![]() By the time I saw them on their Munki tour in 1998, playing for what I remember as a half-full 9:30 Club and still sounding like gods, they’d been essentially forgotten. By 1992, when they played the Lollapalooza main stage in between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, they were curious anomalies in a music landscape that had moved onto other ideas about what cool was. In their infancy, the Mary Chain were the NME-anointed coolest band in the universe. For a while there, it was like the world forgot how to hear them. Things have changed for the Mary Chain since we last heard from them. And now that they’re back, with their first new album in 19 years, they’re still exploring that same territory. They kept exploring the same territory, finding slightly new things they could do with it, and it served them well, until they finally got sick enough of each other to break up in 1999. But their sound, as ferociously cool and secretly beautiful as it was, remained essentially unchanged. ![]() They’d combine those foundational elements in more and more intuitive ways, writing even better songs in the process, and they’d make a bit of room for new influences, as when they temporarily replaced their endless succession of flesh-and-blood drummers with a drum machine. Over the next five albums, the Mary Chain would make slight adjustments to the fundamental equation at the center of that sound. They made lovely, shimmering pop songs, and then they drowned those pop songs in howling feedback, sounding as studiously bored as they possibly could the entire time. The Scottish insurgents took the nihilistic cooler-than-thou junkie-blues skree of the Velvet Underground and the starry-eyed melodic sweetness of the girl-group era, and they combined those disparate elements into one thing. And the Jesus And Mary Chain found one of those things, combining sounds that had never been combined before. It wasn’t a young genre or anything, but in 1985, there were still things you could do with rock ‘n’ roll that nobody else had yet attempted. As it happens, that’s the same age, more or less, that rock ‘n’ roll itself was when Psychocandy came out. To ensure that you never miss a future issue of the print magazine, subscribe from just £24 for 4 issues.This year, Psychocandy, the Jesus And Mary Chain’s first album, turns 32. Click here for the app, here to read Popshot via ISSUU, or here to read via Readly. The digital edition of Popshot is available for reading on tablets and desktop and you will receive free access to the complete magazine archive with your subscription. A printed copy of the magazine will be delivered direct your home each quarter-and you will also get access to our full digital archive. īy subscribing to our print edition you can read all four issues published throughout the year from £24. Read an interview with the author here and the rest of this short story in the latest issue of Popshot. Imogen says that sometimes she dreams there is a tiny creature living inside her, somewhere between a child and a tape worm and that it will never come… On the phone her twin sister, Imogen, says that by the time their mother was their age she already had three children and no wonder Marla is panic dreaming about pregnancy. In the dreams the babies bubble from the ground like hot springs, their faces broken into wails, their fat hands clasping at her as she tries to hold all of them at the same time. ![]() Afterwards they stay in travel lodges or tents or, once, a communal yurt and Marla, arms wrapped around Simone’s shoulders, dreams about babies. For the weddings she gives money towards honeymoons and mortgages and new cars and wears the same blue suit with a bow tie which Simone got her for her twentyfifth birthday. Marla goes to an enormous shop and buys six of the same overpriced stuffed giraffes. That year there are four baby showers and double the number of weddings. It is meaningful to think of him now because her body is beginning to feel less and less like her own and she understands that if she were ever to fight for the joy of it, it would not be for the reasons that he had but rather to bring her body back to herself, to call it whistling back from the edge of her thirties and the imaginary babies she may or may not have. He dripped blood avariciously onto the bed sheets, spat loose teeth onto her belly, pressed her fingers into his sores. And she remembers the awful boyfriend she had when she was twenty-one who she both loved and hated with equal measure the awful boyfriend who started turning up with skin like split peaches and weeping, mucus filled wounds on his face. Illustration by Natka Klimowicz.Īnd of course, there is the year where she thinks: I cannot do this. Read an extract below and find the complete story in the magazine now. This short story by the Booker shortlisted author features exclusively in The Intimacy Issue of Popshot.
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