Remembering that time I saw The Jesus & Mary Chain at The Studio in Bristol.
It was 14th November 1989, a Tuesday night, and at that point I was a college drop out, working for a bank in a suburban high street. These were the days when the manager would smoke in his office; there was probably a bottle of the good stuff under lock and key, for the special customers.
Me, I spent days either in the back office, or on the counter, which was considered a 'step up', or clearing out the sodden, stinking confidential waste from the leaky metal shed in the back yard, the squatting rats and I trying to give each other a wide berth. Clearly, I was working there for the money, not the glamour.
A mid-week gig in the city centre therefore was a relatively rare thing, with an 8.30am start the following day and all hellfire unleashed if you were a minute late for work (although, perversely, a more liberal attitude to the traditional 'lunchtime drink').
Anyway, I must have raced from work to get there, picking up my friend Stuart on the way, as we were parked, up the external flights of stairs past the cinema to get to the Studio and get a decent spot in time for the start of the support act.
I knew nothing about The Perfect Disaster at the time and they were good as I (vaguely) recall, though my abiding recollection is that the lead singer was trying a little too hard to be Mick Jagger. It was the bass player, Josephine Wiggs, that lingers the most in the memory though, for joining The Breeders the following year.
As for the headline act, I was a fan, but not a massive fan, of The Jesus & Mary Chain. I had a clutch of singles and not a single one of their albums. However, Stuart had bought the current album, Automatic, and B-sides compilation, Barbed Wire Kisses, which I thought were great.
My reservation was that I'd read in the music papers that J&MC gigs were at best chaotic, and that even headline shows clocked in at barely half an hour. What the hell would tonight be like?
It was all of the above and a lot more, to be honest. Jim and William and the rest of the band came on stage and launched into a couple of Darklands B-sides. Rider was noisy, scuzzy and scrappy, though nothing compared to Everything's Alright When You're Down. I had this on the 10" vinyl of Happy When It Rains and were it not for the F-bomb, could have been a single in it's own right.
It was four songs in before Automatic got an airing, and then four in a row, including exuberant single Head On. I knew these songs better than their predecessors from Psychocandy and Darklands, though any of the studio gloss that had been applied was stripped away, boiling the raw songs in a sea of noise.
I don't remember any between song banter or even a Ramones-style 1-2-3-4, one song seemed to go into the next in a relentless sonic assault. I recognised Nine Million Rainy Days from the live version on my double pack 7" single of April Skies, and when the title track was played, there was a near riot.
How do you top that? With Some Candy Talking and 1988's sizzling standalone Sidewalking, one more Automatic track (Gimme Hell) and one more April Skies B-side, the bloody brilliant Kill Surf City.
Then it was all over, the brothers Reid pissed off and didn't come back. I looked at my watch and they'd more or less played for an hour. What an hour, though!
Ears still ringing the following day, as I ran a seemingly endless success of cheques through the encoder, hoping to god that everything balanced so that we could get of work on time, I dreamt of greater things.
Three and a half decades later, I've a much greater appreciation of what an amazing pair of albums Psychocandy and Darklands were. Barbed Wire Kisses remains one of the greatest compilations by any artist ever and whilst Automatic is generally one of the less loved entries in The Jesus & Mary Chain catalogue, it holds a special place for me, as a record of those times, Stuart's mixtapes and especially that night in 1989 at the Studio.
I get to live it all again early next year, as The Jesus & Mary Chain are co-headlining with The Psychedelic Furs, including a date at the Beacon in Bristol. I've enjoyed their newer material too, so I'm really looking forward to see them (both) again.
In the meantime, here's the customary Dubhed recreation of that night. Setlist doesn't have details of the Bristol gig but as previous nights have an identical 17-song set, I'm pretty confident that it was the same.
Catching Sparks is lifted from the lyrics to Head On and is a pretty succinct summation of this 55-minute mixtape.
1) Rider (Single Version) (1987)
2) Everything's Alright When You're Down (Single Version) (1987)
3) The Hardest Walk (Album Version) (1985)
4) Coast To Coast (Alternate Take / William Vocal) (1989)
5) Halfway To Crazy (Album Version) (1989)
6) Head On (Album Version) (1989)
7) Her Way Of Praying (Album Version) (1989)
8) Taste The Floor (Album Version) (1985)
9) Nine Million Rainy Days (Album Version) (1987)
10) The Living End (John Peel Session) (1985)
11) Who Do You Love (Cover of Bo Diddley) (1987)
12) Take It (John Peel Session) (1988)
13) April Skies (Single Version) (1987)
14) Some Candy Talking (NME version) (1986)
15) Sidewalking (Single Version) (1988)
16) Gimme Hell (Album Version) (1989)
17) Kill Surf City (Single Version) (1987)
1985: Psychocandy: 3, 8
1986: NME's Big Four EP (NME promo 7"): 14
1987: April Skies EP: 11, 13, 17
1987: Darklands: 9
1987: Darklands EP: 1
1987: Happy When It Rains EP: 2
1988: Sidewalking EP: 15
1989: Automatic: 5, 6, 7, 16
2000: The Complete John Peel Sessions: 10, 12
2011: Automatic (Expanded Edition): 4
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