The Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut album Psychocandy is widely considered as one of the most groundbreaking and best Scottish albums of all time.
What is Psychocandy about?
Psychocandy is largely about desire, alienation, boredom and romantic obsession, filtered through the detached cool of Jim Reid’s lyrics. The songs often sound emotionally numb or casually nihilistic, but underneath the feedback there are remarkably traditional themes: wanting someone, losing someone, feeling isolated and looking for escape.
Tracks such as Just Like Honey and Taste of Cindy are essentially love songs, while others lean into frustration, self-destruction and the sense of being trapped in ordinary life.
What makes the album distinctive is the collision between those simple pop ideas and the way they are presented.
The Reid brothers took melodies influenced by 1960s girl groups, Phil Spector, the Beach Boys and the Velvet Underground and buried them beneath sheets of distortion and feedback.
That tension is really the essence of Psychocandy: sweetness and menace, romance and hostility, beautiful melodies fighting their way through noise.
Jim Reid explained: “The sound of the band and the ethos of the band were all formed in East Kilbride.
“We were writing Psychocandy when we lived in Calderwood and we tried to get gigs in Glasgow but couldn’t.
“We ended up getting our first gig in London, but we were still based in East Kilbride.
“At the very beginning of the band, when we went to play those initial London shows, we were based in East Kilbride. We’d go down there for the weekend or something like that, play a few shows, upset a few people and then come back on the bus overnight with no money to buy sandwiches and stuff.
Talking about their sound, he said: “I think music is timeless and not of any actual place.
“I know a lot of people disagree and a lot of people think their music is essentially about where they’re from and stuff like that. I never really bought into that.
“We were sitting listening to the 13th Floor Elevators from Texas and the Velvet Underground from New York, and where those bands were based just seemed utterly irrelevant to us.
“We felt the same. We were just making this music that we hoped could be accepted by anyone, anywhere.”
Track list
- Just Like Honey
- The Living End
- Taste the Floor
- The Hardest Walk
- Cut Dead
- In a Hole
- Taste of Cindy
- Never Understand
- Inside Me
- Sowing Seeds
- My Little Underground
- You Trip Me Up
- Something’s Wrong
- It’s So Hard
Front Cover
The cover of Psychocandy by The Jesus and Mary Chain features a grainy, high-contrast black-and-white photograph of the band members, with a raw, blurred, almost ghostly quality.
Reception
When Psychocandy arrived in November 1985, critics immediately recognised that The Jesus and Mary Chain had made something unusually confrontational but unmistakably pop. Time magazine wondered what had happened to punk, concluding that the East Kilbride band had effectively hooked it up to pop, borrowing from Phil Spector while piling on screaming guitar feedback.
One contemporary review compared the record’s opening impact to neighbours attacking a wall with a Black & Decker, calling it “bloody frightening”, yet also found something strangely endearing beneath the noise, placing its roots somewhere between the Velvet Underground and the Ramones.
NME journalist Andy Gill wrote: “A great searing citadel of beauty whose wall of noise, once scaled, offers access to endless vistas of melody and emotion”
In 2003, the album was ranked number 268 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list.
Famous fans
The Jesus and Mary Chain have gathered an impressive list of famous admirers over the decades. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has described the band as “pretty integral” to his musical development, recalling how hearing Psychocandy initially confused him before becoming one of the records that changed the way he thought about music.
Nine Inch Nails supported the Mary Chain early in their career and, decades later, Reznor invited the Reid brothers to open for them in America. His bandmate Atticus Ross has similarly described the Mary Chain as a huge influence and a band he had always loved.
Their following extends into film and television too. Director Sofia Coppola gave the band a major second wave of exposure when she used Just Like Honey for the unforgettable closing scene of Lost in Translation, something Jim Reid later credited with bringing a younger audience to the band.
The film’s star Scarlett Johansson went one step further, joining the Mary Chain on stage at Coachella in 2007 to sing the song.
Director and comedian Richard Ayoade is another long-standing fan: he has spoken about liking the band as a teenager and going to the celebrated 1992 Rollercoaster tour at Brixton Academy, where the Mary Chain appeared alongside My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr and Blur.