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Monday 11 October 2010

Easy Streets Are Not For Me


In 1992 The Jesus And Mary Chain released this single, Rollercoaster. It's a good slab of mid-period Mary Chain noise and melody with a typically self-loathing lyric. What's remarkable in retrospect is that the tour to promote the record featured not just the Reid brothers, but also Popscene-era, pre-Britpop Blur, Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine. For around a tenner. You'd be lucky to see four decent bands like that on one day of a festival now and get change from a hundred quid. The song was also on their (relatively) dance influenced album Honey's Dead in a slightly different version, an album which brought them back from the dead after Madchester made them look a bit old hat and redundant. Honey's Dead also had the depraved Teenage Lust and the beautiful Almost Gold. After the British Rollercoaster tour they joined Lollapalooza in the States, which by all accounts didn't go very well. The Reids admitted they wished they'd jumped ship after the third show. Press at the time suggested they'd had an altercation with Ice Cube and some of his entourage, which you would pay good money to see if only for the differences in dialect, language and dress. As Ronan Keating so helpfully pointed out a while back, life is a rollercoaster.

12 Rollercoaster.wma

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