The Jesus And Mary Chain

Darklands
Blanco Y Negro / WEA, 1987

Sometimes it seems like my music taste is stuck ten years behind. In the middle of the 90s, while the other malcontents were getting into Garbage's single 'Only Happy When It Rains', I was just discovering The Jesus And Mary Chain track of the same name. The two songs had little in common beyond their sentiment, and it was difficult to explain to friends why I was into these "old guys" instead of drooling over Shirley Manson's mini-dress. Never-mind that JAMC had started more riots than Manson had make-up kits – they were still past their use-by date. From an aesthetic point of view, it's a tragedy that we have such a short collective memory when it comes to pop music. But commercially, it's wonderful. I mean, who'd buy new records if they knew it had all been done before?

The fact that Darklands was, by and large, an album of understated pop songs made it even harder to explain. When Jim and William Reid – the Scottish brothers at the core of the band – started playing in the mid-80s, they stirred up controversy like born publicists. Dressed in leather jackets and dark sunglasses, they would play only three or four songs at gigs, sometimes with their backs turned to the audience, and wait for a riot to ensue. Within a few years they'd been banned from several venues, four cities and the offices of their record label. As one reporter dryly noted, their rap sheet was a list of "the essential ingredients for success". When he asked Jim why the band were so infamous, the singer replied in his thick accent: "Because we're so guud. Because we're so much better than uverybody ulse."

To go along with the band's devil-may-care image was their first album Psychocandy, one of the noisiest pop albums ever released and the subject of countless love letters from music critics. Whether they'd got it all out by the time of its follow-up, or they just wanted to piss off their fans some more, Darklands was almost the opposite. Instead of being wrapped in razor-wire, the melodies were accompanied by backing vocals and a drum machine like handclaps. It still had the Reid brothers' venom though. There's a line on 'Happy When It Rains' that sums up the pair's ethos perfectly: "Talking fast on the edge of nothing."