The Jesus and Mary Chain: Darklands Visible

1. I Fall To Pieces.

If there’s anything worse than unrequited love don’t tell me about it, I don’t want to know. OK, so lots of things are worse, but love’s like a toothache: when you’re going through it there’s nothing half as painful. And when you finally build up the nerve and tell the woman how you feel, and she reports you to the supervisor, you might be excused for going off the deep end.

Or I might be. I did. Right off into the darkness on a Saturday afternoon alcohol binge in the Village. Scotch laced with bitterness and self-pity and self-loathing; walking in the middle of stalled traffic and banging my fist against the hoods of taxis; screaming in the street: “Somebody run over me, please, please.”

In a bar, shortly before I get thrown out, I repeat two lines mantralike. Hereto me: “We are friends, business friends. But if you think we’re ever going to be buddies and go out together... it’s never going to happen.” The supervisor: “You’re way out of line, Iman. Way out of line. This can never happen again.”

Two days later the Jesus & Mary Chain’s second LP, Darklands, arrives at my doorstep. I’d spent the past couple of months listening to stuff like Patsy Cline Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday. I hadn’t found a recent LP capable of speaking to the condition I was in—one hand on the razor blade, the other on the bottle. Day and night thinking of that damn woman

A jangling acoustic guitar, an electric folky bass and Jim Reid’s plaintive voice. It sang to me:

“I’m going to the darklands

To talk in rhyme

With my chaotic soul

As sure as life means nothing

And all things end in nothing

And heaven I think

Is too close to hell

I want to move I want to go

I want to go

Oh something won’t let me

Go to the place

Where the darklands are. ”

Now I’m not claiming these lyrics gave me a reason to go on living. Nothing so simple. But, when complemented by the melancholy atmosphere of the song itself and the LP as a whole, it helped me understand why I would never kill myself over this woman. I felt focused—in synch with the two key elements of Darklands: sadness and acceptance. At no time do the brothers William and Jim Reid reach the fake-out of redemption. I couldn’t have empathized with them if they had. Yet the duality expressed above leads to a cathartic shrug of the shoulders; and when hope isn’t the question, the only thing left is to carry on.

2. I’m Happy When It Pours.

The woman in question and myself. watch the Jesus & Mary Chain’s video for their second single off the LP. She thinks it’s pretty good but suspects all the JAMC’s songs sound alike. You and I, having heard the melodic feedback of their excellent debut LP, Psychocandy, know better. I wonder what she would make of it if she knew.

As good as Psychocandy was, it still seemed like a novelty. How could the band hope to continue?

WILLIAM: “We did have difficulty continuing; it wasn’t an easy thing to do. The initial feeling was panic—we were perfectly aware that it wou'd be hard to make another move. We took our time and made sure we got it right. We sat down and got ourselves together, it was just an attitude.

“Apart from the music, our attitude had changed.”

Like your fellow Scottish band, the late Fire Engines, the JAMC were given to 20 minute concerts of pure feedback.

“We’ve changed our view toward a lot of things. We were extremely belligerent when we started out. We had to be, really, because the sort of music we wanted to hear we want to hear in certain places—chart radio shows or whatever— and it wasn’t being done.

“The thing with success is we didn’t hate the music business as much as we had, mainly because we became a part of it and it wasn’t this big faceless thing. It was full of people. In the beginning we had a naive attitude, record companies were like the gestapo to be hated.”

JIM: “The thing we learned is that while there’s always a lot of criticism of a major record label, the record that you make is totally up to yourself. If anybody makes a ‘record company record’ that’s purely because they went for the bucks.

“We’d made the most extreme record for years on Warner Bros. Once we’d done that we thought ‘Well, we’ve done [that. What are we scared of?’ Afterwards it was a more relaxed feeling as far as us making the music we want to hear. We realized we were in control.”

A friend of mine interviewed you a couple of years ago and said he found you difficult. Has that changed?

WILLIAM: “I don’t accept that at all. You do a tour and you’ve got to talk to many people. Maybe it’s show business we’re in, but I’m not a show business person, I don’t walk about with a constant smile on my face. If I feel pissed off about something I don’t try to pretend I’m not. If I’m tired I can’t walk about constantly smiling. It hasn’t changed because we’ve never felt paranoid toward the press. I’ve always been relaxed with the press, figuring this is our opportunity to explain ourselves.”

Do you think Darklands is a better album than Psychocandy?

WILLIAM: “Not at all. I think it’s as good. Darklands is what we were trying to do in 1987. It’s as simple as that.”

JIM: “What most people get wrong is they don’t realize Psychocandy is the popular piece and Darklands is a bit depressive in places. If we released Psychocandy today it’d be a bigger hit than Darklands. When we play gigs people only seem to want to hear noise. What we’re doing is great and all that, but people don’t want us to innovate, to go ahead. They want the same old thing.

“It’s harder to recreate Darklands onstage because there’s a certain mood in the songs that’s hard to get at. That atmosphere. And it’s not just our fault. Psychocandy is a brilliant LP, probably it’ll wind up being a masterpiece, but it’s easier to get that feeling onstage. It’s cruder.

“Darklands is a huge success artistically to me. Looking at second albums through the history of rock ’n’ roll, they always seem to be an anticlimax.”

WILLIAM: ‘‘I think the reason for that is the second record tries to be the first. The way we approached Darklands was as though the group had split up and started again. Forget what we’ve done before, what do we want to hear now? It sounds as fresh as Psychocandy but in a different way.

“Matured is the wrong word. Changing isn’t necessarily maturing. Having money changes the way you are—I’m not rich, but I’m not poor anymore.”

JIM: “A lot of people who now want the feedback, were, at the time of the feedback, calling it shit.”

Do you think American teens empathize with the melancholy aura of Darklands, bridging social and cultural gaps?

WILLIAM: ‘‘I don’t know about social and cultural gaps. I do hope there’s an empathy but after all, it’s only a pop record.”

That’s like saying Astral Weeks is only a pop record.

WILLIAM: “Astral Weeks is only a pop record.”

JIM: “I see what you’re saying, though: it does change the way people think and therefore it is more than a pop record.”

WILLIAM: “I would hope people would think Darklands is as intense as anything they’ve heard. The reason I said it’s only a pop record is I was being devil’s advocate, but I was also being my advocate. Sometimes I view art very cynically, as if it’s just high-brow soap operas. Sometimes I get quite angry about things like that.”

JIM: “I don’t like people coming up and trying to talk to me about it. People can listen to our records but we aren’t psychiatrists. If a record makes somebody feel better that’s great, but it’s still just a record. It’s not me.”

WILLIAM: ‘‘What people don’t understand is that even though we write the songs, write the lyrics, we aren’t really any more of an expert than the people who listen to it. It took us about two months to realize there was a depressive side to Darklands. We thought it was a fairly nice and happy LP. There’s a lot of fairly happy songs. I can see it now, something like ‘Cherry Came Too,’ but once you’ve made the record you’re busy thinking about the next record. Then everybody articulates things that you don’t think too much about.”

JIM: “We don’t analyze our music, and I think if we did it’d be a big mistake.” Are you happy with the way everything’s worked out?

WILLIAM: “At the very beginning you dream of how far you can go, you get ideas about what it must have been like to be Mick Jagger, you think that can happen to us, but it’s a dream. But what’s happening is pretty exciting.”

Are you happy?

WILLIAM: “That’s not an easy question. You can’t answer yes or no, but no, I don’t think I’m very happy.”

JIM: “I’m neither happy nor unhappy.”

WILLIAM: “Of the two of us, he’s the one who sometimes feels real happiness and sometimes is very depressed. Utimately, he’s the more depressive of the two of us. Whereas with me there’s a constant state of ‘big deal.’ Nothing’s great but nothing’s terrible. A kind of mundane monotony.”

3. If Those Things Weren’t Lost.

Well, she doesn’t speak to me anymore. When I ask her how she’s doing she tells me to mind my own business. I don’t even blame her. I lost a heart and gained a great rock album. Fortunately for you, the price of Darklands should be a lot cheaper.