5. The Jesus and Mary ChainYou Trip Me Up
Around 1983 or ’84, pop music stopped doing it for me. It was getting a bit clean. There was still a lot of good stuff, but I think it was The Smiths… I wasn’t obsessed with them the way Sice was and a few other people I knew, but listening to them made you want to find something else. Then, when The Jesus And Mary Chain came out that was it. My brother brought their second single home and I wasn’t sure at first. It was such a racket. It still is. But it was ‘You Trip Me Up’ that really did it for me – I was sold. This beautiful marriage of… it’s not nice feedback, controlled feedback like you’d get off The Who. It’s awful. But the core of what’s going on – the song – is so lovely. And they looked fantastic, like The Beatles in Hamburg. They looked like a gang. It just seemed like they were blowing everything away and starting again. I went to listen to the Velvets after I’d heard this, and the Velvets did it… it was either noise or it was a great melody. They never really did the two together, whereas the Mary Chain managed to marry the two. The video is just fantastic. They’re walking around somewhere in the Mediterranean, sitting on the beach in full leather gear with their massive guitars. After hearing the Mary Chain, that was all I wanted to listen to – bands who did that. They were a big band. They were in Smash Hits, which is hard to believe.
