London Camden Ballroom

SINGER JIM REID has described pop music as ‘a sewer’. On stage he slides, rolls. jerks and gesticulates like a schizophrenic rat on amphetamine.

Opposing the commercialism of Madonna and the tweeness of The Smiths, Reid’s group, The Jesus And Mary Chain, offer a musical mayhem driven by youthful zest and emotion rather than any overt technical skills. They thrive on a volatile atmosphere and create one through an undercurrent of violence inherent in their music.

All the songs are cloaked in a dizzy crackle of guitar feedback. On the most accessible numbers this is welded to a spindly thread of melody often so unnervingly simple as to be redolent of surf music. On their second single, ‘Never Understand’, they sounded like the Beach Boys with knuckle dusters.

In their short existence, they’ve frequently been likened to the Sex Pistols, largely by dint of defying any obvious musical lineage and excelling at raising a big two-fingered riposte to the pop music establishment. In their audience they incite as much abuse as adulation, often from the same people.

The determinedly ramshackle set played out amid an ear-splitting din of PA buzzes and microphone howling was, in a mad and anarchic sort of sense, exciting, unpredictable and challenging. But the thrill is momentary. A brisk, bright spark of mid-80s rock and roll iconoclasm that almost by definition has zero longevity. Career-wise, the Jesus And Mary Chain will happily die before they get old.

They played six songs in a twenty-minute set which was the culmination of a nationwide tour consisting of three dates. Clearly they do nothing by wholes. They also disdain encores and their refusal to re-appear for one was a cue for the large crowd to lob (plastic) beer glasses at the houselights, overturn the scaffolding which housed the mixing desk, then scurry for the exits as several dozen police arrived to restore the law and order which had temporarily been abandoned.