Garbage Days Revisited #8: The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Stoned And Dethroned" (1994)

 

"Fuck with me and I'll fuck with you, isn't that what we're supposed to do? Cut me down and I will kill you too, isn't that what we're supposed to do?" - The Jesus & Mary Chain, Dirty Water

I've written several times in both SFTJ and GDR about my evenings as a teenager sitting around with various friends of a weekend listening to albums in various peoples' bedrooms and drinking alcohol and smoking, erm, "magic parsley", when the funds and availability through mates' older brothers allowed. As I've said, a lot of the lads who I used to partake in these sessions with were either shoegazing or grunge fans so although we all got on well, I still felt like a bit of a square peg in a round hole with the group from time to time. I'd happily tolerate listening to Ride or Lush or whoever was on the stereo this week but it still wouldn't stop me asking if we could cue up some Senseless Things or Wonder Stuff or Carter on a frequent basis to get a bit of excitement in among the endless dreamscapes.

One group that we did all agree on though was the Jesus & Mary Chain. Growing up in the early '90s we were a bit late to the party when it came to the Reid brothers - certainly Psychocandy was way before my time and it was only really with Honey's Dead and the Top 10 single Reverence which to my teenage ears sounded incredibly dangerous and cool with lyrics like "I wanna die like Jesus Christ/I wanna die on a bed of spikes/I wanna die like JFK/I wanna die in the USA" making the money-grabbing faux-angst of yer Eddie Vedders sound piss-weak in comparison. A lot of the guys in the group had older brothers who were Mary Chain fans and hence Honey's Dead quickly joined our listening rotation when it came out.

Unfortunately, whisper it quietly but, the album was a bit hit and miss. When it hit the mark such as on the beautiful Almost Gold (surely the band's most under-rated song), the languid Sundown and the lurching Rollercoaster, it was great but elsewhere songs like Teenage Lust and Sugar Ray just didn't have the tunes to draw you in. We would discover the rest of their back catalogue over the next few years - while a lot of people love Psychocandy, I have to be honest and say that I don't think it's their best work. When the tunes punch through the sheet metal production like on Just Like Honey, it's pretty amazing but there's a lot of times where I find it just unlistenable. To be honest, I much prefer its follow-up Darklands which is one of the most magnificently moody indie-goth albums out there and for me is where the laconic cool of the Mary Chain really is at its best. Automatic, although panned by the press at the time, isn't bad either - certainly the snarling swagger of Blues From A Gun is one of THE great Mary Chain singles in my opinion and the likes of Here Comes Alice, Coast To Coast and Drop are fine stuff as well.

Anyway, it's not those albums we're here to talk about, it's the group's 1994 effort Stoned And Dethroned which followed Honey's Dead. By this point the group were a bit unique in that they were an '80s alternative mainstay who hadn't either moved up to the big leagues like U2, split up like the Smiths  or simply faded away into semi-obscurity thanks to the changing tides of fashion like several of their one-time peers among the goth fraternity (and yes, I know the Mary Chain were very disdainful of the goth tag but let's face it they most definitely did pull in quite a few fans from that group). They’d kind of plateaued, not quite as successful as they’d been 5-10 years before but with enough of a following to keep their records charting. Since Honey’s Dead, they’d been away on the Lollapalooza tour in between times making another attempt at breaking America and had befriended US alt-rock/shoegaze types Mazzy Star (best known for the blissful So Tonight That I Might See album and its attendant classic Fade Into You, arguably the perfect 3am with a glass of red song) with William Reid and Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval becoming an item. Hope shared the vocals with Jim on the Mary Chain's comeback single, Sometimes Always and it quickly became a favourite of our "weekend listening group" upon its release.

The big surprise I think was just how stripped back this new Mary Chain sound was (I even remember my Mum remarking upon hearing Sometimes Always coming from my room that it sounded like Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra which certainly isn't something you'd associate with the Mary Chain at all!) and when Stoned And Dethroned came out, it really saw them pushing things in a much more laid back and downbeat direction. And I thought it was great. As I've said before, I've always much preferred the dark and stripped back side of the Mary Chain's output like Darklands to the likes of Psychocandy so this was pretty much a slam dunk for me.

I still love Stoned & Dethroned now - it's one of those albums that's perfect to reflect to when things aren't going so well. The opening duo of Dirty Water ("I've been swimmin' where the fish won't go...") and Bullet Lovers ("I'm in your blood and I'm in your bones/Better dead than to be stuck alone") felt like the Mary Chain really were speaking to my troubled teenage soul. There's a definite sense of heaviness and death hanging over the album as well on songs such as Never Saw It Coming and You've Been A Friend while God Help Me features none other than Shane MacGowan on guest vocals. It's safe to say that by 1994 with Britpop looming large on the horizon, the Mary Chain were very much out of fashion but this is the sound of a band forging their own path and not caring what's going on in the world around them and creating a genuinely special album. And I think that's maybe what drew me to it - it sounded like absolutely nothing else in the UK alternative music scene at the time and sometimes you need that soundtrack to the morning after to counterbalance the Live Forever vibes from the night before.

Although Stoned And Dethroned received warm critical reception (something the Mary Chain could nearly always guarantee) and actually became the group's highest charting album Stateside (albeit peaking at a lowly number 98), it only produced a sole Top 40 hit with Sometimes Always and when follow-up Come On and the non-album I Hate Rock 'n' Roll which followed a few months later both missed the Top 40 by some margin, they were dropped by Warners, signing with Creation (who they'd started out with a decade before) in the UK and Sub Pop in the US and adding former Lush bassist Phil King to their line-up. Unfortunately the next album Munki was a dud, the sound of a band who simply sounded for the most part like they'd given up trying. It had a handful of decent songs on it (the sickly Cracking Up being the best) but the majority just sounded like unfinished demos. Soon afterwards, a US tour descended into chaos when the group had a mass punch-up onstage in Los Angeles leading to a gig being cancelled fifteen minutes in. The group had always had a volatile chemistry to it but this proved to be one brawl too far and the end was nigh.

As with the Faith No More GDR entry the other week though, this one does at least have a happy ending - the Mary Chain reunited at the end of the noughties and finally came up with a new album, Damage And Joy, in 2017. A good mix of all the best bits from their output, it was everything we were hoping for from their comeback and hopefully more new material will be forthcoming in due course.

In the meantime, I'd strongly recommend you seek out Stoned And Dethroned and give it a listen if you've not already. For me, it's second only to Darklands as the best Mary Chain album - as the great and good Pepsi Sheen on the excellent Sleazegrinder website said of the Mary Chain’s mellower moments, it may be a downer but it's a soulful, righteous downer for the darker moments in life. It's just a shame it came out in 1994 when soulful, righteous downers were about the least fashionable thing that you could do. But then if the Mary Chain did exactly what people expected of them, I suspect they wouldn't be quite as infamous as they are...