when he got enthusiastic and he started screaming about ‘genius’,” continues Jim. “We thought we’d blown our chance and shot ourselves in the foot but he started going on about album deals and stuff like that. He was into it and that was good enough for us. Through that, plans were made to record ‘Upside Down’.”



 Given the band’s position as a surly quartet from East Kilbride with a history of rejection, McGee’s offer was initially viewed with scepticism that soon turned to joy.


 “We were naturally very suspicious of any kind of enthusiasm so we thought we’d never hear from McGee again but he was on the phone the next day. We were like, ‘Woah! This is actually gonna happen!’”


 Having played a few more gigs in London, the band was booked by McGee to record their debut single at Alaska Studios in Waterloo. Only a few months ago the band had yet to play its first gig and any recording experience had been limited to making demos in a small bedroom in East Kilbride. With a limited recording budget, they were forced to record throughout the night. Despite initial reservations, the band took to the sessions with enthusiasm but struggled to capture their live sound.


 “We’d work from midnight till about seven or something like that but we didn’t care; it was brilliant,” explains Jim. “The engineer that was there kept playing everything through these massive Tannoy speakers and everything sounded amazing. ‘Fucking hell!’ we thought. ‘We didn’t realise we sounded so powerful!’ We made this version of ‘Upside Down’ and when we played it back it sounded like Dire Straits! We couldn’t work out why until someone pointed out we’d been playing it through these mega fucking blow-out–the-neighbourhood speakers and they’d make anything sound like The Velvet Underground so we had to go back in and remix it.


 “And we tried to do that and we did that classic thing where everybody’s in the studio saying, “Turn this up!” “No, turn that up!” so it was then decided that William and Alan would go in and mix ‘Upside Down’.”


 The resulting single was one of the most thrilling rock & roll moments of the early 1980s. Though its reference points were obvious, its genius lay in mixing this heady stew together with the kind of onslaught that The Ramones had promised almost a decade earlier. Deadly in its simplicity, this was the ghost of a pre-army Elvis Presley reaching out to the living world through a vortex of terror and unrelenting feedback. Released in November 1984, ‘Upside Down’’s initial pressing of 1,000 soon sold out and reprints were quickly ordered. Selling around 20,000 copies, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut single put Creation Records on the map while finding itself in the No. 37 slot between The Smiths’ ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ and Cocteau Twins’ ‘Pandora’ in John Peel’s Festive 50 at the end of the year and with it came major label interest.


 “It was a weird thing because one part of me thought this would always happen but when it did happen it didn’t stop you going, ‘For fuck’s sake!’” laughs Jim. “I remember we played a gig in London – just before we did this Creation Records tour of Germany – and there were quite a lot of people at that and the music papers came down. The reviews came out in NME and Sounds and Bobby was reading the reviews on our way back from Germany and I thought he was taking the piss. The NME was over the top saying how we were the greatest thing since the Sex Pistols and the Sounds one said we were the worst band they’d ever seen. You couldn’t wish for anything better! After that, record companies were beating down our doors with blank cheques.”


 Before any of that was the small matter of the drummer. Always considered an outsider by the rest of the band, Murray Dalglish was fired from the group and replaced by Bobby Gillespie, a sticksman of no fixed talent but whose music tastes and attitudes were perfectly in tune with the Mary Chain.



 “Bobby joining was key moment. The songs were always there and there was insanity on stage but there was always something missing,” says Douglas Hart. “There was a great moment when we kicked Murray out of the band and got Bobby to do the drums. We went to Glasgow to rehearse with Bobby and it was quite freeform and I remember thinking, ‘This has really clicked’. That was the moment when it really became amazing. He could manage to play two drums standing up and it was great because we were always asking Murray to reduce what he had. And after Bobby joined, we didn’t really rehearse but the feeling was so good and it was magical. We knew we had something.


 “‘Never Understand’ was the first thing he recorded. It clicked and we then got to play cellars in Germany and wear leather trousers!”


 If the sessions for ‘Upside Down’ had proved problematic in attempting to capture the band’s ferocious sound, they were to have their vision put to the test by the BBC’s engineers after they’d been invited to record a prestigious session for influential Radio 1 DJ, John Peel. To the Mary Chain’s collective mind, things had hardly progressed since the days of lab coat-wearing engineers and what could and couldn’t be done in the studio.


 “When we did our first Peel session… it was a bit frustrating because the big stumbling block with the sessions was the producers and the engineers at that time,” explains Jim. “They had quite a snotty attitude towards us that we were these little kids who didn’t know shit so we didn’t record what we wanted to record. We wanted to record broken glass on one of the songs and they wouldn’t do it. We were like, ‘But we’ll break it in a bucket and it won’t go anywhere’ but the guy said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that in the studio, sonny.’ That’s the way it was then, we just had to make do.”


 Though the initial Peel session of ‘In A Hole’, ‘You Trip Me Up’, ‘Never Understand’ and ‘Taste The Floor’ failed to capture The Jesus and Mary Chain’s howling fury to their complete satisfaction, the songs did reveal a masterful grasp of melody that the live shows had prevented from getting through. Clearly, a battle was raging between the basis of the songs and the instrumental packaging that embellishing them. This dichotomy would be a source of frustration for the band.


 “The songs that were underneath the feedback people hadn’t really got yet. Live, it was a total sonic assault and it was difficult to pick those songs out,” sighs Jim. “And we did have that thing where we’d put on a show and we’d be like, ‘Well, what shall we try to push to the front this time? Shall we let people know there’s more to this than just a massive freak out?’ But more often than not it would be the noise that overtook everything and it was hard to keep that under control. It seemed to take on a life of its own really.”


 There also remained the issue of stagecraft. The band had gone from forming to performing to recording in a very short space of time and the roles within the band had been assigned more through accident than design.


 Jim continues: “The other thing was that we were kind of timid on stage and the feedback and the noise was something to hide behind. At that time, I felt very uncomfortable on stage; you know, I was just some kid who was signing on a few months earlier.


 “Plus, we’d formed the band before we’d even decided who was doing what. It was never said I was going to be the singer. We always said it was going to be me or William but as I recall neither of us wanted to do it. We had an argument as to who wasn’t going to be the singer and I lost that argument. I’m not a singer in the classic sense so I needed the feedback to cover my voice on stage. My confidence level was at rock bottom.”


 Riding high on the success of ‘Upside Down’, manager Alan McGee set about arranging a major label deal for his charges. Though ‘Upside Down’ had earned an impressive amount of money for Creation, McGee felt that his 20% management fee from any major deal would help sustain Creation while the band was keen to not only get themselves out of a perceived indie ghetto but were also under the impression that recording their debut album would need serious financial backing. In the end, The Jesus and Mary Chain signed with Blanco Y Negro, a subsidiary of Warners headed by Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis. Looking back, Jim Reid now questions this decision.


 “We would have recorded Psychocandy on Creation if Creation had actually had any money at that time. Creation then was nothing like what it became a few short years later,” he says ruefully. “Alan was basically bankrolling a few singles here and there and all the stock was in his back bedroom, you know? It was a very small-scale operation.”


 He continues: “At the time we had kinda thought, our heroes are like David Bowie and Marc Bolan and stuff like that and we wanted to be on Top Of The Pops and that we needed a bankroll behind us so we thought that it had to be a major. We thought we needed someone to spend money on the band. And the joke is that Psychocandy cost £17,000 to record – and that includes the b-sides as well as the singles – so that was peanuts really.”


 Allowing himself a chuckle, he says, “With the benefit of hindsight – I mean, wouldn’t it be great to go back and speak to yourself back then – we didn’t need to sign to a major; we didn’t get a lot out of it or many benefits. Warner Brothers didn’t exactly bend over backwards to promote the Jesus And Mary Chain. They hadn’t a clue what we were all about. We just couldn’t communicate with anybody down there so it probably wasn’t the best move we’d made.”


 With the deal in place, the band entered Island Studios with engineer Stephen Street who’d been making a name for himself through his work with The Smiths. Given his track record, the pairing seems odd to say the least and the attempts at recording ‘Never Understand’ came to nothing. According to bassist Douglas Hart, the sessions weren’t just to record the follow-up to ‘Upside Down’ but were originally planned to record Psychocandy.


 “We tried recording it with Stephen Street at Island Studios but that was like, ‘This is not working.’ It was such a mismatch. The harshness of Island Studios didn’t suit us so we went back and recording ‘Never Understand’ in the studio we did ‘Upside Down’ in.”


 Released in February 1985 on Blanco Y Negro, ‘Never Understand’ truly delivered on the promise made by ‘Upside Down’. Opening with Douglas Hart’s low bass rumble, the effect of William Reid’s grasp of studio dynamics and loops of feedback entering the fray with Bobby Gillespie’s minimalist drumming was akin to being a attacked by a swarm of bees on steroids while Jim’s laconic and reverb-drenched vocals hovered over the beautiful din with an almost delicate fragility. For those raised on 50s rock & roll, 60s girl groups, 70s chart music and the leather-trousered torch-bearers of the early 80s such as The Cramps and The Birthday Party, The Jesus and Mary Chain were the word made flesh.


 The combination of their recorded work to date and growing reputation for drunkenness and violence at gigs – a gig in Birmingham in January 1985 had been cancelled by police – meant that an offer of appearing on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test was offered with kid gloves and strict conditions. The show was broadcast live but for their session, The Jesus and Mary Chain had to turn up at the BBC’s studios early in the morning and pre-record their contribution of ‘In A Hole’. If the producers were expecting a fresh-faced and well-behaved band, they were shocked to find four drunken musicians rolling up at 10am.


 Douglas Hart laughs at the memory saying, “For …Whistle Test, they had us in the morning to record that. We’d been up all night and it was just weird watching ourselves on telly later that night. We were all sat around this little fire with massive hangovers!”


 A gloriously nihilistic performance – the band really does look as it couldn’t give a shit about being on telly – it did at least prove that the band were capable of writing memorable songs under the insistent barrage that carried them. But it was what was to happen next that sealed the band’s reputation in the wider world.


 The Jesus and Mary Chain’s notorious riot gig at North London Polytechnic on March 15 has become the very stuff of legend. Oversold, overcrowded and underplayed – the band played for approximately 16 minutes – the resulting chaos saw the band’s gear trashed, the PA demolished and the arrival of police. Though Alan McGee lauded the event through a series of over-excited press releases – his claim that “…in an abstract way, the audience were not smashing up the hall. They were smashing up pop music” still manages to induces a smirk – the band themselves were now getting more than a little worried that matters were getting of hand.



 Yet contrary to their reputation, they took their music more seriously than they were credited for. On March 30, work began on Psychocandy at Southern Studios in Wood Green, North London. Established in 1974 by engineer John Loder and favoured by CRASS, the role of the studio and its founder cannot be overestimated. Here, at last, the Mary Chain found an engineer who not only tore up the studio rule book but encouraged the band to indulge in their musical excesses.


 “Geoff Travis suggested that we use CRASS’ studio,” says Douglas. “Not because we were fans of CRASS but because it was a totally low-key place. And it was a great sounding studio because, you know, it was like a shed in a garden and there was no pressure and it was cheap and John Loder could handle where we were coming from

."He was the first sympathetic engineer that we worked with. A lot of the times he would just disappear. Engineering-wise, he was absolutely perfect because he’d let us try to find the sound that was in our heads without saying, ‘You can’t do that!’”


 Jim Reid is equally fulsome in his praise of Southern Studios and its helmsman.

 “We tried a couple of studios but it just wasn’t working. We couldn’t find the right place to record Psychocandy. We’d been to several places and they were all terrible. You’d start trying to do a mix and sorting out the guitar level and you could see the engineer looking uncomfortable with what we were doing. He be going, ‘But it’s in the red!’ and we were going, ‘Fuck that, pal! Just go for a slash!’ We just had to get away from that kind of mentality that we got in every studio in London. There was always someone in these places that just didn’t like our music.


 “Southern Studios… was just fabulous because John Loder was there. He was the opposite of those other engineers; he was actually egging us on to go further. His attitude was to set the desk up and then go away. He’d just go to office and do his work. He’d have an intercom and he’d say, ‘If you have problems, just buzz me and I’ll come down and help you out.’ He did what was needed and he left us to our own devices.


 “We needed someone like John. He was essential purely because he let us get on with it. We had the sound in our heads and he tried to find a way to get that on tape. He did everything he could to help us get that sound.”


 Flying in the face of their increasingly fearsome reputation as belligerent drunkards, The Jesus and Mary Chain approached the recording of their debut with a focus that belied their public image. While the gigs may have ended in chaos, the band was acutely aware that this was their one chance of making a valid and coherent statement. This was make or break time.


 Douglas Hart is still proud of the band’s approach: “At the time, we made that album totally sober. We used put a lot of this mad, drunken energy into the gigs with this pent-up anger that was kind of a, ‘If we don’t do this, we’re gonna die’ attitude. So when it came to make the record, we were very conscientious and not drinking and not getting wasted.”


 He continues: “When it came to make the record, it was a release for us. We were a great band with great songs and we knew that if we didn’t do it right we’d probably kill ourselves. We were very hearty people; we’d slogged it out in the back of transit vans for years. It was a well-crafted record. It has a very free feeling.


 “You had the chaos of the live performances but when it came to the studio, none of us had been in bands before but they were well-crafted songs and we could all step up to the mark. We knew we could do it. We struggled on the first couple of singles, to be honest, but I think that after ‘Never Understand’ we knew we could make it work in that way. The bass and the drums and the guitar would all be recorded live and then add on overdubs so it has quite a live feel.”


 According the bassist, such was the Mary Chain’s almost puritanical work ethic that temptations were eschewed with an almost casual ease.


 “As I say, we were very conscientious. On-U Sound were recording at Southern Studios in the evening and we were there during the day. We’d come in and there’d be all these lines of speed that they’d chopped out but we’d totally ignore all that and go get some breakfast at the Wimpy where they’d serve those weird sausages that went round the eggs. And then we’d just get on with it. Obviously, when it came to mixing we’d stay longer but not like a crazy, late night session; not at all, not at all.



 “There certainly weren’t any tensions in the studio. In fact, I’d say it was a really joyful thing to do. Jim and William weren’t fighting at that time. I was there for the whole process and we’d been given a chance to make a record and it was joy to do.”


 For Jim Reid, the band knew that they were in the process of making a classic and one that would not only define 1985 but also stand the test of time.


 “I know it sounds big-headed, but we kinda had an idea,” he says. “We felt pretty good about the record as we were making it. We had it in mind that this was a record that would be like the kind of records that we bought; y’know, like The 13th Floor Elevators or something and you still listen to them 20 years after they were made and that’s what we were aiming for.


 “We weren’t aiming for a record that comes out in 1985 and then be forgotten in 1990. We wanted to make a record that, if you heard it 25 years later, it wouldn’t sound like a 25-year-old record. And if it appealed to little spotty anoraks in their bedrooms like we were, that was good enough for us. And if there were kids scattered around the place and hearing that record and thinking, ‘I can do that!’ and they start a band then the record’s successful.”



 Douglas Hart agrees with his former bandmate: “I remember we hung around William’s place and listened to it and we knew that we’d made a great record. By that time, we had a great load of songs together. It was something that we’d talked about earlier when we’d walked the streets thinking, ‘Just imagine if we could do that!’ But we nailed it and it was like a dream come true but we still didn’t know what people would fucking think of it. But there was definitely a moment when we looked at each other and went, ‘Fuck, yeah!’”



 Released in November 1985, Psychocandy was an instant classic. Not carrying an ounce of flab, every song was a killer. This writer’s memory of playing it for the first was a worry that, such was the quality of side one of the album, the second side would fail to match its magnificence. A false concern. Here at last was an album that wasn’t afraid of noise or playing guitars at crotch level unlike so much of the fey music that made its name at the time; its beautiful melodies, pumping basslines and almost childishly simple rhythms were bolstered by a red-hot blast of white noise. It was steeped in the quasi-homo-erotic outsider biker imagery redolent of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. This outsider/biker feel permeates the grooves conjuring up black leather and buckled boots straddling roaring motorbikes racing past girls called Cindy and Honey, all the while attempting to articulate teenage angst. Crucially, Psychocandy was as much a pop album as it was a rock & roll one. For the Jesus And Mary Chain, the fusing of these two dynamics was the intention from the very beginning.


 “When I think back to the music that we listened to in East Kilbride, of course there were The Stooges and things like that but there was also The Shangri-Las,” says Douglas. “Those kind of disparate things gave us an elevated feeling. You know, you used to meet all these people then that were into punk but hated The Beach Boys and we found that so weird.


 “We couldn’t understand why people couldn’t love both things and that combination of melody and extreme noise was so obvious to us. And they were equally as important. And so was Motown. Take ‘Just My Imagination’ – that’s three chords with really strange reverb on it. Everybody talks about The Velvets but we were more than that. Nobody really mentions the Motown influences or glam rock. You know, stuff like Gary Glitter and that were a huge thing in our life when we were young. The first thing we bought was T-Rex.


 “We were totally in love with that and we wanted to be on Top of the Pops and in Smash Hits. I remember people looking at us as if we were weird for saying that and it’s amazing that we actually got into Smash Hits! And on the front cover! You look at that po-faced indie aesthetic which we hated. We were always in love with pop music.”


 That love of classic pop certainly shone through Psychocandy’s 14 gems, be it the heartache of ‘Taste Of Cindy’, the Phil Spector-indebted ‘Just Like Honey’ or the glorious ‘You Trip Me Up’, a track that in some alternate universe occupied the Number 1 slot in the singles charts for several weeks. Sadly, the airwaves of daytime radio were far from accommodating to their vision and they found themselves marginalised away from the mainstream much to the band’s chagrin.


 “It was more than frustrating; it was bloody annoying, actually,” Jim states “It was annoying because we wanted to have our music played on the radio and we couldn’t unless you listened to John Peel.”


 Released shortly after the violence that marred the band’s gig at the Electric Ballroom and the riots that had broken out in London, Psychocandy drew a line under the chaos that had come to be identified with the band. Indeed, the band itself was acutely aware that the aggression and carnage would have to stop in favour of their increasing skills as musicians and performers.


 “I always figured that if you antagonise people to that degree then you should expect a bop in the mouth,” says Jim who found himself on the receiving end of a kicking at a Nick Cave gig in 1985. “But I did worry that someone in the audience was going to get seriously injured. People would come along because they’d read that there would be a riot at the gig and you’d see some really nasty characters out there with clubs and you’d think, ‘Well, wait a minute, someone’s going to get their fucking head broken open’ and that’s when we decided that enough was enough.


 “There were a few gigs and the atmosphere was such that you knew people had just turned up for a punch up. The way we dealt with it was just not to play for a while and we then said, ‘If you’re coming to our gig for a fight then you’re an idiot.' It seemed to do the trick.”

 Changes were indeed underway and by the end of February 1986 Bobby Gillespie had quit the band to concentrate on Primal Scream and be replaced by Quietus writer John Moore. Their sets became longer and more musically accomplished and with ‘Some Candy Talking’ The Jesus and Mary Chain scored their first bona fide hit before having it banned by Radio 1 under the premise of its alleged promotion of drug use.


 But before all that, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy was declared NME's Album of The Year, an accolade shared with Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs. (They also topped the NME's Singles Of The Year poll with 'Never Understand'. 'Just Like Honey was at number two and 'You Trip Me Up' was at number six.) Looking back from the vantage point of the 21st century, both Jim Reid and Douglas Hart view Psychocandy’s legacy with a pride that’s several degrees apart.


 “I recently met The Vaccines and they spoke really fondly of the Mary Chain and the fact that it made them want to start a band,” says Douglas with a broad smile. “It’s quite weird for me but it makes me feel really good about it. Whatever people think of our legacy, the fact is that kids are still picking up guitars because of Psychocandy. You can’t ask for than that, I think. We were driven by things we loved and if one of those bands makes a great record then you can’t ask for more.”


 Jim is more circumspect than his erstwhile bassist saying, “It’s difficult for me to say. I don’t like to talk too much about what the music means to other people. We made the record and hopefully it has some significance to some people – and the more the better – but it’s up to other people to tell what they got from it.”


 With a Conservative government implementing savage public spending cutbacks, unemployment and job insecurity rising and rioters taking to the streets and pop music becoming little more than light entertainment, 2011 has more than a few parallels with 1985. With this in mind, could a Psychocandy and its attendant circus happen again and is the time right?


 “It probably is,” affirms Jim. “If it happened now, it would sound totally different. I think the attitude of Psychocandy was to do with not being satisfied with the status quo and trying to fuck things up a little bit. There’s always gonna be somebody who wants to do that and hopefully it’ll be different every time it happens.”


 The difference could indeed be crucial. With the benefit of hindsight, I wonders what the Jim Reid of today would say to the Jim Reid of 1985?

 “Oh, fucking hell!” he exclaims with a laugh. “I’d probably give myself a good slap!”


 And so it goes full circle to the violence once again…






At least at the beginning, there was no middleman: Starting from the ground up, the band did everything themselves. The Mary Chain was an autodidactic bunch, gathering materials on their own that would help them craft their image, aesthetic approach and performance style. The band created the interiors of their record sleeves, rounded up their friends for help, and took the photographs that would grace Psychocandy’s front cover in Jim and William’s shared bedroom in East Kilbride. (“Marc Bolan didn’t have to stuff the sleeves of his own records,” Jim remembers grumbling at one point.) They spent many late nights at Alan McGee’s flat in Tottenham wrapping up records in plastic bags, remembers Karen Parker, Bobby [Gillespie]’s then-girlfriend and soon-to-be-unforgettable vocalist on “Just Like Honey.”


By June 1984, the young band had already signed to Creation. But at the time, “musicians” was a loose term to describe them, at best. Bassist Douglas Hart notoriously thumped his bass with two strings, one of which actually worked. “Two is enough; it’s adequate,” he would say to interviewers years later. “Anybody can play this bass.” William Reid played guitar because he could do it only slightly better than his brother Jim, which meant he could hardly play at all. “He could barely hold down a bar chord,” remembers Jim of William’s guitar playing at the beginning. As for William’s guitar? “It’s totally out of tune, because my guitar’s for kicking,” he told video interviewers in 1985. Bobby Gillespie had been screaming in his first industrial noise band before joining as the Mary Chain’s drummer (his “drum kit” was comprised of two trash can lids).

 The younger, painfully shy Jim Reid had been relegated to the role of the band’s vocalist out of necessity because no one else would do it (he and William flipped a coin, and he “lost”). Originally, Jim tried to get Douglas — then the youngest member of the band, just a teenager — to sing. “I was like, 'Fuck, what?' I couldn’t believe it,” Hart recalls. “It was total shyness on his part. I was like, ‘Your voice is fucking amazing,' and he’s a good-looking bastard!”


 Their attempts at performing live had been minimally successful thus far, and their audience typically comprised their friend / superfan Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee and a few confused onlookers, most of whom left after several minutes. Though they were booted off the stage at a psychedelic club night at Alice in Wonderland (in London’s Soho) in September 1984, they decided that the next show (at another venue, of course) would be different. Perhaps it helps that before their first show at the Living Room, they marched into the New Musical Express offices in London and announced to the tastemaking writers and editors that they, the Mary Chain, had arrived.


 “We went down and said, ‘We’re the Jesus and Mary Chain, we’re playing tonight [at the Living Room], and if you don’t come, you’re going to be pretending that you did in five years,’” Reid says. At first, McGee wasn’t too keen. “We explained to Alan that we were going down to the NME offices to invite them to the show. He was laughing and saying, ‘Fuck, that’s not how it works.’ But why isn’t it how it works?” says Jim Reid. “He was like, ‘You just can’t do that. They don’t know who you are.’ But we did it anyway.” Their boldness then caught the attention of an NME critic named David Quantick. This time, NME’s own Neil Taylor ended up going to their gig at the Three Johns on October 24, 1984. In his review, he touted the Mary Chain as “the best thing since the Sex Pistols.” This bit of press would prove critical to the band moving forward, even if the show itself was admittedly a mess.


 McGee remembers that particular show dissolving into spectacular chaos. “I don’t even know how to describe it. Every single one of them ... Gillespie was sort of having a nervous breakdown as they played,” he told Barbed Wire Kisses’ author Zoë Howe. “Douglas Hart was … well, I don’t know what drug he was on, but he was, like, pinned to the wall. Jim was having an epileptic fit, William was on his knees, and then they proceeded to smash their instruments up. Gillespie — the guy barely drank, but he was drunk, manically drumming away.”


 It was utterly punk to make something from nothing, and these chances are what made the Mary Chain. Even tensions bubbling up between the dueling brothers took a backseat to the Mary Chain mission. “We just had such a clear idea of, at the end of it, the words the Jesus and Mary Chain are going to be written on something,” Jim remembers. “We want to have control over that. It doesn’t have your name on the final product. It’s got our name. So, you know, we just want to make sure it’s done right.”


 Part of what set the Mary Chain [apart] was their early understanding that maintaining creative control over their product, even when making the move to major labels later on, was crucial to maintain a sense of stability and purity. Speaking to this, Jim recalls a later story about going to film the video for “You Trip Me Up” in Portugal, which they planned so that it would be sunny (naturally, it rained virtually the entire time the Scotsmen were there). What they could control of their music and its marketing, they did — and sometimes, it wasn’t received all that well by others.


 “It used to really annoy people how we were so hands-on. We edited the ‘You Trip Me Up’ video, and they were just so fucking annoyed with us,” remembers Jim. “We would just be randomly cutting up films and splicing them together, and they were so angry! And they would say, ‘Why don’t you go to the pub, and when you get back we’ll have edited your video?’ We would say, ‘No, you got it wrong. You go to the pub, we’ll have edited the video.’ That was our attitude, you know? We did everything ourselves.”


 Regardless, the Mary Chain would be consistently painted in the press as a group of self-indulgent, lazy retromaniacs. Due to their seemingly uncaring attitude and onstage antics, the Jesus and Mary Chain were almost immediately dubbed “Sex Pistols 2.0” by the British press upon the release of their first single in November 1984. The nickname was damning, and nods to the fellows’ polarizing performances, the band’s monosyllabic radio and television interviews and, of course, their ungodly name. They hadn’t even released a full album, and they were already pissing people off.


 In a 1986 Rolling Stone profile, Jim Reid grumbled, “We’ve been taken hold of by the media as if we were some kind of plaything. To a certain extent, we played up to that in the beginning. But it got to the point where we were being portrayed as drunken idiots. It’s completely untrue. Just because the music is loaded doesn’t mean we’re loaded.” Instead of being strung out and loaded on heroin, the Mary Chain’s idea of “loaded” was more along the lines of the eponymous myth that wrought the Velvet Underground’s final record, Loaded, a tongue-in-cheek decision made by Lou Reed at the insistence of a producer who urged the then-Velvets to make a record that was “loaded” with hits. "Loaded," of course, can also refer to a gun with a trigger ready to be pulled.



 

Review Summary: Conflict


 
Conflict is what defines The Jesus and Mary Chain’s career. It’s what drove the brothers Reid haphazardly through the spotlight over decades, and it’s what drove Psychocandy to encapsulate an ideal the brothers could never fully capture again - no matter whether they tried or not. It’s what drove an unhealthy marriage of proto-punk and pop music, apathetic morbidity set in the California beaches of 1965, trying too hard to look like they never tried hard enough. There are rarely more than three chords on any given track; hell, the Reids practically copy-pasted the first forty seconds of their now-seminal classic “Just Like Honey” just ten tracks later. Note for note, transposed down a tone or two. And yet, in this limited framework lies a simple, pleasurable creativity, intent on expressing love for the pop genre and maliciously twisting it all the while. Any retroactive critical acclaim, or influence on the scene of tomorrow, is just the icing on the cake.




Goth music could hear the angst of “God spits on my soul” or sexual frustration in “Eating up the scum” and go even further into despair. Shoegaze could take the deafening cacophony of tightly-controlled feedback and, by 1991, turn it into an alien and ethereal beauty. Yet there was never the sense of duality that Psychocandy encompassed, nor was there the sheer violence of the Reids’ will to record the album exactly as they wanted. It’s both a product of the sound and the personalities, but each collision of Jim Reid’s low register and William Reid’s explosive leads sounds like it could escalate into a brawl. Sometimes it actually does, when “Taste the Floor” drowns Jim out in the mix in favour of a feedback tsunami. It would be worrisome, yet the sweetness of old always brings a sense of comfort to the equation; how can we break into a riot now, when we’ve made something so fragile in the process?




Perhaps the crux of Psychocandy is that each listening experience is a conflict in its own right. The Reids go too far too often – where the introduction of “In a Hole” fails to resemble anything at all, except maybe tinnitus, and the ballads hit like a fire drill. Nonetheless, there’s a solemn reward in fighting through the Reids’ vision, fighting through the anger to reach a soft “I’ll be where you can’t see… my little underground.” It’s the never-ending struggle between audience and artist that makes this fleeting vulnerability all the more beautiful. For every embrace and optimistic “There’s something wrong,” there’s a snide remark somewhere later down the line that fires up conflict all over again. In that sense, Psychocandy is one of the most paradoxically accessible records in musical history; a little something for everyone who goes looking, and a sloppy middle finger for everyone no matter what, before stumbling back into the set.










 

I'm pleased you (eventually) enjoyed Psychocandy a/c, but would never have thought of it as background or work music. Try listening to it loud when pished.

The band's distortion and feedback mixed with a surfing theme is offensive, unique and brilliant. Funny, I never thought of them as a 'shoegazing' band, but then when I first got into them, I don't think that term existed. It was when the Wedding Present did that 12 singles in 1992 record setting that I first heard of the term from a fellow United fan.

This wouldn't be my favourite JAMC album: normally I tend to like early LPs by bands, but Munki from the late 'nineties is top bracket for me (listen to that, A/C). In fact, I think they got better as time went on, excepting the reunion album a couple of years ago (still good right enough).

Wish hkarab in one of his or her forms was around to give his or her slant on this.

PatReilly wrote:

I'm pleased you (eventually) enjoyed Psychocandy a/c, but would never have thought of it as background or work music. Try listening to it loud when pished.

The band's distortion and feedback mixed with a surfing theme is offensive, unique and brilliant. Funny, I never thought of them as a 'shoegazing' band, but then when I first got into them, I don't think that term existed. It was when the Wedding Present did that 12 singles in 1992 record setting that I first heard of the term from a fellow United fan.

This wouldn't be my favourite JAMC album: normally I tend to like early LPs by bands, but Munki from the late 'nineties is top bracket for me (listen to that, A/C). In fact, I think they got better as time went on, excepting the reunion album a couple of years ago (still good right enough).

Wish hkarab in one of his or her forms was around to give his or her slant on this.

Will give that munki a go tomorrow Pat, as back on pentin' duty


Btw love your avatar my first real footballing hero

Last edited by arabchanter (01/2/2020 11:34 am)

Album 561

New Order.........................................Low-Life   (1985}











This album opened up with a great song that I'd never heard before Love Vigilantes, but unfortunately for this listener it then became track after track of repetitive synth orientated dopelganging music.


I found there was too much repetition, there's no way you wouldn't know it was New Order after 10 seconds of any of the tracks, now I'm not saying they are bad, but it seems to me on listening to my first New Order album that they have found their own popular niche (which they are very good at to be fair) and are not for changing (and why should they)


I wish I hadn't listened to this one as I liked New Order, Blue Monday, Confusion and Temptation are three tracks I really like and joining them now is Love Vigilantes, but on this showing I think a full album of New Order would be just too samey for me and I don't think it would last too long on the turntable, I would have to listen to them in small digestible chunks, no more than two to three tracks back to back.


This album wont be going into my record collection, I loved Joy Division but found this rather disappointing.





Bits & Bobs;


New Order was formed in 1980 by former Joy Division members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, following the suicide of vocalist Ian Curtis. Gillian Gilbert was the only new member added after the demise of their former band. She was invited to join New Order during the early part of October 1980. Gilbert had already played with Joy Division a number of times, filling in for both Curtis and Sumner playing guitar. She was also the girlfriend, (now wife) of Morris.


 
New Order's debut single "Ceremony Club" was actually one of the last songs Joy Division ever wrote. It hinted at a possible lightening up from their previous gloomy sound.


 
Peter Hook said that Ian Curtis was the main difference between their songwriting for Joy Division and New Order. "When we were Joy Division, myself, Bernard [Sumner] and Stephen [Morris ] would jam a lot and get our ideas that way," he explained. "Ian would be listening to us playing and would say, 'That sounds good, that bit is great, do that bit again...' he was like a conductor in that respect."



"As New Order it was very different because we had lost Ian, which meant we had to change our way of songwriting, and it also meant that we had to start doing the lyrics ourselves," Hook continued. "It took us a while to get used to doing that."



 
Their second album Power, Corruption & Lies (1983), was a dramatic change of sound, adding synthesizers and sequencers, and a substantial amount of melodicism to the traditional guitar, bass and drums. This established New Order's formula mixing early techno and guitar-based music.


 
"Temptation" is one of New Order's best-known recordings. This is in part due to its appearance in the Trainspotting movie where the lyrics are sung by Kelly MacDonald's Diane character while she's taking a bath.


 
"Blue Monday" is the best-selling 12-inch single of all time in Britain. However, as Factory Records were not members of the British Phonographic Industry association, it was not eligible for an official gold disc. The single wasn't issued as a traditional 7-inch until 1988, which helped boost sales of the 12-inch.


 
In their early days, New Order paid themselves £72.50 a week.



 The gentle lead guitar of New Order's 1989 single "Run 2" led some fans to cite an unlikely comparison: John Denver. When the the American singer-songwriter got wind of the tune, he took legal action claiming that the guitar break too closely resembled his song "Leaving On A Jet Plane." The case was settled out of court, and as a result the single can never be re-released in its original form.


 
New Order achieved their only UK #1 in 1990 when "World in Motion" topped the chart. The official 1990 England World Cup song, it was a re-working of the theme music to youth current affairs show Reportage. Released under the name of England New Order it featured several members of the 1990 English football team, as well as comic actor Keith Allen, who co-wrote the lyric.


 
The video for New Order's 2001 single "Crystal" depicted a young American band miming to New Order's music and words. The clip was directly responsible for the name of the American group The Killers, as that name was written on the bass drum of the fictional band.


 
Gilbert stopped touring with New Order in 1998 so that she could care for her's and Morris' two daughters. She took part in the recording of 2001's Get Ready after which she was replaced by Phil Cunningham in New Order's line-up. Gilbert rejoined New Order in 2011, after a 10-year hiatus.


 
New Order have had two lengthy sabbaticals. Between 1993 and 1998 the quartet worked on their own individual projects, before reconvening. In 2007, after Peter Hook left the band, Sumner and guitarist Phil Cunningham worked on their Bad Lieutenant group and the other members again pursued their own projects. The band reunited in 2011 without Hook, with Tom Chapman replacing the bassist.





Love Vigilantes

Track 1 from Low-Life by New Order. The song tells the story of a soldier fighting in Vietnam.
Bernard Sumner explained his approach to writing it:


I did that with “Love Vigilantes” where I decided to write a redneck song. It was quite tongue-in-cheek. It was about Vietnam. It was about a soldier that came back and his wife was sent a telegram to say that he was dead. You can take the ending one way or another. He’s either dead and he’s come back as a ghost and he sees her or he’s not dead and the telegram was a mistake. But his wife’s got it and killed herself.



The Perfect Kiss

 “The Perfect Kiss” was released in 1985 with a catalogue number of FAC 123. While it runs 8'46" in its full-length version, the song is most widely available in one of a few edits. The album edit which appears on Low-Life cuts the third verse and most of the instrumental outro to get down to 4'48", while the version on the Compact Disc release of Substance cuts about 40 seconds due to limitations of the CD format. The full version is only available on CD on the bonus disc of the Low-Life re-release.

 Peter Saville’s cover design features the title of the song embossed vertically onto the sleeve. The title wraps around, such that the front reads ‘perfect’ and the back ‘kiss The’.


 The music video for “The Perfect Kiss” was directed by Jonathan Demme and featured a new recording of the song played live in-studio. In typical Factory Records fashion, the video received its own catalogue number – the reverse of the single, FAC 321.



A Quick review I found;


Rising from the ashes of the great 70's gloomy dance rock Joy Division after the death of frontman Ian Curtis, New Order took on the role of depressing dance group in the eighties. Arguably the most copied band in history, New Order's sound consisted of synthesizers, drum machines, distorted bass and violent guitars. With the release of their most successful album Power, Corruption and Lies, New Order had a tough album to follow with. Making a more depressing sound helped with the creation of this album, and in 1985, Low-Life came to reality, and assisted in the growing music scene that was almost elegant, but catchy at the same time. Low Life signaled a new era in music; the eighties synth scene that dissolved in the nineties. New Order were the top at what they do, and here's an example of how brilliant they are.



New Order - Low-Life
Released 1985 Warner Brothers



Love Vigilantes: The first song on the album represents the album well. Starting with a pronounced bass, harmonica and eventually a faint guitar and drum machine. In comes the vocals, frail and almost sarcastic. The chorus is nothing especially different, but has a catchy bass hook and some nice, pleasant lyrics:
 Quote:I Want To See My Family, My Wife And Child Waiting For Me

This song repeats, but you should really listen to the whole thing, because it's really a spectacular and the first of only two happier songs on the album. An overall nice song, complete with a speed guitar outro.



The Perfect Kiss: The song that I originally hear and what got me into this album. A bass, dramatic keyboards, a drum machine and speed guitar occupy this song throughout the whole thing, and the result is pretty much the best song on the album. A little bass breakdown boasts a guitar solo riff but brings it down to fit the song, which again goes into the chorus with a stressed performance vocally, and a heavily fragmented bass pattern make this even more enjoyable, and create a real atmosphere for the album. A percussion break only can add to the song, and thats what the add with... frogs. A long lull of keyboards gradually erups into a bass-infested bridge, and a cowbell playing along, which exits the song with an instrumental part, which is what makes me love this song so much.




This Time Of Night: With claps, operatic keys and a fast paced drums, this technologically advanced piece makes it cool to be living in the eighties still. Which could be a problem, because you might get influenced to dance along to it, which would be a mistake seeing as you would look like an idiot. Enough filler, this song is a rather dramatic song that includes double bass pedals, and ailing vocals and a guitar playing a signature eighties riff. This song has some rather breathtaking elements, especially the faint keyboards, which make this song that much more enjoyable, and deep, Joy Division inspired vocals. Overlapping vocals at the end makes a dramatic ending. Another flawless song.




Sunrise: This song marks the midway point on the album. After about :40 of keyboard filled opening, the song erupts into a catchy, octavating bass pattern and rhythmic guitar playing chords. The vocals enter, and sound every bit as pained as the music. This song is another depressing song, that also inspires the eighties persona in all of us. A chorus filled with indivdual guitar and keyboards, and the introduction of the real first drumset. This song is 6:00, so there's bound to be something that can hold your interest in this song, and it's the bridge with talking-over type vocals, another tragic but wonderful bass pattern and a sole guitar playing up the neck gradually. Such an amazing song to listen to. This could have easily been the ending, because it's just that epic.




Eligia: Starting with creepy keyboards and a following guitar, this song has a rather beautiful side to it, complete with vocal-type keyboards and a guitar pattern that is similar to the bass pattern, a climbing pattern in the keyboard, and a lack of vocals. Before you know it, you're halfway done the song, and the whole thing continues on such an epic level that you have to sit and listen to the whole thing attentivley or you'll miss something. What else can be said about this song, other than that it's an instrumental epic with overlapping keyboards, similar bass-guitar riffs and the occasional synthesized symobls? Doesn't that just spell amazing? It does to me. It's over too soon, even though it hits a respectable 5:00.




Sooner Than You Think: Another rather mellow piece, Sooner Than You Think sounds like alot of the other songs, but adding jungle-esque percussion and even a 70's disco inspired keyboard riff, a distorted guitar playing scales and quiet but rewarding if you listen to it bass, this song has a chorus that showcases vocals more than anything else, hinting at "romantic" intentions:

Quote:Oh, you know what I need, yes you do

A breakdown from the guitar enters, and the song has a tendency to go right by quickly. An overall average song, but still nice to listen to. A guitar solo is the main interest holder here.




Sub Culture: This song features earlier bass patterns, most notably from Blue Monday, a Gloria Gaynor inspired keyboard pattern in the chorus, and sad lyrics. A breakdown features interesting chord changes and a kind of a continuation guitar riff that follows the keyboard. This song has really good elements musically, most notably a percussion break, a guitar solo, and a nice to listen to bass, but it's the lyrics and vocal stylings that keep you on this song. A powerful performance by New Order, and one of the most depressing songs on here.




Face Up: An upbeat song, this has some nice keyboard effects and bass patterns, but this is actually a step down from the other songs that made this album so brilliant and, essentially, trend setting. As stupid as this may sound, New Order can't really do happy songs that good, at least not as good as their more depressing songs. The extremely catchy bridge makes this song worth listening to. This concludes the album, which is a shame because a much more epic song such as The Perfect Kiss would be more suited to finish an album of this status.




Overall
This album has it's highs, which soar, and it's lows which aren't really that bad, but it all balances out to make an extremely enjoyable, gloomy, upbeat dance album that well continues the legend that bands such as Joy Division first made popular.



An Interview from 1985;


 This article originally appeared in the September 1985 issue of SPIN.



Jesus Christ, life is depressing. It’s surprising that anyone bothers to carry on with it. And when everything seems hopeless, someone tells you it’s bound to get worse. You know. You wear a pin that says “Life sucks, then you die.” The epidemic of teenage suicides in this country doesn’t shock you because youth is no excuse for living.

 You can understand why Ian Curtis hanged himself, aged 23, the night before Joy Division was scheduled to start its first American tour. His lyrics were haunting, his grief-filled voice unique. But who cares? When you’re hot, you’re hot; when you’re sad, you’re sad.


 The death of this unassuming singer with faraway eyes was considered Very Important Indeed. Joy Division was to England in the ’70s what the Velvet Underground was to America in the ’60s. Both bands attracted a fanatical cult following, and both had charismatic lead singers whose overriding artistic motivation was a fascination with the button labeled “Self-Destruct.” Some neurotics fulfill their own prophecy, others make Honda advertisements.


 You can hear Curtis’s suicide notes on the album—in the hypnotic despite of “Digital,” for instance: “I fee it closing in / Day in, day out / Day in, day out / Day in, day out.” Or “Isolation”: “I’m ashamed of the person I am / Isolation. Isolation. Isolation.“


 The death-march quality of “Means to an End” makes it the gloom song to end all gloom songs. Joy Division’s music was stark, abrasive, sometimes simplistic, and (like the Velvet Underground’s) one of the most important influences of the era. You can hear it in Sisters of Mercy, you can hear it in the Smiths, you can hear it in Echo and the Bunnymen, you can hear it in Bauhaus. Now a whole generation of self-obsessed white wimps on Valium is plaguing us with its torment and loneliness. Hear Tears for Fears, for goodness’ sake: “I find it kind of funny / I find it kind of sad / The dreams in which I’m dying / Are the best I’ve ever had.“


 Curtis’s death perpetuated the myth that was already beginning to shroud the band. “It’s the perfect end, isn’t it,” says bewhiskered and apparently undepressed bassist Peter Hook. “It’s like the Doors. It makes him perfect. It makes it all so glamorous and awe-inspiring. It makes the band really appealing.”


 The band is New Order now, of course, not Joy Division, but the early ’80s saw it doing little to destroy a carefully constructed legend. You don’t see beaming boys-next-door staring from New Order album covers. Indeed, Peter Saville’s classical packaging does not give the curious fan the benefit of credits, let alone a lyric sheet. “The songs are not statements,” explains Hook. “We don’t separate the lyrics from the music.”


 Factory was their fortress. That Manchester-based record company was founded by maverick entrepreneur Tony Wilson, whose gray-jowled policy relies on action: “We do something because we want to do it and find out the reasons for it after we’ve done it.”


 Independent labels weren’t unusual then, survival was. Set 200 miles from London (still the heart of the British music industry), Factory refuses to give bands contracts, advances, or hype. It believes that if you have talent, you can make it.


 New Order members reap 50 percent of the profit from their record sales, and since they are the world’s best-selling independent band, they are not badly off. No swimming pools, but “we can borrow money to buy cars,” laughs Hook, “and we can do a lot of things that other bands and independent record companies would like to do.”


 Like refuse to give interviews, for instance, something that helped the legend. They remain shy of the media, despite being the personal idols of most English music journalists. Consequently said writers, starved of bare facts, are inclined to eulogize the band and overintellectualize its output. When New Order played its first concert in London in 1981, Paul Morley told New Musical Express readers he “burst into tears” (not from boredom, presumably).


 Even recently, another writer called them the “driven snow of the soul.” Writers always felt there was a lot to say about New Order, but the band’s material did not always live up to that expectation. That’s because when it comes down to it, New Order is not grandiose or obscure. It is a down-to-earth group with a cute vocalist who sings nicely and a batch of charismatic dance tunes.


 “What appeals to us is simplicity,” says Hook. “Our music is complicated, but you get a nice, simple feeling from it.” That feeling is largely due to his bass lines, which married to precise drumming by the darkly domineering Stephen Morris, form New Order’s musical character.


 Bernard Sumner’s lead guitar usually takes second place. Their inclination toward sameness stems from unashamed use of disco rhythms, which spawned the commercial success of hits such as “Blue Monday.”

 With the release of Low-Life, the mist around this band may lift. They have placed their faces, albeit artistically distorted, on the sleeve, although it is typical that drummer Morris, and not vocalist and star-apparent Sumner, grace the front.


 The excellent video of “Perfect Kiss,” directed by Jonathan (Stop Making Sense) Demme, focuses point-blank on the individual members and their musicianship. “No models, no smoke bombs, no Mad Maxes here,” says Hook. Just three intense-looking men and a red-headed woman playing out their concentration spans in a Manchester rehearsal studio.


 Demme’s camera zooms in on their features and fingers, which, in keyboardist Gillian Gilbert’s case, are playing a melody comprising about six notes.



They are untrained and proud of it, like the old blues players who when asked if they could read music replied, “Not so it can hurt.”

 “It gives you more freedom to play what comes from within. Mind you, my fingers won’t go in the right places most of the time,” admits Hook. Adds Morris, “As long as what you’re doing is good, you don’t get frustrated.”


 The lyrics have always taken second place to mood and music. Sumner’s quavering tones are often mixed in production so they are heard below the instruments. Try to sing along to “Perfect Kiss.”

 “Often when a song is semifinished, we just go out and play it,” explains Hook. “We’ll jam the lyrics. It works quite well sometimes, but sometimes it’s really embarrassing. There’s always a string of obscenities. But as long as you look as if you mean it…as [Factory’s] Tony Wilson always says, ‘It’s Aaart.”


 This disorganization, which borders on arrogance, is, of course, endearing. Journalist Chris Bon, who toured with New Order in 1983, recalls a typical scene: Hook failed to show up at a concert in Washington, D.C., because he had passed out after drinking melon-ball cocktails.


 Manager Rob Gretton, who has a face like a leek, halfheartedly and unconvincingly stepped in. A couple of songs through the set, Hook turned up and greeted the audience cheerfully: “Hello, shitheads.”


 Now New Order is doing business with Qwest, Quincy Jones’ label, which boasts the considerable advantage of being distributed by Warner Brothers. They can look forward to the rerelease of Power, Corruption and Lies. MTV. An extensive summer tour. Back-to-back interviews. Paparazzi fighting over them. Will New Order become Pop Stars? Will they remember the fans who braved New York’s East Village to see them in the Ukrainian Home? Will they go on Solid Gold?


 “The single wasn’t engineered to be commercial,” says Morris in his North England burr. “We didn’t think, ‘Right, we’ve got to write a commercial song.'”


 “Anyway,” inquires Hook, “What does commercial mean? ‘I’ve heard it a lot of times and I like it,’ or ‘It doesn’t sound like Einstürzende Neubauten’?” No. Commercial means you could run the risk of becoming the next Police.”


 “The deal with Qwest is not what it seems to be,” explains Morris. “We’re not signed to them We’re not in a position where they can exert a tremendous amount of influence on us. They approached us. A lot of people who wanted to sign us didn’t want to give as much control as we wanted, and to compensate for that they offered us more money, but it didn’t seem a fair deal.”


 “The deal we got with Qwest seemed the best because of who they were and because they were interested in what we were gonna do.” And, adds Hook, “It’s quite flattering the Quincy Jones thinks our record, which we produced ourselves, ranks alongside his. That’s a compliment worth waiting for.”


 So what are their motivations now? They’ve been in the business for eight years, they’ve achieved adulation all over the world without having to wear silly clothes, they can play Hawaii because they want to. They’ve made money and put it back into their hometown (they own the local Hacienda nightclub).


 Morris: “We don’t really hope for anything, just that we will continue to be around and able to do this. It’s nice if people buy your records, you know, but you don’t desperately want it. All you want is the means to carry on with the next thing. I haven’t really got any illusions about stardom in America. It will just be more of what it is now, and we will have to deal with it pretty much the same way.”


 Sumner and the rest of New Order are too clever to want stardom—they always have been. They haven’t sold out, they are merely learning and progressing, which is (and I’m only guessing) what life is all about. That and optimism (“Let’s go out and have some fun,” sings Sumner on “Perfect Kiss”).


 Anyway, how can you doubt a guitarist who says, like Hook, that the highlight of his career “was this fight I had at the Factory. Me and this roadie had been out drinking. This kid hit this kid. I thought, ‘Fuck this,’ fell off the stage, and kicked the shit out of him. We got him to the back and he was yelling, ‘No, no, I’m a Joy Division fan.'”




Peter Hook on How New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ Lost $100K;

 New Order’s 1983 synth classic “Blue Monday” is one of the most important and beloved songs of the new wave era. The nine-minute alt-dance opus influenced and inspired everyone from the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart to electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk, and to this day it holds the record as the top-selling 12-inch single in recording history, shifting more than a million units in the band’s native U.K. alone. So how exactly did “Blue Monday” manage not only to make no profit but to actually lose a whopping $100,000?


 The Manchester group’s iconic founding bassist, Peter "Hooky" Hook, explains that it all came down to indie label Factory Records’ decision regarding the single’s very famous — but very expensive — packaging.








“[Graphic designer] Peter [Saville] came to the practice place, and he saw a floppy disk and he loved it,” Hook recalls, as he sat with Yahoo Music reflecting on his illustrious discography with both New Order and the band from which New Order sprang, the equally influential Joy division. “And he felt we should do the sleeve [to look] like this. … Unbeknownst to him, it had to be die-cut three times, which made the sleeve ridiculously expensive — which [New Order bandmate] Stephen Morris thought was hilarious, because you were paying for the bits that you didn’t get, the hole, where the card had gone!

 “But, yeah, the sleeve unfortunately cost 10p [approximately 20 cents] more than the record could earn, so every time we sold a copy of ‘Blue Monday,’ we were losing 10p,” Hook elaborates with a rueful chuckle: “It then went on to be the biggest-selling 12-inch of all time! I remember [Factory Records label head] Tony [Wilson] going to great trouble to cast a brass Factory symbol that said, ‘Well Done, Hooky!’ celebrating a loss of 50,000 pounds. … I suppose it really seals its place in history as a mythical being for that reason.”




Lastly a ticket and setlist from 1985;


 

1 Elegia

 2 Love Vigilantes 

3 Blue Monday

4 Thieves Like Us


5 Your Silent Face 

6 586

7 The Perfect Kiss

8 Sunrise

9 Face Up

10 Age of Consent

11 Ceremony 

12 Temptation

Last edited by arabchanter (05/2/2020 12:39 am)

Album 563
Dexy's Midnight Runners........................Don't Stand Me Down   (1985)









Though derided at the time for its long song lengths and rambling lyrics, Don’t Stand me Down has been looked back on as a cult classic. In this album, singer Kevin Rowland presents the listener with a musical conversation, giving the listener an insight into his life and thoughts.


 After releasing this album, the band continued to make new singles for another year before breaking up. There was no new material from the band until the 2010s, when they came back as Dexys.


 The album was rereleased, slightly restructured, in 2002. This is known as the ‘Director’s Cut’. It has the alternate cover with the band in the field. It includes the extra song Kevin Rowland’s 13th Time as track 1, and has several changes to track titles.

Album 564

Scritti Politti.............................Cupid And Psyche 85   (1985)











A shower of ridiculously dated, monstrously overproduced, squeaky-voiced, blue-eyed pap, this is nonetheless one of the greatest records to emerge from the eighties. Each song is a towering synth-pop spectacle that pounds and dazzles in equal measure and beneath the mindless pop exterior there is a hyper-keen intellect that truly sets it apart from the competition.



The opener Word Girl is a straight up masterpiece. Over a cute reggae groove, Green Gartside excoriates ever so sensitively about the very use of the word 'girl' within the context of a pop song. The chorus is heavenly sweet and the haunted outro aches with an exquisite eternal longingness that is almost too painfully pretty to endure. Album centrepiece Perfect Way is a big, brash pop symphony that pulls out all the stops and then snaps and stamps on them for good measure. Absolute and Wood Beez are two anguished, Arif Mardin-assisted dancefloor stompers that still sound thoroughly massive to this day. The latter, positioned near the end of the record, is a completely ravishing show stealer.



Besides the beefy hit singles, there are many other meaty moments to savour. Lover To Fall is a dinky little ditty with an amazingly addictive chorus and I Don't Work That Hard is a bright and breezy, effortlessly joyful pop gem. A Little Knowledge is a fantastically woozy ballad that plays a bit like a bizarre cartoon duet, perhaps for a Don Bluth movie, and Small Talk is a crunching whirlpool of finely programmed guitar and bleats and bloops. Hypnotize is a purposefully hollow hip hop excursion that wraps up the record in gleefully inane fashion. Perfect in its own way, Cupid & Psyche 85 thrives from its gaudy, disposable pop pretensions and becomes essentially one of the top 10 album releases of the decade.

Album 565.
Elvis Costello And The Attractions............................Blood And Chocolate (1986)









After the acrimony surrounding King Of America Elvis Costello took his backing band, The Attractions, into the studio in the summer of 1986 for a curtain call. As he closed the first decade of his career, Costello was making major changes both in his career and his personal life, and they all seemed to be coming to a head on Blood and Chocolate.


 Bringing things full circle, Nick Lowe was asked to produce in an attempt to get the album done as quickly as possible “…at something approaching stage volume,” according to Costello. The production and the tension in the band created probably the hardest edge to The Attractions' sound since 1978’s This Year's Model. From the 2005 liner notes, Costello states:

“When the spill from bass channel bled onto the drum microphones, we simply turned down the direct signal in order to rebalance. This accounted for both the murky, booming sound of some tracks and our inability to play at a very low dynamic throughout this record. In fact it often made us sound as if we were playing wearing boxing gloves. But somehow this also became a virtue.”


 This would be the last time the band recorded together for another eight years and would provide fractures in Costello’s relationship with bassist Bruce Thomas that would never quite heal. The album showed the worst chart showing for Costello since his debut (No. 16 U.K., No. 84 U.S.), and it would be nearly three years before he put another album on record store shelves.

Album 564

Scritti Politti.............................Cupid And Psyche 85   (1985)











This is an album I had back in the day, and listening to it again brings back some brilliant images in my mind of the 80's. This couldn't be anything but an 80's album, very much of it's time and probably wont have aged well for some, but for me maybe nostalgically I loved every minute of it, like bumping into an old mate you'd lost touch with and still getting on like a house on fire.


Kicking off with The Word Girl  (probably my favourite track) all the way through to Hypnotise every track on a scale of good to very good, I can see why some might think it a wee bit too poppy/sugary, but for me this was a great "take me back"  abum and I'm 'avin' it.


This album will be going into my vinyl collection
(nostalgia )






Bits & Bobs;

Founded by a group of Leeds, England-based art students in 1978, by the time of their first single, ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’, the nucleus of Scritti Politti was Green Gartside (Paul Julian Strohmeyer, 22 June 1956, Cardiff, Wales; vocals/guitar), Matthew Kay (keyboards) and Tom Morley (drums) and Nial Jinks (bass, departed 1980). At this stage, the band was explicitly political (Green had been a Young Communist and the band’s Italian-derived name translates roughly as ‘political writings’), encouraging listeners to create their own music in the face of the corporate record industry. Gartside also gained a reputation for convoluted wordplay within his lyrics. This early avant garde phase gave way to a smooth sound that brought together elements of pop, jazz, soul and reggae on songs such as ‘The Sweetest Girl’ (with Robert Wyatt on piano) and ‘Asylums In Jerusalem’/‘Jacques Derrida’, which appeared on their debut album for Rough Trade Records, produced by Adam Kidron.


 Morley quit the band in November 1982, by which time Gartside was Scritti Politti. Songs To Remember became Rough Trade’s most successful chart album; number 1 in the UK independent and, in the national chart, peaking at number 12 (beating Stiff Little Fingers’ previous effort at number 14). After moving on to Virgin Records, Green linked up with New York musicians David Gamson (keyboards, programming) and Fred Maher (drums), who formed the basis of the band that made a series of UK hits in the years 1984-88. Produced by Arif Mardin, these included ‘Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)’ (number 10), ‘Absolute’ (number 17), and ‘The Word Girl’ (number 6). A three-year silence was broken by ‘Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry For Loverboy)’ (number 13), lifted from Provision, and boasting a trumpet solo by Miles Davis. Gartside again maintained a low profile for two years after ‘First Boy In This Town (Love Sick)’, failed to break into the UK Top 60 in late 1988. He returned in 1991 with a revival of the Beatles’ ‘She’s A Woman’, featuring leading reggae star Shabba Ranks, reaching number 20, while another Jamaican star, Sweetie Irie, guested on a version of Gladys Knight And The Pips’ 1967 hit, ‘Take Me In Your Arms And Love Me’.


 Gartside’s extended lay-off was eventually broken with the release of 1999’s eclectic Anomie & Bonhomie. The album reflected Gartside’s infatuation with hip-hop, and featured guest appearances from Mos Def and Meshell Ndegéocello. Another lengthy hiatus followed, during which the only sighting of Gartside was a duet on Kylie Minogue’s 2003 album Body Language. At the start of 2006 Gartside made his first live appearances in over 25 years, playing a number of promotional dates to preview his new album. White Bread, Black Beer marked the singer’s return to Rough Trade, and proved to be a much more low-key offering than previous albums. The set’s gentle charms repaid repeat listenings, however, and prompted its inclusion in the 2006 Mercury Music Prize list.




Scritti Politti started out as a post-punk band in the UK in the late 1970s, inspired by theorists such as Antonio Gramsci; one of Scritti’s early songs, “Hegemony”, was named after the Marxist concept of one state or social class’s dominance over another. This working-class consciousness applied to a transparency in the band’s business practices as well. On the website Instant Team Work, original drummer Tom Morley says, “We were pioneers of DIY recording and inspired many other indie bands to make their own records by printing all the costs and names of cheap studios and pressing plants on our record sleeves.”


 By 1985, Scritti Politti was just Gartside and a producer, arranger, and phalanx of studio musicians that included Fred Maher (Lou Reed, Matthew Sweet) and EBN-OZN’s Ned “EBN” Liben. Cupid & Psyche 85 owed much of its soul and soft-rock sound to producer Arif Mardin, who had worked with The Bee Gees and Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway in the 1970s and continued to be a sought-after name in the ‘80s.


 If Cupid & Psyche 85 sounded like a lot of other music on the radio, it was because of a relatively new piece of synthesizer technology called the Fairlight CMI. Designed in 1979, it became a fixture of every major recording studio because of its possibilities for sampling and sequencing and its ability to produce multiple timbres at once. On this album, the programming duties belonged to David Gamson, who, according to an interview on the GForce Software site, used the Fairlight and the TR-808, Linndrum, Oberheim system, and DX-7, among other gear. One of the Fairlight’s most recognizable sounds — on Cupid & Psyche 85 and elsewhere — is the ORCH5 sample, better known as the “orchestra hit.” Believed by many to be sampled from Stravinsky’s The Firebird, this assertive “stab” would show up in The Art of Noise’s “Close (to the Edit)” and Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”. The most prominent use of the ORCH5 on Cupid & Psyche 85 is probably on the showstopper “Hypnotize”, adding a layer of aggression to Scritti’s lightly frisky funk.


 Not content to just be a collection of au courant sounds and lush vocals, Cupid & Psyche 85 uses Gartside’s interest in Marxism and deconstructionist theory to subvert the blissful, accessible pop with ideas about language, work, and capitalism. “There’s gonna be a day when the rich get theirs,” Gartside sings on “Lover to Fall”. “Don’t Work That Hard” is a love song, sort of, but even the title suggests an entreaty to not get crushed under the weight of labor demands. He sings, “I need love for the power” (flipping the script on “Hegemony” as sexual role-play?) and “I got a piece for the wicked/ Use it oh so fast” (“piece” being sexual in its own right). The phrase that “A Little Knowledge” name checks, per Phrases.org.uk, goes back further than the Alexander Pope quote it’s associated with (“…is a dangerous thing”), actually belonging to an anonymous author in 1698: “Twas well observed by my Lord Bacon, That a little knowledge is apt to puff up, and make men giddy, but a greater share of it will set them right, and bring them to low and humble thoughts of themselves.”



 The lyrics of “Small Talk” reference a World War II propaganda campaign; “Careless Talk Costs Lives” becomes “Careless talk costs more than you bargained for” in a song that actually seems to glorify the act of small talk as a remedy for “prophesying,” perhaps owing to what Gartside told NME: that he was beginning to consider a “bankruptcy in Marxism to deal with ideology or any artistic community.” That quote in particular was Gartside’s take on “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)”, Scritti’s song about “the whole question of what pop is; its relationship to language, power and politics.” In “Wood Beez”, Gartside is happy to proclaim himself “a would-be” and sounds proud when he sings, “Nothing/ Oh, nothing” in the pre-chorus. Scritti’s answer to what pop is does revolve around the word “nothing”; there’s nothing that Gartside wouldn’t do to be with his girl, “nothing” as a welcomed form of inertia, “nothing” as a deconstructionist scorched-earth policy denying the assignation of meaning to, well, anything.


 Gartside’s wispy voice mirrors Michael Jackson, who was still on top of the world in 1985, even without a full-length follow-up to 1982’s Thriller. Cupid & Psyche 85’s biggest influence comes from the urban-oriented music of the 1980s. Gartside told Simon Reynolds in an interview for the Totally Wired book that David Gamson, the record’s synthesizer player, programmer, and arranger, had grown up with black radio stations in New York and was a fan of Parliament-Funkadelic. Gartside says Cupid & Psyche 85 was largely about expressing that fandom, especially hip-hop, which would emerge as a greater force in Scritti’s subsequent releases.


 Whether consciously or subconsciously, Cupid & Psyche 85 also echoed a growing trend in UK indie known as “twee”: in 1986, NME would release a cassette called C-86 as a document of things happening in music at the time, and what people would grow to love about that tape was the artists’ appreciation of what AllMusic would call “the jangly guitar pop of The Smiths, the three-chord naiveté of The Ramones, and the nostalgic sweetness of the girl group era.” In indie circles, twee was thought of as “shambling” or “anorak,” but it had a presence in slick mainstream music, especially with Strawberry Switchblade’s 1985 synthpop hit “Since Yesterday”, which must have been on Gartside’s radar that year. “New Pop,” post-punk’s challenge to itself to renounce its austerity, had been in the air a few years as well, and Jess Harvell at Pitchfork believes writer Paul Morley was responsible. In the NME‘s 1980 year-end issue, [Morley] recoiled from the cassette-trader feebleness post-punk had arrived at with a call to “bring life back to the radio, to make the single count” and a push towards “overground brightness.”



Scritti Politti, insofar as they’re remembered at all, are remembered primarily in the UK press for their early exploits in DIY and irreverent post-punk songs such as “Jacques Derrida”. In America, they’re more of a trivia question, although “Perfect Way” does show up in some of the better karaoke systems. It’s a shame that Cupid & Psyche 85 isn’t widely regarded as a classic of its time, especially with a renewed interest in the Fairlight — or at least a grudging acceptance from the rock community that Fairlights, Linndrums, and 808s were an undeniable force in some of the most acclaimed records of the 1980s. While very few people are going out of their way to emulate Cupid & Psyche 85 — Max Tundra being one of them — it feels very much a piece of the Beyoncé-and-Bruno pop landscape of 2014. If Gartside’s new job as the face of Faber causes people to revisit Scritti’s triumphant crossover out of curiosity, they will find that it feels fresher than ever.



Green Gartside: The brainiest man in pop (apart from Brian Eno)



Scritti Politti introduced critical theory to the top 10. Now frontman Green Gartside is too sensitive to listen to pop – or finish his songs


 Any touring band is used to fans who turn up backstage with old singles, photographs and bits of ephemera to be signed. When Scritti Politti toured America for the first time in 2006, as part of their first live dates of any kind in 26 years, something different would happen. Earnest young men would approach Green Gartside – since 1977 Scritti's singer, songwriter-ideologue and sole constant member – and show him their published works of philosophy, claiming that they owed their interest in critical thought to Scritti's music.


 "The ratio of tactically deployed pop banality to smartarse references to Kant and Gramsci was occasionally uncomfortably high," admits Gartside of his band-cum-vehicle's commercial zenith in the mid-80s, when hits such as Absolute and The Word Girl snuck such subjects as unconditional reality and semiotics into the pop charts. Or rather he reads it because, brilliantly, Gartside has brought prepared notes to our interview, from a talk he's giving later at The wire magazine's Off The Page Festival in Whitstable. More pop stars should do this.


 The life of the mind figures highly in the Scritti canon, which is now ripe for revisiting with the release of a greatest hits album, Absolute, next week. Gartside is, famously, joint-holder with Brian Eno of the title Cleverest Man in Pop. As we enjoy an afternoon pint in the Pembury Tavern near his home in Hackney – fittingly for a man who recorded an album called Cupid & Psyche, the beers are called Zeus, Dionysus and Sparta – Gartside describes yesterday's hangover as "a moment of emotional lability". Later, he explains that one of the reasons he left Rough Trade Records in 1983 was a concern over the "reification of indie. These are not the words of someone who subscribes to modern rock's lumpen suspicion of thought, but neither is Gartside a pretentious individual. He just knows what he's talking about.


 A well-read and inquiring mind whose background as a Young Communist in South Wales segued smoothly into the squat-scene theoretics of the punk era, Gartside set out his own mission statement on Scritti's reputation-making 1982 single The Sweetest Girl. Drawing attention to the loaded nature of pop language, he put inverted commas inside the title. "The weakest link in every chain, I always want to find it," he sang, "The strongest words in each belief, and find out what's behind it." The tension between Gartside's appetite for deconstruction and his longing to abandon himself to the wordless joys of pop have nourished and tormented him ever since.


 "I still look for disorienting moments in pop," he says. "Sometimes music can still be too powerful to deal with. It might just be an old Motown hit on the radio that is at the same time asking too much of me, and giving me too much. It happens to my wife, too. We'll have to stop listening to it because we'll be floored, or we won't be able to sleep. The Jacksons' Victory album for instance, the other day – we actually had to turn it off."


 The compilation Absolute begins in exactly that kind of delirious pop daze, with a five-track assault from Scritti's period of peak popularity. He recorded them in New York with Arif Mardin, the pasha of R&B who had produced such premium soul products as Anita Baker, Patti LaBelle and the Bee Gees. To work with such an elite craftsman was an outrageous move for anyone of the DIY punk generation, but Gartside did it anyway. "I wanted to know how it felt to make a record like that."


 'Cocaine was briefly a problem'


 In those days you had to declare any previous membership of the Communist party on your US visa application. Though Gartside had helped out at the party's HQ in Covent Garden ("Interesting times . . . there were letter bombs going off while I was organising gigs with Aswad and Sham 69"), he had never been a full adult member of the party. On his first visit to America, US immigration delayed him for hours for a different reason: an official had clipped a note with the word WEIRD on his passport. "I was wearing a tricorn hat at the time," Gartside recalls.


 The New York sessions were the making of Scritti. "The same will behind my desire to make punk was behind my desire to make big beat pop," Gartside explains. "The idea of the critical privileging of rock music as the unmediated, the truthful and honest as against pop as the derivative, mediated, commercial and superficial . . . that interested me. After the album came out I got endless stick for making bourgeois pop music, but stick has never bothered me."


 Mardin proved to be a "charming, delightful gentleman" who nurtured Gartside even though the singer knew he was out of his depth. At the end of each session they would repair to the producer's apartment on Central Park West where he would prepare his "Mardinis". The result was the planet-eating gorgeousness of Cupid & Psyche 85, but also pop stardom for Gartside, a burden he found insupportable. "A genuine breakdown ensued," he says, and the hastily recorded 1988 follow-up album Provision flopped.


 "Promoting Cupid & Psyche knocked chunks out of my already fragile psyche," says Gartside. "I was in a poor state, physically and psychologically. I was living in various hotels and apartments in America. Cocaine was briefly a problem. After promoting Provision, that's when the complete collapse happened."


 He returned to South Wales, to Usk, and the lost years began, whiling away the days in local pubs. His drinking was never a problem but nor was it an irrelevance. "I've always enjoyed beer," he says. "Drink is a recurring issue with me and it is something I continue to battle." Ironically given his rural seclusion, it was the most urban music of all, hip-hop, that brought him back to musical life.


 "It was the beats of hip-hop that made me love it," he says. "There was no jaunty teleological drive from A to Z over three minutes. There was a lack of tonal melody, of the hyperbolic pop excitement that had been my undoing." Hip-hop imports proved surprisingly easy to obtain in Usk, energising him to make the 1999 album Anomie & Bonhomie, the title of which bigs up Emile Durkheim's theory of societal normlessness.


 Towards the end of Absolute there's an annexe of what Gartside calls "juvenilia and pre-history" including the pre-pop anti-music of Skank Bloc Bologna from 1978. The early Scritti divided its audience savagely. Chris Cutler, drummer with one of Gartside's favourite bands Henry Cow, mailed his copy of Skank Bloc back to Scritti at their squat with a message that they should leave the music business to the professionals. ("At least he sent it back in one piece. Most people smashed it first.") The song alluded to political upheaval in Italy and specifically Gramsci's theory of the historical bloc of the underclass. In the 21st century civil unrest is back on the agenda, not just in old Europe but the previously repressed Middle East, and Scritti Politti are back on Rough Trade Records. Has Gartside's world gone full circle?


 There's nowhere near enough rioting or dissent in the UK, he thinks, but then again Gramsci did say that civil society could absorb incredible economic or political shocks and people would carry on as normal. Gartside still thinks of himself as a man of the left, primarily because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. "But it's a question of, which left do you want to be part of? I'm a political apostate, really. I just drifted away, as many people do."

 Flirting with Pseud's Corner


 A few streets away in Hackney, the area Gartside credits with reviving him a second time after another few lost years, there are hundreds of new Scritti Politti songs in unfinished digital form. Gartside admits he suffers from completion anxiety. "But I'm convinced that I have to keep making music," he says, "and that I haven't come close to making the best music that I can. Though I've had a very low opinion of myself, the fact that the best work I've yet done is sitting unfinished on a hard drive back home must be good."


 Then he falls back to talking about hip-hop, the musical love that still sustains him. Gartside can rhapsodise about DJs and MCs as few others can. Where can the 50-plus chap go to nod his head to a DJ Premier beat, he wonders? There should be a club for guys like him. He can still be transported by the crunch and grit of a snare sample or the smack and clang of a bass drum. "Or a chopped piece of guitar that was chucked in there as some kind of Duchampian objet trouvé."


 You're flirting with Pseud's Corner now, Gartside. "Fuck it, I've never been afraid of that," he replies with a smile. And then we have another couple of pints of Dionysus.




 
 The Word Girl
According to Scritti Politti leader Green Gartside, this song is about the word "girl," and what it represents.

 
This was Scritti Politti's biggest UK hit.



The Welsh born singer-songwriter derived the band’s name from ‘Scritti Politici’ – the political writings from 1910-1920 by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Gartside made the name of the band more ‘charts friendly’ by changing the last part into Politti.



Gartside said;

‘The Word Girl’ lyrics are about the language in pop music, for example, the ubiquity of the word ‘girl’ in pop music, its reasons of meaning, its emptying out of meaning. The lyrics are filled with references to the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Julia Kristeva. There came a point, though, about the end of the ‘Provision’ album, that I became fed up with the whole post modern philosophy; Baudrillard, Léotard, Derrida, Foucault etc. At the same time I also became fed up with pop music and I was only interested in hip hop and trying to go back to basic questions of Epistemology. I was fed up with the whole Postmodern and Post-structuralism tradition.





Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)




"Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)" is the first hit single for British soul group Scritti Politti. It is, as the title says, a tribute to Aretha Franklin and displayed the group's smooth soul and R&B sound to a wide commercial audience, at least in the UK, where the single peaked at #10 in the charts, becoming the group's first Top 10 entry. This song appears on the group's album Cupid & Psyche 85 and was produced by Arif Mardin.
The song appears in Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City's fictional radio station Vice City FM.



 






 

“Don't Stand Me Down”
 
What a let down this was for me, as I’d enjoyed everything Dexys had done before this, so in keeping with the maxim of only commenting at any length about stuff I enjoyed, let’s leave it at that.
 
“Picture Book”
 
I’m one of the folk who think of Mick Hucknall as a cunt, so that’s enough.
 
Cupid And Psyche 85
 
This was an album I liked way back 35 years ago, and unusually, my soon to be (at that time) wife enjoyed Green Gartside’s songs as well. It was unusual, for she probably like Simply Red as well, and generally her musical tastes are far removed from mine.

This album was the ‘absolute’ peak of the band’s output, with work before and since never gaining any great commercial success. Lots of singles off it too, and Gartside seemed to be destined to become one of the most sought after musicians of the ‘eighties, collaborating with top artists, but he was on the brink at that point. Looked it up: he became more reclusive, eventually suffering a mental breakdown and living alone in an isolated cottage.
 
Yet he’s out playing again with a new Scritti Politti line up, and has been for most of the 21st century: I never knew that.

Last edited by PatReilly (25/2/2020 3:28 pm)

Pretty fucked and fucked off so gonna put the next album up and do the double tomorrow.

Blood & Chocolate

From being a big Elvis fan over his early albums, I couldn't find much to like by the time he got to Blood & Chocolate.


Licensed To Ill

I know you've not done this album yet, but I think about the famous Stutter Rap by Morris Minor & the Majors every time I hear of this album.

Album 568.
Metallica.....................Master Of Puppets (1986)









One of the most influential heavy metal albums of all time. This album and the previous are the reasons Metallica is often regarded as one of the top 10 metal bands of all time.


 It follows a similar track sequencing to Ride the Lightning; first an up-tempo song with acoustic opening ("Fight Fire with Fire" and "Battery"), then the lengthy title track ("Ride the Lightning and "Master of Puppets"), then as the fourth track a power ballad ("Fade to Black and Welcome Home (Sanitarium"), then closing the album with an epic instrumental piece ("The Call of Ktulu and "Orion") and a fast thrash metal song ("Creeping Death" and "Damage Inc"), only in reverse order for Ride the Lightning.


 The topics of the lyrics range from an homage to the band’s fans (“Battery”), to drugs (title track), to the H.P. Lovecraft monster Cthulu ("The Thing That Should Not Be), to inmates in an insane asylum (“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”), to corrupt generals in wars (Disposable Heroes), to corruption in religion ("Leper Messiah) and, finally, to destructive corporations (“Damage Inc.”).