GONE are the days when a Jesus And Mary Chain gig was a raucous affair with riotous potential. There was never any risk that Monday’s Barrowlands show – the third of the three Glasgow gigs that kicked off an international tour performing their 1987 hit album Darklands – was going to witness the kind of violence that characterised many of the band’s appearances in the early and mid-1980s.
This civilised, almost sedate affair never threatened to break into the kind of rancour that led singer Jim Reid to smack an unruly fan with his microphone stand in Toronto on the original Darklands tour (thereby earning the Scottish rock star a night in a Canadian jail cell).
However, fear not, ye masters of mayhem, Monday’s show was not all tranquillity. A few (empty) plastic beer cups did fly in the air as East Kilbride’s most famous sons neared the end of their set.
There is, it has to be acknowledged, a slight cognitive dissonance in watching Jim and his guitarist brother William (aged 59 and 63 respectively) perform an album that was created when they were in their 20s. It’s not as weird as a 70-something Mick Jagger running across the stage like an electro-charged Peter Pan, but a little discrepant nonetheless.
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Jim has long since dispensed with the carefully disordered, flop-fringed hair of his youth, and now, sporting a smart trim, looks more like the coolest art teacher you can remember from high school. William, by contrast, has kept his trademark mass of unregulated curls and slouches over his guitar like a cross between
Sterling Morrison of The Velvet Underground and the Buddha.
Or, at least, that is how the siblings look in the rare moments when they are sufficiently illuminated for us to see them. For the most part they play, appropriately enough, in the shadows.
The set itself comes in two parts. The first is a no-nonsense delivery of the Darklands album, with every track in its original order. The second is a selection of songs, ranging from 1985’s Psychocandy to their most recent album Damage And Joy (which was released in 2017), and various points in between.
Darklands, from its Beach Boys in black opening title track to its improbably sentimental closer About You, is played straight through, with barely an interruption. Jim is a man of few words, and – having, with a West of Scotland brevity, explained the show’s two-part structure – he hardly says another word until the entire album has been played.
It’s played well, but with a subdued, almost reverential professionalism. The love of the music is still there (this is no mere going through the motions), but the atmosphere is caught, curiously, somewhere between 1980s rock gig and classical chamber concert.
The energy levels are a bit higher in the rougher, less obviously rehearsed second half. Tracks such as Can’t Stop The Rock (2017), Kill Surf City (1987) and, ultimately, Taste Of Cindy (1985) are delivered with a few false starts.
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These momentary failures are strangely gratifying. They lend the gig a handmade, punkish aura.
That back-to-the-eighties sense is soon dispelled, however, when Jim stops the band early in the playing of Up Too High. “I’m getting too much of everything,” he tells the sound engineer, before confessing to a “prima donna fit”.
These days, when a Mary Chain show stops, it’s not because the cops have come for the frontman. Rather, it’s because Jim has become the consummate professional.
Towards the end of the gig, they play I Love Rock ’n’ Roll. Their encore-satisfied audience – which includes a healthy young element among the 50-somethings of the band’s original fan base – is in voluble agreement.
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