It’s hard for many to believe that it’s 25 years this November since the Jesus & Mary Chain unleashed their caustic squall upon the world and changed music as indie fans knew it. The band’s reunion tour three years ago was a far cry from the feedback smothered, riot starting frenetic live shows of their debut album Psychocandy, but Jim Reid of the band admits that touring the album to mark the 25th anniversary of its release isn’t something he’d rule out. Speaking to blog the Von Pip Express, Reid reveals that the band didn’t think of it as the perfect album which many now regard it as.
‘We wanted to make changes to Psychocandy within a matter of days after completion – it’s like that with any record you make, it can never be perfect, you always want to keep changing things and tinkering with it. You just have to kind of draw the line somewhere because this doesn’t really make it better – it just makes it different from what it would have been. Looking back on Psychocandy now it’s a bit like looking at an old photograph of ourselves or something, it crystallizes exactly what we were about at that point in time, but of course we change, but the record doesn’t.’
Since his old drummer, Bobby Gillespie, now fronting Primal Scream is touring on the back of the 20th anniversary of Screamadelica; does Reid think about hauling the squall of feedback and Spectorish pop that is Psychocandy out on the road? He says ‘As far as ‘Psychocandy’ is concerned I wouldn’t rule it out, but the truth of the matter is it’s a very hard record to play live, Christ only knows how we managed to do it all those years ago, but we probably didn’t ! We were probably just so drunk that we thought we did.’
