The Jesus And Mary Chain embark on international tour celebrating Darklands

I wore my hair long and cultivated an “indie-rock” image in which open-necked shirts and cast-off waistcoats were staples. I traipsed around the college’s corridors in a wool coat that had, I imagined, been deposited at the charity shop where I bought it by the grieving relatives of the recently departed octogenarian man who had been its previous owner.

My primary requirement of the coat was that it had pockets big enough to contain my beloved Walkman, on which I constantly played the music of indie bands like The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure. So, when Jovanka, an effortlessly cool English girl of Slavic extraction, needed to jettison her copy of the Mary Chain’s 1985 debut LP, I was the obvious candidate.

Jovanka loved the Mary Chain, she explained, but the album had been a present from a boyfriend with whom she had recently, and painfully, split up. Keeping the record was bordering on masochism, and, so, it was on offer to me at a very reasonable price.

I still have the LP to this day, complete with the boyfriend’s dedication written inside the cover, and then, for discretion’s sake, carefully crossed out by Jovanka (you can still read the original message: “To Jov. Merry Christmas. Love Gerry XXX”).

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Listening to Psychocandy was my first really serious engagement with the Mary Chain, the band that was started by working-class, Scottish brothers Jim and William Reid in the early-1980s. Although I was not yet an aficionado, I already had an affinity with the group.

They hailed from East Kilbride, a new town that was, in many ways, a Scottish equivalent of Telford, a post-industrial Birmingham overspill town that sits incongruously in the green and pleasant county of Shropshire, made famous by the Victorian poet AE Housman. They were clad in black, wore sunglasses indoors and took themselves too seriously. I liked them.

An avid reader of Melody Maker, Sounds and, the indie kids’ bible, the NME (which was simply too cool for its full title, the New Musical Express), I’d seen the Reid brothers photographed dozens of times. The uncompromising, image-conscious Scots often featured on the covers of the music papers, glowering indifferently from behind their purposefully dishevelled fringes.

They had been propelled from demo tape-recording obscurity to an album contract with the Blanco y Negro record label (a subsidiary of media giant Warner) in just two short years. Psychocandy – which featured a drummer by the name of Bobby Gillespie (below), who the Mary Chain had borrowed from an emerging rock band called Primal Scream – marked a notable highpoint in the guitar-driven, post-punk “alternative”, “indie” music that emerged in the early to mid-1980s.

If this music was “alternative”, it was, first-and-foremost, an alternative to the computerised synthesiser pop of artists such as Gary Numan and The Pet Shop Boys. Their “indie” credentials came, not only from their independence from commercial popular music, but also their expression of a burgeoning dissatisfaction among working-class and lower middle-class youth with the right-wing zealotry and moral conformism of Thatcher’s Britain.

By the time Psychocandy was released, in November 1985, the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 had gone down to agonising defeat. The Thatcher government’s relentless assault on the trade unions and, therefore, Britain’s heavy industry had already touched the Reid household – Jim and William recorded their first demos in 1983 using equipment bought with money their father gave them when he was made redundant from his factory job. THE Mary Chain – whose early gigs were notorious for a disconsolate violence that the band were keen to shake off – were by no means overtly political, but they provided a bleakly humorous, rebelliously poetic contribution to a growing counter-culture. They may have been happy to admit that they had “no solution” and “nothing to believe in” (as they did later in the song 331/3), but they were always more likely to spit on a Tory than they were to emulate Numan by voting for one.

Psychocandy – on which the Reids offered the darkest, most hilarious double entendre in rock history: “God spits/On my soul/There’s something dead inside my hole” – was unlike anything coming out of the indie scene in the mid-1980s. The band might have come from a new town in South Lanarkshire, but they sounded as if they had got there by way of the Velvet Underground’s New York, the Beach Boys’ California and Johnny Cash’s Tennessee.

The album combined, in songs like Never Understand and Something’s Wrong, the electric feedback, jagged guitars and broken down Americana of the Velvets’ path-breaking 1968 album White Light/White Heat with the perverse, west coast, surfer boy optimism of the Beach Boys. However, on a more melodic, contemplative track, such as Some Candy Talking, you could swear the band had stopped off in Nashville to jam with The Man in Black himself.

As a debut LP it was close to flawless. Or, rather, its flaws (like John Cale’s sonic experiments with the Velvets) were deliberate and inspirational.

The album spawned a legion of imitators and creative emulators. Perhaps the most impressive record in this vein was Loveless, the 1991 album by My Bloody Valentine, which sounded like a poetic love letter to Cale and the Reids delivered in luxurious feedback.

As I drank in the knowingly bittersweet music and lyrics of Psychocandy, the connection with The Velvet Underground became increasingly apparent. What I didn’t realise then, in my white teen ignorance of black music, was the debt it also owed to Motown and its very particular take on Phil Spector’s much-vaunted “Wall of Sound”.

There was a lot going on in this album, created by a couple of working-class boys from a new town built to house the erstwhile denizens of Glasgow’s slums. Suitably impressed by Psychocandy, I soon moved on to the Mary Chain’s second album, 1987’s Darklands.

Forget the platitudes about bands that enjoy debut success finding themselves mired in “difficult second album” syndrome. Darklands was a brilliant and highly successful follow-up record.

Incredibly, for music by an alternative band, the LP peaked at number five in the UK album charts (Psychocandy had risen to no higher than 31st spot). It would prove to be the Mary Chain’s most successful album, by a distance.

The first thing you noticed about the record was how different it was from its predecessor. For sure, the cover – a blurred image of (presumably) the Reids on-stage, set on a black background, with the band’s name and the album title in bold block red lettering – bore reassuring similarities with Psychocandy, but the sound was remarkably divergent.

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Gone was the reverberating feedback that had characterised Psychocandy. This record was cleaner, produced, it seemed, to give breathing room to the 1950s rock ‘n’ roll twang that had been so deliberately obscured by the white noise of the debut album.

Gone, too, was Gillespie, who was a tad busy with Primal Scream’s debut album Sonic Flower Groove (which was released a little over month after Darklands). He was replaced – Echo and the Bunnymen-style – not by another musician, but by a drum machine.

This musical turn may have resulted in considerably higher record sales, but there was no evidence in Darklands that the band were engaged in some kind of populist compromise. The music still had an edge, as if Chuck Berry had played using not his famous tortoiseshell plectrum, but a razor.

The lyrics, too, retained the Mary Chain’s established line in darkly comic desolation. Many a poet would mortgage their soul to be able to pen a metaphor as smart and multi-layered as that from the song Fall (from the B-side of Darklands): “Everybody’s falling on me/And I’m as dead as a Christmas tree.”

A track such as Cherry Came Too, complete with its “barbed wire kisses” and barely concealed sexual double meanings, seemed like the fruit of a collaboration between the Reid brothers and Johnny Cash on the Cathkin Braes on an especially windy Tuesday afternoon. The Beach Boys-style chorus shone a bleached orange, saccharine light on a love song that compared the object of desire to “the trigger itch in the killer’s hand”.

FAR from selling out to sell big (although the Mary Chain never hid their desire to reach a large audience or, for that matter, their wish to appear on Top of the Pops), the band’s shifting musical style was, first-and-foremost, about keeping things interesting for themselves. In an interview in 2011, Jim Reid explained: “we tried to reinvent ourselves with every album.”

“I think it’s fair to say that… Stoned & Dethroned and Psychocandy are at opposite ends of the spectrum. But it would just have been too boring to record Psychocandy two, three and four etc.”

What followed Darklands was a largely successful series of reinventions, with studio albums: Automatic (1989), Honey’s Dead (1992), Stoned & Dethroned (1994) and Munki (1998). None of these records achieved the commercial success of Darklands, but they won the band admirers.

Tennis champion Steffi Graf was spotted coming out of one of their gigs in Germany. She told an enquiring journalist, quite simply, “I love their dark music”.

Meanwhile, in the states, indie rock aristocracy The Pixies recorded a searing cover version of Head On from the Automatic album (“And the world could die in pain/And I wouldn’t feel no shame/And there’s nothing holding me to blame”). Then, in 1998 and ’99, the band suffered a long, acrimonious collapse, sealed by them completing a tour of the US and Japan without William, who had walked off stage 15 minutes into a show in Los Angeles after his brother attempted to perform while visibly inebriated and barely able to stand.

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It took eight years for bridges to be built to the point where the Mary Chain could reform, and another 10 before the 2017 studio album Damage and Joy could be released.

Now, as the band embark on an international tour celebrating Darklands, is as good a time as any to reflect on just how scorchingly good the Mary Chain were when they kicked their way into the public consciousness in the 1980s. As William (Wordsworth, not Reid) put it: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!”

The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Darklands tour begins at Stereo in Glasgow on November 13. For details, visit themarychain.com