The Jesus and Mary Chain / Psychocandy [LP. Blanco y Negro. 1985]

I was driving down Bealey Avenue, one of the four roads that make a square around the CBD of a rural service centre. It is lined with motels which in the last few years have been co-opted for emergency housing. It is also where dealers have set up, so the road is chaos, with erratic driving, wild scooter use, and wide-eyed pedestrians crossing the three lanes to the median strip as the crow flies. I heard a thought that didn’t seem entirely my own. “Come for the drugs, stay for the music.”

I have come to think that vinyl albums have something to do with still life painting. Records. Of significance. Life decisions. Totems. Power (aura). Time and place. Tuning in.

I was born in the first days of 1970. Just after someone landed on the moon. And in 1977, there were gold LPs put on Voyager 1 and 2 when they were launched on their lonely SF journey into deeper space. I say this to underscore the profound significance of vinyl, of records, to someone who was fifteen in 1985. It is a great bond. Meant and means a lot. It was how we received information, and so many layers of it. And at a point of great inexperience, even with my new adult body.

I strongly dislike being asked to say what my favourite anything is. As a result, this is not what I am doing here. I am writing about a particular LP because it shows something of the importance of records to me by looking back at something (turning to a pillar of salt), and a subjectivity I also grew out of. It was significant to me that the medium existed, worked so profoundly, as the signal/noise itself. A calling in. These records I sought out allowed or promoted a refocusing of sacred intention in a (then, to me) counter-intuitive manner.

As a medium to carry music, a record holds many more other things, domains, territories. Planes of existence. It’s like a weathervane, an object, an arrow that shows me what way something powerful I already feel (ALREADY FEEL) is coming from. Its signal can reach me in deep space, travelling across massive psychic distances, and from past to present, with its not-practised-to-death energy intact. The musicians’ surprise at it having worked and come out like that seems to be still there, to hear and feel – with something like pride and gratitude – the ability to channel something bigger than not just one person, one group, but a crowd, a legion. The blissed-out blast buzz fuzz of shoegaze or drone anything seems to spell this out sensually, this surrender and elation, flying melodies, synapses and receptors satisfied. A bursting heart… (I am listening to Boris’ Pink as I write this.)

Geography seems important here, talking about climate, but also to talk about ‘remoteness’ and the experience of this. Aotearoa New Zealand is a windy place, sure, but it is also apart from continental earth, sandwiched between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean, like bedding above and below. I live on a narrow island. People from here live on mostly temperate islands. A veritable archipelago – strange that I only just learned that. It is colder at night, with no large land mass to keep it warm. And it seemed amazing at the time that anything cultural, or with an experiential or subversive edge, made its way here. There needed to have been a miraculous chain of action like an underground railroad that brought an LP, single or EP to my hot hands.

The impact of them still exists, like miracles, physical spells or blessings, and is something to do with the perpetual surprise of them as objects and the sounds they elicit when their surfaces are lightly scraped, like fingernails on skin. I believe the physicality of a record and its sound is quite particular to the medium. Audiophiles will talk about warmth, but I think it is beyond the audio quality or texture. There is something straight-out magical in the record as object that a jewel-cased CD or an audio file on a device does not offer or contain. Putting on a record is a totemic, devotional, ritualistic act. Keeping them despite their weight and vulnerability to heat and rough handling is like the care one is forced to develop when other people are important to us, and we clock their need to be treated gently and lovingly. It is like a coin economy or something more ancient, except we never lend or ask to borrow vinyl.

For the benefit of younger people, in the mid-1980s there were only phones that connected to walls, and people had chairs and tables by them (sometimes the same piece of furniture) for ashtrays. We drove old cars made here, in Australia or the UK. Sometimes in Europe – like Fiats – or they were chrome-era Japanese cars. Obviously, there was no internet for us, and we paid cash. My father was a researcher, and he had a computer about the size of a bedsit, and it used punch cards and long swathes of perforated paper that was what we would draw and write on as kids.

We bought records. There was not an affordable way of calling people who lived far away from us. We wrote letters and knew what other people’s handwriting was like, and it said something about them. Their gestures. Flights were not taken often. When we were gone, we were gone. This meant that if you wanted to find someone and they were not answering the phone at home, you went out and looked for them. Or let things happen spontaneously, as in improvising with what is there. We left home as soon as humanly possible, like at 16, 17.

I don’t remember the term ‘shoegaze’ being a thing at the time. I was never very interested in trying to put this experience into words. It’s like trying to describe eroticism. Like offering a cat a fork or whatever. I think the closest we got to identifying divergent tastes was a word like alternative. We would go to town on Friday nights. Singing ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’ to ourselves on the bus. We read NME, Melody Maker, The Face. I am in Christchurch, and I am 15.

Liquid eyeliner, inky blue bruise-coloured eyeshadow. I wore old clothes that were later called vintage. They were everywhere if you were looking. From the 30s, 40s, 50s. Still there waiting. Silk dresses, wool crepe swing coats, beautiful old dress shirts. Silk velvet. Embroidered twinsets. Printed dresses with small waists. Leopard print coats. Hairspray, backcombing. If you threw a can of Silhouette on the fire it exploded so loudly there was no sound, as it deafened you as it happened. To a fine rain of ash. And windows blew out.

I am looking through my records, as I somehow still have quite a few I bought then. 1985 was bountiful, it seemed, at the time. I had the impression that a lot of new music came out at this point, but it’s probably a perspectival illusion. Of reaching my full height and becoming more aware all at once of what was there and coming into the indie bin at the record stores. Sometimes it seemed like someone was speaking to me, through time and space (you know, like Suicide: Oh girl, turn me on / Oh girl, oh turn me on / You know how). These things made what was laid out for me as normal life difficult to carry out.

I left school early, didn’t finish, at the end of 1986. I had been asked to leave from a school where I had been recently harassed by a very tall temporary head-master, not that that was ever discussed. Felt like it had something to do with it though, even though I had been destructive enough to shoplift in my school uniform. Which smelled of smoke. And I had been listening to student radio, and I think the idea was that I was some sort of bad apple because of it. It’s not like I even advertised the facts.

(For context) we – me and my friends (all boys) – were listening to things like Killing Joke, The Clash, Joy Division, Siouxie and the Banshees, Dead Kennedys, Soft Cell, XTC, Devo, The Stooges, The Specials, Madness, Psychedelic Furs, The Jam, The Smiths, Wire, Hüsker Dü, Mötorhead, Sex Pistols, The Gun Club, Ramones, The Cramps, New York Dolls, The Beat, Scientist, Public Image, Augustus Pablo, Sly and Robbie, Grace Jones, Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Metellica, Dub Syndicate, Julian Cope, Bauhaus, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, The Modern Lovers, Depeche Mode, Squeeze, Echo and the Bunnymen, Violent Femmes, etc. We’d hear these sort of at a distance as we were always doing other things while the records played, making each other laugh, not just listening politely. And Blondie, T-Rex, Hendrix, The Stones (19th Nervous Breakdown / Exile on Mainstreet), Hawkwind, The Who, The Kinks, Zappa, Sabbath, Deep Purple, Bob Marley, Funkadelic, Status Quo, Kraftwerk, The Doors, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Little Richard, The Velvet Underground and John Cale from older siblings or hip parents (I had none of those, and my cousins were oafs). We listened to the usual imports for teens with very tapered jeans and docs and braces. Working up to being able to get past the door to see bands like The Axemen or the Axel Grinders.

These discs of black plastic showed me that music could come from shit places in the world. Like Ohio or Manchester. Like The Gordons and Ashburton. Or here (a guy in The Wastrels grew up over the front fence from me, and his mum had tried to teach me the piano). And you did not have to be good-looking and charming or technically proficient, and perhaps it was best you were not. Just talented in that particular brassy, sloppy way, with the courage of a fence-jumper, but with ennui. And more than that, the objects mutely asked, ‘So, what are you going to do?’ It seemed a miracle that they had landed here, these golden discs from space. Were we really at the ass-end of the world? To worlds centred in London, New York, Berlin etc. I guess so. But it was our ass-end. And we played records together in it.

I had a turntable in my room that was mostly plastic (a pink and grey Sony midi-system) that my dad had bought for me – which in retrospect was a very cool thing for him to have done. But this record. That’s the one I wanted to tell you about. I remember being in town by myself, probably bussed in, or whatever, and had read about The Jesus and Mary Chain in the NME, and lo and behold in the new arrivals there it was, Psychocandy. I bought it from the counter, took it home and played it by myself in my room. Like I had done with others I had bought. But for some reason, this record hit me differently.

I am looking at it now, the copy I bought nearly forty years ago. The cat has chewed the corner, and a John Fahey record in the same incident, through its plastic sleeve. I probably listened to the 2nd side first. I still do that, not looking at which side it is I am putting on. I am also really bad at knowing the names of songs, as I don’t really look at the information while I am taking it in. The sound is still, always, too much of a wonder. The way the record works always floors me. I marvel. The stylus picking up vibrations. Needle scratching the skin. If you go deep enough you scratch the bone.

With no warning. After the needle was lowered. From no sound to thick signal. To sudden sound. For the first time I really heard it. Distortion. Feedback. Noise. It knocked me back. My hands did things in front of my eyes. Right hand, writing hand, lifted the needle off the record like I was protecting myself from something I really wanted at the same time. Like sex or a new drug. Too much. Too much of a new abhorrent pleasure? An abundance? How can I recognise something I did not think I knew yet? (Or maybe I always knew, and the rest is just sets and props.) What came across? What hit me? Everything else seemed prettier than this, and it sounded different. Harsher. In that it made things I had been liking seem insipid. Or I was aware that they had got in my head, but not shaken me up. And I was in some sort of slippery-precedent freefall.

I put it down again, the needle, straight onto the grooves of the first track. Up again. Down again. A few times. Just a little at a time. Blaring scrapes of noise. The opposite of nice and slick. The anarchy of feedback. Where does this go? What happens? “Shhiiit”, I think I said out loud. I am altered. Things are different now. It ripped a hole in something, and I went right through. Or I was suddenly somewhere else without doing anything other than perceiving. So spatial metaphors are pointless. I could not take this in easily, and it took time. I had to adjust to this. I could hear 50s pop, but starker fuzz over very simple drums and distance. Dissonance, noise, stripped-back purity. The spleen blew me out. Timelessly.

The first track on the second side is ‘Never Understand’. It sounds like what that means, or its effect. It sounded like risk. Tinnitus of the mind. Brain ringing. All thought suspended. All deals are off. What this structured for me, this sound, was intuitive knowledge of another possible world. The dissonance or dissent I had courted earlier, without knowing it in that way, rushed in. A rush. That it was supposedly a shoegaze smack anthem, I had no idea of that, but could feel it. Presentient. A reasonably unsophisticated teenager I might have been, but I could read it. I imagine my eyes looked a bit different after that. Like how people who have had sex and tried harder drugs do have different micro-expressions.

I can see things on YouTube now I never saw at the time – live performances, official music videos, interviews. So much that never made it here. I am struck by seeing and hearing the arch-top guitars and standing drummer move, by how much has been stripped out. The loucheness and lack of jock energy, but tough. There is the ‘Just Like Honey’ video, shot in red, black and white in a practically bare photographic studio in 1985. William Reid bends down to lie on his side on one elbow against the bare cyc and adjusts his body gently to find a place to be still like an odalisque. A still from this shoot is on the cover of the album.

I like how Richard Hell put it, about records and sound-noise-elation (in I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp at the start of chapter 15, at the end of Television, before The Heartbreakers and the Voidoids) this rush, and how records captured it, canned it, this heat, of playing:

It was like having magic powers. The ability to create action at a distance. The sounds that came from the amplifiers were absurdly moving and strange, the variety of them so wider in view of the fact that they came from flicks of our fingers and from our vocal noises, and the way that it was a single thing, an entity, that was produced by the simultaneous reactive interplay of the four band members combining various of their faculties. We turned into a sound, a flow of sound. I remember having a moment of weird revelation once, that each moment of a phonograph record being played, each millimeter of information conveyed via the needle to the amplifier to the speaker to the ear, is one sound. A whole orchestra is one sound, altering moment to moment, no matter how many instruments go into producing it. And, as our band rehearsed, in each moment we made the sound spray out in arrays we could instantly alter, emanating from inside us and our interplay and our inner beings combined, playing. And the sound included words. … It was like being born. It was everything one wants from so-called God. … It’s that it was fresh and every moment had that surging astonishment and pleasure – even if in the service of anger and disgust, as it often was – of anything being possible to make happen. It was like creating the world, and the feeling could never quite happen again, or be sustained, anyway, because familiarity and habit take the edge off.

I am thinking about what my friend took from Walter Benjamin when she was trying to write about what makes contemporary art political – the work she identifies with as political, in an incisive way: “the gift of being disgusted”.

Shit from an old notebook … I am listening to The Minutemen while I am writing this … Partying might help

I like how Hell structured his book. He stopped the narrative at the point when he decided to stop playing music and cease taking drugs at the same time. This could be interpreted as life without drugs and music being not worth commenting on. Or that stopping drugs ruins everything. But I took it as him wanting to give his new life, the one he was still living, after the burn-off, some privacy. And without labouring the point, illustrating that he could reinvent himself and leave this old life behind. It made reading the book feel like examining the dried skin that a snake might have left behind, or a cicada, or an empty chrysalis. Had the generosity to not spell it out to his readers. You could draw that yourself, remembering that he started the book talking about reinventing yourself and running away as methods formed and honed in childhood. How we grow out of things without them not being important anymore.

Listening to Psychocandy cold, I felt lit. The physical and psychic blow, the wonder of how this object can contain and release this sound. One sound. Something swollen, aching. Wanting. The superhuman bright flow of electric music. My own birth canal or a snake biting its own tail. And chasing it in chemical form, and in the elation of love, of running away. Of reinventing each other. Thrills. ‘Big thrills’ was a sarcastic response to something that was not of interest or remarkable. Not remarking was more the way. A sullen, scornful stance that was more like what I was listening to here.

Mutual memory loss was at the very heart of bonding. And a strange sex-less-ness. The generation older than us had been much more oozy or sleazy it seemed. This sort of carnality seemed tacky or passé. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there was sex, but it was also so kind of perfect to just lie in bed with someone (or clothed, on the bed) like children, and wake up with them still there, like some sort of friendship miracle. Opiates (and ‘opiates’, things that give the same comfort and spaciousness) give you a different relationship to sex. There is suddenly no hurry whatsoever, barely a basic need. A differently distributed enthusiasm and contentment. Buzzed out anything as go-to. Drone. Heaviness. The wind of sound. What is that called?

I’m in love with myself / There’s nothing else but me
Sex cracked its eyes at me / And I’m feeling something / It’s living inside me
I love baby and she loves me
The wind is screaming around the trees / For my psychocandy

The liner notes to LPs are now the closest thing I have to a photo album of that time, as we were not documenters. This one could be an album about opiates, I realised at a delay. Could also be about self-harming narcissism, or the demonstration of it. The words are like things that people used to write on bathroom or flat walls. Or schoolbooks. The words are fused rather than dominant or subordinate to very messed up surf guitar.

Like honey dripping
And my head is dripping into my leather boots
I feel quick in my leather boots / My mood’s black when my jacket’s on
There’s something DEAD / INSIDE MY HOLE

Lyrics muddle up, fragments written by hand on the notes. Like the way people’s faces were when they danced in clubs. Cold, bored, smoking, not connoting feeling. Not having ‘feelings’ (imagine icicles dripping off that word). Be high. Stay there. Fuck for hours, takes forever to come. But it was the start of the first side that speaks to me now more loudly.

What a wormhole. Back to my teenage self. So strange, given that, in retrospect, there seemed like there was no room for a woman in this. Not just in looking at the liner notes, but also in the world I was in. We all looked like them. And I dressed like a boy too. Black orange-tab Levi’s, braces down and docs. Torn at the knee. Some oil-grey shirt or other. Fishtail parka if it was cold. But sometimes liquid eye liner and some dress with boots, but I am not small, my shoulders are not narrow, and my hair was not long. Minimal wiles. This music implied to me that I didn’t need to do this anyway.

Conventional femininity is a strange object to work around, but there were many other ways of being a woman. A girl. Whatever. And I could just demonstrate this ambiguity – show, not tell. No need to know. But really, I was shocked when I looked at the liner notes and the album art, just how much the boys I was friends with, and I – looked like them. The black curly hair, long in the front. Sullen body shape. Slight frames. Narrow jeans, boots, soft shirts, narrow collars, leather jackets. Cigarettes. Polluted. Unsmiling. Complicit. Fucking up on purpose and with pulled glee. There is a porous equivocality that is very inviting. Finding obscure, rough significance, then always being able to take it or leave it.

Gather around children and I will tell you about the 1980s. Sorry if this sounds a bit like that. This week my son is turning 16, and two of my old teenage friends came out of the woodwork. And I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp arrived. Paused to read it. Fancy first edition. I needed, I think, to consider the Jupiter-like subjectivities of men slightly older than me, and my age – apparently warmer, but really, colder. How this was part of what I apparently needed to learn, or to live through and come out the other side with a sense of self that was not orbiting another’s. That stupid poetry. Stupidity as the essence of poetry. Enjoying not knowing. Like knowing about knowing and how it just blows away with all the other opinions.

When the Jesus and Mary Chain performed there was a lot of crowd violence. I never knew, or remember that I knew, that this was the case. I did not feel that sort of violence. What I think I felt was another kind. The violence worked on a different level, as in being about violence. The slow violence of plasticity figured in signal. As in how our minds and selves change like salamanders which can regenerate after losing a limb, or like a house-fire. The drug route as first violence, but then it is just a plant in a much bigger garden. Is this why we are attracted to hurting our livers and skins? The last of our organs that can regenerate.

Find somewhere to hold your face between smiling and sulking. Like making the shift from stealing as a method to staying still and attracting it in. Undoing my aversion to standard femininity one friendship at a time. Take turns to watch each other do it. Undoing attachment issues. Accepting vacuums of narcissism as basically unworkable in friendship. Self-hatred and plenitude at the same time. Still life with violets.

I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain live in about 1987 at the then very shitty Theatre Royal. They were quite still as they played. The guitarist brother stayed hunched on a high stool for most of it. It was cruelly self-centred and cold, the delivery. When I think of it now, they might have been pretty high. And I wonder how they even got drugs they recognised. It was the age of homebake in this town, which is dirty water indeed. Flattened affect and attenuated time. Analytic distance and a shifted relationship to language, like becoming a mountain. Still life with spoons and distortion. Or they were more likely just bored and drunk on hangovers.

I have neo-VU moments with teens these days, dancing at home. ‘No smiling’, we joke, and laugh. When they ask me about records, I often don’t know how to explain them in words, and don’t really try. So. we listen and dance. At the time, there was next to no genre discussion. Nor should there have been. I think that is a new thing. Well, we never talked like that. If you wanted to know about something you listened to it, or asked your friend, or stared at the liner notes, or read something in a magazine and tried to remember.

I look at Psychocandy’s album art with them, the sixteen-year-olds here, and the liner notes. The reversed N like how my friend used to write them. (I don’t tell them that this friend always wanted a really large amount, going for that fine line between consciousness and unconsciousness, and it killed him. Twenty years ago this Christmas. Always wanted more than he could handle.) I say that that is how we all used to dress and pass time. Records are thick with information. Like those Haynes guides to fixing cars that we used to have. Succinct aesthetic-political statements. Isolated at the centre of the universe. Alone in splendour. Nine of pentacles. Fucking everything up. Doing it all wrong. Slow gentle careful? No. Not yet. Fast–rough–reckless. Don’t do what I did, please.

When I put it on, side one now, I hear it start.

Listen to the girl / As she takes on half the world

And I smile, funny that I don’t remember this line as being the way in, and grateful to be named up front like that. And how we grow out of things. Adjust to our decisions and those of others, like pulling The Lovers card. Like plants growing out of the dirt of others. Blown away.

When I was small, like early primary school, three puzzles had become apparent to me. Most songs were about love. It was possible to die on purpose. And that reality possibly emanated outwards from me at the centre of concentric circles.

Even still, if you look at it the right way, the moon looks like a round hole, a disc, in the night sky when it is big and yellow and lazy and low. And I can see through to somewhere that is electrified.