‘THE BUBBLE COULD POP AT ANY MINUTE’
The Jesus & Mary Chain reflects on its progression
When Jim Reid looks back at early interview videos of his band’s career he tends to cringe.
“I can’t stand it when they pop up on YouTube,” he confesses from his hotel room in Spokane, Wash. The lead singer and rhythm guitarist for The Jesus & Mary Chain is doing a lastminute interview before sound check.
“There was definitely an arrogance,” he wryly notes. “We were all bluff, but we also had self-belief and self-doubt as well. Probably because we felt that the bubble could pop at any minute, we felt the need to talk it up big.”
This is something the band from the small town of East Kilbride, Scotland, did quite regularly in their mid-’80s heyday, when they were almost as well known for playing 15-minute sets and sparking crowd riots as they were for their music, which had echoes of everything from The Shangri Las to the Velvet Underground. The press reports of violence were somewhat exaggerated, but a few video relics of after-gig destruction remain from the era to corroborate the legend. As do the band’s cheeky, often hilarious early pronouncements, like when Reid declared that his “guitar is totally out of tune, because (his) guitar is for kicking,” or dismissed many other groups of their era to be “complete rubbish.”
Based around the songwriting and guitar playing of the brothers Reid (William is the guitar/singing/songwriting foil to Jim) The Jesus & Mary Chain found critical and popular favour, lost it, and then broke up in 1999 after six albums, including two stonecold classics in Psychocandy and Darklands. They restarted again in 2007 after the notoriously volatile brothers patched things up; it took them 10 years to release a new record but they finally came through in the early part of 2017 with Damage and Joy. We spoke with Jim Reid before the first of the band’s two dates in Canada:
Q Damage and Joy almost sounds like an overview of various Jesus and Mary Chain albums to me. Do you hear that as well?
A I think it’s a bit like parts of Mary Chain albums, yes. We’ve been away for awhile, at least in terms of releasing new music, so it probably would have been too much to come back with a record that sounded nothing like what people thought it would. We wanted a classic sound.
Q But wouldn’t people disagree on what the “classic” Jesus & Mary Chain sound is? I mean, Psychocandy is different than Darklands.
A I guess that’s true; everyone has a different idea of what the classic Mary Chain album is, including in our own minds. We took from every album, but you could also say that we picked up from where we left off on Munki (1998).
Q Damage and Joy features a few songs that had been released elsewhere, like Song for a Secret, which you issued as a solo single in 2005, and Can’t Stop the Rock, which you recorded with your sister Linda under the name Sister Vanilla in 2007. Were you just giving them a second life?
A That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Those records came out and fizzled. To be blunt, nobody bought them because there was nothing behind them. The Mary Chain name wasn’t there, and we released them on our own label with no promo. We didn’t want those songs to disappear and never be remembered, so we thought we’d reintroduce them under the Mary Chain name.
Q It’s a legacy name, one that promises something other bands don’t have.
A I can only speak for ourselves, but we felt pretty sure when we started that we had something.
Q Doesn’t every young band have that feeling, though?
A Yeah, you’re right, I suppose every band does. That was us at the time, though, and we knew that we had made a record (Psychocandy) that wasn’t just for the year it was released. it was meant to be relevant decades later. We felt like there would be these little malcontent kids sitting around listening to it 30 years later and thinking, “Yeah, this is a blueprint. I’ll run with this.”
A We did a 30th-anniversary tour for it, so I guess we got what we wanted.
Q Are you seeing more kids in the audience these days?
A Yeah, we’re also seeing more and more young bands namechecking us, and people are looking us up as a result. When I was a kid in the (mid-’70s) punk years people would also namecheck bands like The Velvet Underground, but it was hard to find out more. Now it takes a click of a mouse, and I think that’s great.
Q This is your first time to Edmonton. As someone from a small country and an even smaller town do you like to get to places that don’t normally see bands like yours?
A A lot of it is up to the people who route our tours, but yeah, we like to go places we’ve never been before. It’s monotonous to do the same places over and over again. You play a place like London or New York and people are spoiled for music. They see a different band every night of the week, but go off the beaten path where people have less choice and it can be intense. So, yeah, I’m all for going to the East Kilbrides of Canada.
Q History has proven you right.