Evan Dando

A dozen or so muttered thank-yous; the odd fumbled lyric; an occasional foot held a few inches aloft from the stage: Jim Reid is whipping Brixton Academy up into a frenzy, despite wearing the look of a man supremely not arsed by any of the adulation being hurled his way. "You’re a miserable bunch of bastards, aren’t ye?" he mock intones, after a triumphant rendition of 'April Skies'. How do The Jesus And Mary Chain do it, exactly?

With maybe the most inspired clever/dumb tactics in pop history, that’s how. With rock ‘n’ roll’s self-destructive tropes seemingly exhausted around the time of their inception, JAMC simply plugged all the clichés in and held them up to a big amp, combining pop savvy with Velvets-style white noise on their debut and masterpiece Psychocandy. Reid’s lyrics are bleached-out rock cliché, blank verse that’s sexy, nihilistic and subtly self-reflexive, and it’s hard to suppress a shiver of delight as he coolly spits lines like "as sure as life means nothing / and all things end in nothing / and Heaven I think is too close to Hell" ('Darklands'), even twenty-odd years since they first spilled from pen to paper.

Inevitably, when the distorting mists rolled back, they lost some of their appeal, and second album Darklands lacked the scuzzy authority of its predecessor, even if the tunes were largely intact. A shame, then, that the band choose not to embrace the feedback-laden glory of the first record tonight, as it would’ve lent much-needed edge to this crowd-pleasing set. Consequently, 'Never Understand' roars out of the blocks with fiery arcs of noise overlaying the song’s electrified rockabilly, and 'Head On'’s incomparable rush sounds like a prism in reverse, making dark, intensified beams of unlight from myriad pop strands. But some of the later, more baggy-influenced numbers come off a little flat. Actually, that last bit’s confusing – shoegaze influence aside, you can hear the dark pop thread that runs from 'Some Candy Talking' to The Stone Roses’ formative blueprint, but by the time 'Reverence' (from 1992’s Honey’s Dead) rolls around at the end of their only encore, you can see baggy’s oikish fingerprints all over their sound, and that’s somehow less appealing. One new song, apparently titled 'Amputation', fails to make a lasting impression but hardly disgraces itself among older material.

Brittle of rhythm section and unvarying of attack, one thing you’d never accuse JAMC of is swinging, and admittedly the latter half of the set begins to drag a little. This feels less like a criticism and more like a natural repercussion of who they are as a band – it’s never going to happen, of course, but you feel they’d be better suited to rattling off half-hour sets of machine-gun pop classics, making upstarts like yours truly wish they’d been around to catch them at the height of their powers. Still, their ability to wring magic from minimum chords and no visible effort is an equation that continues to amaze, and there’ll be few going home dissatisfied with tonight’s performance.

Photograph by Lucy Johnston