Uma das bandas de rock pop mais influente na década de 80, The Jesus and Mary Chain, talvez ainda hoje incompreendidos. Seria a overdose de microfonia sufocando as vozes desesperadas por um beijo de arame farpado nas melancólicas ruas de East Kilbride? Ou seria o novo rock enlatado das gravadoras a grande vilã?
A resposta pouca importa perto dessa doçura e dessa fúria que surgiram no cenário rock nos anos 80 quando jovens tímidos sem ter muito o que fazer pelas ruas de East Kilbride, a não ser tocar rock e se drogar – e não curtiam tocar ao vivo – deram os seus primeiros acordes no grande hit Upside Down!

Mas somente quem, em meados dos anos 80, ouviu os primeiros singles até os maravilhosos albuns, Psychocandy e Darklands, sabe o que é uma sonoridade melancólica, combinada com poucos acordes revestidos de microfonia sufocando vocais docemente desesperados querendo dizer algo ao mundo, o que anos mais tarde viria ser “I Hate Rock and Roll ” paradoxalmente combinado com “I Love Rock and Roll”. Tudo bem, desde que se toque rock and roll.

Segue uma série de entrevistas em vídeo, inclusive uma atual entrevista com o ex-baixista Douglas Hart para a Vice Magazine ( transcrita na íntegra , em inglês), falando da cena escocesa na época em que os primeiros ruídos de microfonia e melancolia davam seus primeiros acordes…

LEATHER TROUSERS AND VHS TAPES
When the Jesus and Mary Chain Were Wee Bairns
INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER
IMAGE BY DOUGLAS HART

Read the rest at Vice Magazine: LEATHER TROUSERS AND VHS TAPES – When the Jesus and Mary Chain Were Wee Bairns – Vice Magazine
In the early 1980s, three bored friends from the unremarkable Scottish town of East Kilbride formed a band that they ended up calling the Jesus and Mary Chain. They played druggy rock’n’roll drenched in searing feedback and, under the stewardship of their young manager Alan McGee, soon became a national sensation when their chaotic gigs regularly descended into riots just as they were becoming moody poster boys for the first generation of British indie-rock. The Jesus and Mary Chain also recorded a lot of amazing music, all of which is being reissued next month in the form of remastered and expanded versions of their classic albums.

Bassist Douglas Hart founded the group with brothers Jim and William Reid, later being joined by Bobby Gillespie, who went on to form Primal Scream. Douglas, who sometimes writes for VICE on sartorial matters, left the band in 1991 and is now a successful director who has shot videos for the Pet Shop Boys, Stone Roses, My Bloody Valentine and the Horrors, among others. We caught up with Douglas to talk about the early days of the Mary Chain.

VICE: Describe the East Kilbride of that time to me.
Douglas Hart: I would say it was like Stonehenge with windows. Me and Jim and William, we used to hang out and do acid and take mushrooms. We only had a cheap old tape recorder but we used to take it to a big, echoey, abandoned paint factory and take acid and play the music real loud. I definitely think one of the things no one ever spoke about enough with the band was the psychedelic aspects of our music, in the broadest sense of the word. The layers and the guitars, when you don’t know where you are—that was where it was coming from. When you come from any small town in Britain, what do you do?

Acid?
Yeah, you do acid.

Who did you get it from?
Older brothers or maybe from the bikers’ pub called the Yeoman—just ask a biker and you’d get it straight away. Every town has one. I was talking to Jason [Pierce, of Spiritualized] about this actually and he said he had the same thing in Rugby. You’d go in this bar all nervous and go and get some acid and then get out of there as fast as you could.

The bikers who sold acid where I lived would always have really, really young girlfriends.
Yeah, fucking amazing. They were all young and fit. A thing like that though, it informs your choices. As much as we wanted to be like that, we were nowhere near as glamorous. We were getting as close to it as we could, doing acid in a concrete dump, you know? And even the way we looked, this weird rag-tag look, the main influence on the way the band looked then was the pre-moptop Beatles, when they were in Hamburg and wore leather. And so we were all about big hair and leather trousers and even in ’81 or ’82, I guess we looked slightly freakish, complete outsiders. And then, meeting Bobby, we had never thought there was anyone like us, who was that weird.

When was the first time you met Bobby?
Gillespie got hold of our demo tape and on the back was my number and so he called it. One day I came back from school and my mum was like, “Some guy phoned up about your band” and I said, “Oh really?” She goes, “I asked him if he was famous, and he goes, ‘Not yet’.” So I called him back and we were literally on the phone for two hours. Not just about the music but talking about films, everything, it was way beyond just music. Drugs, everything.

What kind of films?
A Clockwork Orange and If….. You could only get Clockwork Orange on 15th-generation VHS and so it looked amazing. It was so distorted, it looked like ghostly forbidden images. I guess that probably influenced the way our record sleeves looked. We would take photographs direct from TV screens with oversaturated colours. Bootlegs were the same: you had record fairs where you could buy Sex Pistols compilations on Betamax or whatever, and it would be like 15 generations old, so it would be the Bill Grundy show but black and white and just the outlines of them. When I finally got to see Clockwork Orange as it was meant to be, all clean and that, it just wasn’t as good. Things aren’t better when they’re cleaned up.

What was the scene like in Glasgow at that time?
Total shite. Worthy and po-faced. We always told people we wanted to be on Top of the Pops from the start and they would see us, these fucking spotty kids, and think we were mental. One of the first things we did in Scotland was a battle of the bands, and not only did they throw us off stage, they threw us into the street. We started our show and 30 seconds later we were in the rain going, “What the fuck happened?” Even when we attempted to record the single before Psychocandy with Stephen Street, who had produced the Smiths, it just didn’t work. We thought punk had changed the whole world, but it hadn’t. He was horrified at our chaotic methods. He couldn’t believe I only had two strings on my bass.

Things went pretty fast for you when you went down to London, right?
Well, we released “Upside Down” on Creation and it sold like 50,000 records. It was insane.

And the live shows you were playing around that time were a bit of a laugh, eh?
Well, the music was really exciting, and there were people enthralled into smashing stuff up and people who wanted to kill us. I guess it’s like those shows the Stones did in the 60s when after the gigs there would be riots, and like when everybody was slashing the cinema seats after watching Rock Around the Clock. You know when you feel so good about something you want to smash a window? It’s like that. It’s a dark energy that’s actually quite healthy.

Geoff Travis then signed you to Blanco Y Negro.
Yeah, he signed us with what seemed like a massive advance at the time. I guess it would be worth £250,000 these days. It certainly felt like like a large sum to us who’d been broke for years.

What did you do when you got it?
Well, funny thing is, we didn’t have a big party or anything. We weren’t like that. You can tell what we did if you look at photos of us at the time and you can tell we are a bit… well, we did what broke people do when they get money. Eat more and buy more drugs.

And then you actually got on Top of the Pops.
The first single from the second album, “April Skies”. We had Top Ten hits before that, and all our singles were in the Top 40. We had been on the Old Grey Whistle Test before then, around the time of the riots at our shows. The …Whistle Test was a live show but they were shit scared of having us on TV, so they got us in to film us at 8 AM. We still turned up wasted anyway.

What’s it like to see yourself on telly for the first time?
We were always very drunk, so shows like Top of the Pops we wouldn’t get to see until much later. We were introduced by Peter Powell and Steve Wright, who were wearing woolly jumpers knitted for them by viewers in mental hospitals, I remember. They kept getting our name wrong and barely disguised their disgust and horror at our presence. We loved that, we loved the contrast between them and us.

It was better when presenters were like dads. Better than now when they’re like, “I love these guys, they’re great and we go to nightclubs together.” It was better when they had no clue and were offended by the groups. I remember when the odd weird or punk band would get on Top of the Pops, my dad used to say, “If I see you wearing anything like that I will shoot you.”
Yeah, like “What’s he on? Is he gay?” My dad said that about the Pistols, and then he saw Ian Curtis and said, “That boy’s not right.”

When you got famous, where would you hang out?
I remember the first time we played New York and there was the club-kids culture and they just loved weird outsider stuff like we did. There weren’t even that many people there, but the spirit was great. I met this woman and she gave me some cocaine at this after-hours club. I had never really done real cocaine before because it was too expensive. She was telling me that she saw Jim Morrison when she was 13 and how it made her come in her pants. It was like a scene from Midnight Cowboy, it was amazing. I was like, “This is what it’s all about!”
The next time we went to New York some guy brought us prostitutes and we were so naïve. We were asking them their names and what school they go to and did they know the film If.… or the band Subway Sect, and they were like, “Aren’t you gonna fuck us?” We had no idea! I dunno, we always liked those extreme excesses, like doing heroin on the roof and staring at the Empire State Building.

The remastered and expanded Jesus and Mary Chain album catalogue is out in September on Edsel. Douglas Hart’s first short film is called Long Distance Information. Google it and watch it online.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Long-Distance-Information/173346549380509?v=info

Read the rest at Vice Magazine: LEATHER TROUSERS AND VHS TAPES – When the Jesus and Mary Chain Were Wee Bairns – Vice Magazine

Dos subterrâneos aos Céus de Abril, mesmo que nunca entendidos, a viagem sonora continua…seja num beijo de arame farpado, seja numa colméia gotejante de mel ou por 9 milhões de dias chuvosos, numa doçura psicótica na poesia de uma oração sussurrada a Jesus pelas correntes que se quebraram e não se emendaram mais.

Texto: Ricardo Keller