(Credits: Far Out / Netflix / Album Cover)
Thu 9 October 2025 8:00, UK
What do the characters of Peep Show and The Jesus and Mary Chain have in common? A deep-seated hatred of the world, that’s what.
On paper, this may seem like one of the most bizarre crossovers you could ever stumble upon, but the outright irreverence, brazenness, and spontaneity of the cult classic sitcom and the darkly beloved Scottish rock band puts them in much more similar positions than you might think. What’s frankly hilarious, however, is that this fact is more or less completely lost on the very same man who wrote the acclaimed show.
Sam Bain, one of the main writers of Peep Show, is a man who once described his work of creation as “the stubborn persistence of human suffering” and a depiction of “why ordinary people are evil”. Certainly, with the blistering noise of everything that The Jesus and Mary Chain had to offer, you’d think this soundtrack would be something right up his street. Instead, all he heard was bluster.
This came to a head when he was comically, though somewhat against his will, sat down for an interview and forced to cough up his thoughts on an album he’d never heard before, which just so happened in this case to be Psychocandy by The Jesus and Mary Chain. Having heard wild tales about what this band was involved in, Bain braced for impact and was not exactly impressed by the litany of bomb scares that awaited him.
Given that Bain opened by asking if the band name was “some kind of Christian bondage thing?”, it seemed like he wasn’t really off to the best of starts. Of course, he perhaps isn’t alone in that assertion – The Jesus and Mary Chain were most definitely a force to be reckoned with when they burst onto the scene, and their blitzing approach to their music clearly wouldn’t have appealed to even some of the most acquired tastes.
But nevertheless, their 1985 debut Psychocandy was the vehicle through which they rammed through the straight-laced motorway of pop music to that point and offered something far more interesting, if massively riotous. That message was never bound to strike the heart of every listener, though. Bain’s verdict? “The constant feedback is notorious and feels like it’s designed to exclude anyone who might enjoy healthy uplifting things like summer salads, fresh air, rambling and raspberries.”
That’s one way of putting it. Yet he had some more refined critiques, also. “After a while, though, I actually found the vocals more irritating than the feedback,” he added. “It felt like the singer (Jesus? Probably not Mary) couldn’t really be bothered. The vocals sounded like a guide track laid down by the studio runner as a placeholder before the actual singer turns up to record them.”
If you’re looking for a rather oddball example of how certain things in life simply cannot be explained, therein lies the ultimate case study. How can the creator of one of the more irreverent, chaotic, and bullish shows to ever exist be lost to the fact that Psychocandy is essentially Peep Show in album form? It’s one of those questions that will forever remain a mystery.
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