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William and Jim Reid, 2017 vintage: ‘I thought, I want us to be the way we used to be.’
William and Jim Reid, 2017 vintage: ‘I thought, I want us to be the way we used to be.’ Photograph: Warner Music
William and Jim Reid, 2017 vintage: ‘I thought, I want us to be the way we used to be.’ Photograph: Warner Music

The Jesus and Mary Chain: ‘Pop is dreadful. Switch on a radio, I guarantee it’ll be garbage’

This article is more than 6 years old
Jim and William Reid have been back in the studio for the first time in two decades – and just about survived each other to make new album Damage and Joy. They talk about being trapped in the desert, playing the Haçienda and the horrors of Heart FM

Ten years ago, the Jesus and Mary Chain reformed. Reunion gigs were announced and sold out: the first, at the Coachella festival in California, featured a guest appearance from Scarlett Johansson, singing backing vocals on their 1985 single Just Like Honey. Retrospective compilation albums and box sets were released. Interviews were given and articles written, detailing the salient points of their career – their roots in the South Lanarkshire new town of East Kilbride, their feedback-drenched early sound (which gamely attempted to meld the melodies of 60s girl groups with the sulphurous industrial noise made by Einstürzende Neubauten), the chaos and violence of their live shows, their unexpected rise from music-press favourites to mainstream Top of the Pops success, their agonising decline – and lauding their importance. And among fans and critics alike, there was rejoicing that the relationship between Jim and William Reid – apparently irreparably ruptured after a disastrous 1998 gig in Los Angeles, which ended after 15 minutes with the brothers, as Jim later put it, “trying to kill each other” – had in fact been mended.

There was, Jim Reid concedes today, just one problem. Their relationship had not been mended at all. “The band was back together and we were playing live, but there was still … we weren’t really … we were saying to everybody: ‘Yeah, everything’s great now,’ and it wasn’t great. We were still sort of chucking things at each other at any opportunity.”

Never Understand, from their first album, Psychocandy.

A long-time observer of the band might suggest that meant things were very much back to normal. The Reid brothers’ relationship was always legendarily combustible, marked by explosions of physical violence: as if to set the tone for the rest of their career, the pair managed to have a fight on stage at the sound check before their first London gig. Jim was apparently furious at the torrent of feedback emerging from William’s amplifier, a mistake that would soon become their trademark. Now, a big sticking point was whether or not the reformed Mary Chain should record a new album. William was keen: “I just wanted to do it,” he says. “I just thought: let’s go into the studio and just do it, rip it out in a couple of weeks or a couple of months or whatever, but just do it. I mean, it’s great to have a strong back catalogue and to play those songs on stage, but doing that ad infinitum … I thought: ‘I want to do more than this, I want us to be the way we used to be,’ which was an alive band.”

His brother wasn’t so sure. For one thing, he had young children at home and didn’t want to spend more time recording in the US. For another, he “just didn’t know what another Jesus and Mary Chain album was going to sound like”. How, he wondered, would a middle-aged version of the band, previously the incarnation of a very youthful kind of rage and disaffection, work? “If you had asked me when I was 25: ‘Can you see yourself doing this at 55?’ I would have pissed myself laughing,” he notes, “but here I am.”

Furthermore, he says, the disastrous sessions for the Jesus and Mary Chain’s last album, 1997’s Munki, weighed heavily on his mind. “It was painful, it was bloody painful. That was when we couldn’t be in the same room together, let alone the same band as each other. So I’d go in and record my stuff, he’d go in separately and record his stuff. It was supposed to take two weeks and it took a year and a half, and then it came out and nobody seemed to care. I mean, the weird thing is that I love that record. The music didn’t suffer, but the people who made the music certainly did.”

So the pair quarrelled about everything: how the album would sound, where they would record it. “It was like a fucking seesaw,” says William. “I wanted to do it and he didn’t want to do it – then fast forward a couple of years and he wants to do it and I was going through a time when I just didn’t want to do nothing, you know? We just couldn’t get that first step done. We just couldn’t.”

Always Sad, from Damage and Joy.

And yet, here we are, almost exactly a decade after their first comeback gig, discussing the new Jesus and Mary Chain album, Damage and Joy: Jim nursing a cup of coffee in a nondescript west-London hotel bar and William over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. They are, according to Jim, “getting on better, to the point where it’s almost like it was before we were in the band, when we were the opposite of what everyone thinks we are now; we were really good mates”.

Indeed, even separated by 5,000 miles, it’s hard not to be struck by how alike the pair seem. They’re both polite and friendly – a far cry from the Jesus and Mary Chain you can see in old clips on YouTube, answering questions with contemptuous monosyllables – if they can be bothered to answer them at all – and clearly incredibly shy. William apologises in advance for his shortcomings as an interviewee (“I’m not very articulate over the phone”) and his answers frequently tail off, his attempts to find the right words replaced by frustrated muttering involving much exasperated deployment of the word “fuck”.

As their manager, Alan McGee, has pointed out more than once, they share an ability to make rather heavy weather of life in a band, and indeed life generally. I ask them both if, given the fraternal fighting, the constant battles with a record company that kept trying to get them to work with producers who had made hits for Tears for Fears or U2, and their fabled antipathy to touring, they ever actually enjoyed being in the Jesus and Mary Chain. “Was I ever happy, full stop?” frowns Jim. “In the Mary Chain, I guess, as in life, happiness is just fleeting.”

His brother goes further: “Is anybody ever really happy? I mean, isn’t the whole world just stressed out? We’re all going to die and nobody knows where we’re going. How can you be happy knowing that you’re going to fall off the end of a cliff someday?”

Their similarities in character notwithstanding, how they ended up actually making the new album, Damage and Joy, is an intriguing question. “A couple of years ago, we just kind of thought: OK, this isn’t going to happen unless we make it happen. We thought the best thing to do would be to get a producer who could act as an intermediary,” William says. They plumped for former Killing Joke bassist Youth, in the belief that his “hippy punk” temperament might qualify him for a job Jim describes as “producer/peacekeeper, producer/Kofi Annan if the shit hits the fan”.

There were certainly moments of trepidation: Jim describes arriving at Youth’s studio in Spain and realising to his horror that it was “in the middle of a bloody desert. There’s literally nowhere else to go – all there was to do was make a record. Or,” he adds darkly, “kill each other.”

Nevertheless, their producer’s diplomatic skills turned out to be unnecessary. “What happened was that I realised, and I think William realised too, that this was our last chance,” Jim says. “If we fucked this up, there was no going back. It had taken so long to get there, and if we screwed it up with petty bickering, we would have really blown it; would have blown it big time. Had we fucked up, that would be it for the band.”

The Jesus and Mary Chain on The Tube in 1985. Photograph: Rex

“I think we bonded during the process, actually,” offers William. “I think it was a really good experience for me and Jim as brothers. I think our mother [who died in 2007] would have been proud to see us getting along so well, and doing things for our common good. I have been playing in studios over the decades, doing demos and trying to get my shit together, and I always come back to the same conclusion: that I needed Jim, you know. I needed his input, his voice. He’s not an effusive guy. He’ll never be coming to you and telling you you’re brilliant or you’re great or whatever, but Jim’s seal of approval, even if it’s just a nod or a ‘Hmmm, that’s OK,’ means a lot to me, you know? And I think the same is true of him with me. Yeah, I can make records without Jim, Jim can make records without me, but there’s a special thing that happens, and I’d kind of missed that.”

So it was a pleasurable experience?

“Pleasurable?” he says, his voice rising with incredulity. You would think I had just asked him if he enjoyed slamming his fingers in a car door. “I wouldn’t say it was pleasurable, no. I’d say it was absolutely excruciatingly stressful.”

“I wouldn’t say it was pleasant at all,” concurs his brother. “I mean, I don’t enjoy being in the studio. There’s too much at stake … it can be incredibly frustrating.”

Indeed, during the mixing of the album, he started drinking again after years of sobriety. “I don’t really want to go on about it too much, but I’m an alcoholic, and I do fall off the wagon from time to time. I drink, I’m a drunk. I was on the wagon for five years once, fell off; was on the wagon for a year and a half then just cracked one day during the making of this record, and I have been sober since 4 October. But I don’t think there was a trigger. You know, if you’ve got a drink problem, there’s always an excuse to drink.”

Either way, the end product sounds pretty triumphant: recognisably a Jesus and Mary Chain album without sounding like a rehash of their past glories. Occasionally, it has a similarly jolting effect as their early singles, not least when a song called Simian Split reaches the lines: “I killed Kurt Cobain / I put the shot right through his brain / And his wife gave me the drug / ’Cos I’m a big fat lying slob.” (“I think I wrote it after watching that Nick Broomfield documentary,” William says, referring to the film Kurt and Courtney, in which an overweight punk singer called El Duce makes unsubstantiated claims that Courtney Love asked him to murder her husband. “Yeah, it’s a provocative lyric but … I don’t know. I don’t like talking about lyrics.”)

Amputation, from Damage and Joy.

Intriguingly, several tracks are re-recordings of songs the Reids released, virtually ignored, in the years between their initial split and their reformation: Jim both, with his band Freeheat and solo; William under the name Lazycame. The single Amputation in particular paints a grim picture of a time during which the brothers “couldn’t get arrested”, as Jim puts it. “At first, I was totally happy not being in the limelight, not doing tours or any of that shit. After a while, I thought: I’ll dip my toe in the water again, and it seemed like nobody gave a shit. It was hard to look around and see bands that sounded like the Mary Chain doing better than the guys from the Mary Chain. At one point – and this is a true story – Ben [Lurie, the band’s former guitarist] and I seriously thought about forming a Mary Chain tribute band. You know, ‘Nobody gives a shit whether we do another band or not, why not make it a tribute band?’” He laughs. “Then the drink and the drugs wore off and we didn’t do it.”

He says he isn’t sure where the reformed Jesus and Mary Chain fit in any more. He occasionally hears bands that sound like their old records, but certainly never sees bands behaving with the kind of reckless, audience-baiting abandon the Reids did in their early days when a gig was “15 minutes long, pissed off your head, kick the guy in the front row and fall over, and then everyone goes mental and has a fight”.

Then again, he concedes, bands didn’t behave like that then either. “The first six months of the band, we seriously didn’t seem to give a shit,” he says, a hint of amazement at his own behaviour in his voice. “I remember we went on at Liverpool University, someone had given us a fuckload of speed before and it was just so … non-musical. We didn’t even play any songs, it was just a free-form freakout. And then afterwards, we had the gall to go and mingle with the audience! There was just a crowd of guys around us going, ‘How do you get away with it?’ When we played the Haçienda we turned around to Bobby Gillespie’s girlfriend Karen and went: ‘Do you fancy playing the drums tonight?’ She goes, ‘I cannae play drums,’ and we went, ‘Don’t worry. Neither can Bobby.’ And she did it. How do you go on stage at the Haçienda with someone playing drums who has never played drums before? It was fucking mental. Bands just don’t do things like that.”

Clearly, this kind of thing doesn’t happen any more, but in some ways, he says, he feels the same now as he did then. “We’re driven by the same things that made us make music then. In 1985, there was a kind of frustration about the status quo in music. Today, all I know about the music scene is when my kids play Heart FM and it’s dreadful. Pop music is dreadful. I mean, you find a radio now, switch it on, and I guarantee it’ll be garbage coming out. That still pisses me off. So it’s the same thing as what it was then but more … I hate to use the word mellow, but it’s a kind of mellow rage.”

Damage and Joy is out now on ADA/Warner.

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