Psychocandy
The same year, the band signed to Blanco y Negro and released the singles "You Trip Me Up" and "Never Understand", which were soon followed by their debut album Psychocandy. The album fused together the Reids' two primary influences, the guitar noise of The Stooges and The Velvet Underground with the '60s pop leanings of The Beach Boys, The Shangri-Las and Phil Spector -- in fact, the album's opening song, "Just Like Honey," borrows Hal Blaine's famous drum intro from The Ronnettes 1963 classic, "Be My Baby", produced and co-written by Spector. Also an influence was the sonic explorations of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd. It has been noted that the band was very fond of drugs such as LSD and amphetamines and that the drugs influenced the ear-piercing, screeching feedback, which immediately became their trademark. The record received unanimously positive reviews and is now considered a landmark recording.
Not a group to stay out of trouble, the Mary Chain were thrown out of their record company's offices after a fight broke out, and Reid was arrested for possession of amphetamines in Germany. This earned them the now infamous comparisons to The Sex Pistols (another key influence on the band) by the UK press and led to numerous appearances in the infamous UK tabloids. Like the Pistols' "Anarchy" tour, the Mary Chain were banned from Plymouth, Birmingham, Sheffield, and removed from a Glasgow concert for swearing onstage. The final date in Brighton was attended by 600 fans and an impressive army of police, but the band and the crowd behaved themselves.
Two months later, the WEA pressing plant refused to handle the Mary Chain's third single, "You Trip Me Up", because some of its staff considered the B-side, "Jesus Suck" (originally titled "Jesus Fuck"), to be blasphemous. They were forced to replace the cut with "Just Out of Reach."
