“Upside Down” is the first single released by the Jesus and Mary Chain.

The single was released on Alan McGee’s Creation Records in November 1984. McGee found the band through his friend Bobby Gillespie (the Chain’s future drummer), who gave him the band’s demo tape and asked him to book them a spot on the Creation Records night at the Roebuck pub in London. Though the band was seriously inebriated and played a set of incomprehensible, feedback-poisoned covers, McGee saw a hit and signed them on the spot.

The band, having had only a few months' practice at live performance and no recording experience save for their home demos, worked long hours into the night to record this single.

Lead singer Jim Reid on the recording session:

We’d work from midnight till about seven or something like that but we didn’t care; it was brilliant. The engineer that was there kept playing everything through these massive Tannoy speakers and everything sounded amazing. “Fucking hell!” we thought. “We didn’t realise we sounded so powerful!” We made this version of “Upside Down” and when we played it back it sounded like Dire Straits! We couldn’t work out why until someone pointed out we’d been playing it through these mega fucking blow-out–the-neighbourhood speakers and they’d make anything sound like The Velvet Underground so we had to go back in and remix it.
And we tried to do that and we did that classic thing where everybody’s in the studio saying, “Turn this up!” “No, turn that up!” so it was then decided that William [Reid] and Alan [McGee] would go in and mix “Upside Down”.

The single, originally pressed in an edition of 1,000, sold out quickly and went on to sell around 20,000 copies. It established Creation as a label to be reckoned with and garnered the Jesus and Mary Chain their first hints of fame.

Famed DJ John Peel was a fan of this record, putting it in his year-end Festive 50 in between The Smiths‘ “Reel Around the Fountain” and the Cocteau Twins’ “Pandora”.