Jim Reid: Definitely. East Kilbride in the 70s, it felt like Mars. It felt like the world happened somewhere else. You were an observer, so travelling the world and being in a band that anyone gave a shit about seemed to us almost impossible. I think that had a part in shaping us as people, and our music, considerably.
SB: What was the music that opened the door for you and made you feel like a being in a band was possible?
JR: The punk thing was definitely when it hit home that we could do it. Me and William [Reid] were quite into music from an early age and I don’t really know where that came from – my mum and dad weren’t particularly interested in music. We got into glam, but we thought it was something other people do. Then punk rock happened and suddenly it was like: “This is something we could do. This is something that’s within our reach.” I remember hearing the Ramones and it was like a sledgehammer to the forehead. You could pick up a guitar, and within a couple of weeks you’d be playing one of their songs. Writing them was a different matter, it’s by no means easy to come up with the brilliant ideas. But still, it was a start. Punk was when it started to hit home that we could not only be listeners but the guys who make the music.
Brothers Jim Reid and William Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain, London, 1985.
SB: I am sure you guys were and maybe still are into Phil Spector girl groups. Did you hear about those bands via the Ramones?
JR: The Shangri Las were my favourite of those girl bands. I remember Leader of the Pack was in a Levi’s ad in 1975 and that was the first time I ever heard the song. As a result I dug up some more stuff of theirs. There’s just something magical about that kind of music that stuck with us. It always depresses me if you’re only into one thing – if all you listen to is heavy metal, it just seems a bit like: “Is that it? Can’t you broaden your horizons?”
SB: I was thinking about how you were drawn to so much psychedelic music – the kind of music you envisage alongside people walking about with flowers in their hair. That’s the opposite of where you came from – you were a weirdo gang, the odd ones out, and you celebrated that rather than letting it define you in any way.
JR: The odd ones out. That’s going to be written on our tombstones. We were the odd ones out. You know East Kilbride, I’m not putting the place down but it wasn’t that interesting. I don’t know what it’s like now, but in the 70s everything was geared to the mall, to normality and mass taste. We certainly felt like we stood out like sore thumbs. The weirdos. The kind of entertainment that we looked for really didn’t exist in East Kilbride and as a result we started to get into acid and stuff like that, just to take us away from the mundane. We found music that was made under the influence of drugs, and you discover a whole new alternative culture by being led down that route.
The odd ones out. That’s going to be written on our tombstones.
SB: I thought one of the stories that encapsulated the beginning and the brilliance of the Mary Chain was the one where you were all fucked on acid and taking photos of each other, and suddenly everyone from the Orange Order appears. That is probably the worst thing I can think to happen on acid.
JR: I hate to go on too much about drugs but it did happen – we did get into weird acid trips. We used to hang out around this old deserted factory in East Kilbride and get off our tits and smash the fuck out of the place. It wasn’t your flowers-in-your-hair hippy-trippy stuff. We used to get, I wouldn’t say violent, but kind of creatively aggressive.
SB: From my understanding, you went from playing music in your house to making albums. A lot of your connections seem closely defined by people: meeting Bobby [Gillespie] and Alan [McGee]. Can you explain how you met those guys?
JR: Who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t met Bobby and Alan. It was pure luck. We would try to get a gig in Glasgow and no one was interested; we’d given a tape of a demo to some guy who was putting on a club, and he wasn’t interested. But it just so happened there was a Syd Barrett compilation on the other side of the tape, and he knew Bobby and said: “Here’s a compilation – you can have it if you want it.” Bobby played the Syd Barrett side, turned it over and listened to our demos and he loved them. It had a phone number on it so he phoned us up and said, “I’ve got this mate in London – he’ll put a gig on.” It all happened from that point on. It was hot a day in June, and me and William were screaming at each other. We were supposedly doing a soundcheck but me and him were screaming at each other – we’d only just met McGee, and within five minutes we were having a fight and he just thought we were nuts. He thought we were some kind of psychotic version of the Monkees or something. He was totally into it and was like: “Yeah, let’s do an album.” It was amazing that anyone even cared. It seemed to be fast-forward from that point on.
SB: It’s funny when bands start. You just get swept away. You get too busy to think about how mental it is, then only later get to the stage where you think: how the fuck did that happen?
JR: Totally. We’d gone on the dole in January 1985, and in March we were playing in New York City.
SB: Your early gigs were pretty raucous and there was eventually a riot. Was it a self-fulling prophecy?
JR: I mean, it was a lot less to do with music at that time. We could hardly play. It was as loud as hell because if we turned it down people would be going: “those guys can’t play a fucking note.” A lot of it was just: “Fucking hell – someone’s going to find us out any minute.” A lot of it came out of our insecurity and inability, I suppose. At the time, we thought “We can’t go out and sound like an honest to goodness rock band”, so we would make it so that you wouldn’t forget it. If you came to see the Mary Chain, it was something that would stay with you for a while. We deliberately pressed buttons. We knew we were winding people up. For a while, it seemed like a bit of a laugh and then it got out of control. It seemed like someone was going to get hurt bad. If it was us, then fair enough, but if it was someone in the audience then I didn’t want that on my conscious. We stepped back for a bit. We didn’t play live for about six months, and hoped it would all blow over. As luck would have it, it did.
SB: One of my favourite things of yours was a Peel Session - an acoustic session with some of the Psychocandy songs, using just guitar and voice. I think that might have been lost on people at the time because of the stories about the noise.
JR: We had always intended on doing an acoustic album but we never did get round to it. We tried with Stoned and Dethroned. It’s quite hard to pull it off – we realised we didn’t know how to make an acoustic record.
SB: When Some Candy Talking came out, I remember there was a fury with Radio 1 because they thought it was a drugs anthem?
JR: They didn’t ban it. If they had banned it that would have been great, it would have immediately been No 1. They just didn’t play it. But that was nothing new as they didn’t play any Mary Chain records. William wrote it but I am pretty sure I can say it wasn’t about drugs. The original was recorded as part of a Peel Session, so it just sounded like utter hypocrisy that they take such a hard tone.
SB: When you were playing on Top of the Pops, did you feel like you didn’t belong there? The weird world of celebrity that I can’t imagine any of you guys were into at all.
JR: No, we never really got in – that was an exclusive club we were just visiting, that’s the way it was with us. We always seemed to fuck people off. I swear to God, without trying we seemed to make enemies all over the place. We only ever got invited on Top of the Pops once. We never got asked back. I don’t know what we did. Well, I do know. We got very drunk and that was enough to piss people off. I remember we did a show called The Roxy, ITV’s version of Top of the Pops, and the floor manager made a Freudian slip: he shouted “roll the crap” instead of “roll the track”. We started pissing ourselves laughing and they chucked us out! We couldn’t believe it – they insulted us so we laughed. Things like that happened all the time. The world of celebrities and showbiz was never going to be for us, I suppose.
SB: Maybe you broke too many mirrors when you were on acid. When Bobby left to do Primal Scream full-time, did that feel like a bit of a watershed for the band or did you always know he was going to end up doing his own thing?
JR: We always knew that Bobby’s time with the Mary Chain was very temporary. We gave him a chance to join the band, which we knew he wouldn’t do – it’s not going to work being in two bands. We were all pretty good and prepped for it.
SB: You’ve previously mentioned the change of fashion, and it playing against you. I have to say I find that kind of depressing, as I don’t think the press dictate musical trends now as much as they did.
JR: I would say that’s true. I think a lot of that is to do with the fact that people get their information from all over the place, whereas in the 80s and 90s, scenes and bands were made or broken by a small number of people – the NME or Melody Maker. Now that kind of thing can’t happen anymore. I suppose it brings its own kind of problem, but there’s not that kind of sea-change anymore.
SB: When we started our band in the mid 90s, one of the things that was a driving force was that a lot of bands we liked had been marginalised. A lot of the bands that mean a lot to us – Sonic Youth, the Valentines, you guys – had been put in a drawer because the people who decided what was fashionable were into something else. It’s weird when you think what would have happened had your band started at a different time. But then again, you’d be going at a time when folks stopped buying records.
JR: You could go on for hours about bad timing. I can’t really complain. We’ve had quite a good time of it through the decades. And hey – we’re still touring and doing our thing and people come and see us, so it’s all good.
SB: I won’t bang on about when you broke up, but how have you found it since you came back?
JR: It’s kind of surprisingly enjoyable and surprisingly easy. I wasn’t sure when we got back in 2007 if there was any demand, for a start. How was it going to be with that fucking brother of mine? Am I going to kill him or is he going to kill me? We don’t always see eye to eye, William and I, but we learned how to sidestep each other. In the 90s, it got to the point where we went out of our way to annoy the fuck out of each other. We couldn’t really be in a room together. So thankfully it’s not like that now. We argue, but it’s never going to be the way it was as we’re older, a bit wiser. There’s been a lot of shit that’s happened, but we’re going to have to make the best of it and give each other space.
SB: How do you feel about the legacy of the band? I feel like it’s snowballed over the years – there are bands who don’t just sound like you but dress like you used to do. It shows that what you did had a permanence to it.
JR: It’s nice. I like to hear that bands have taken ideas that we had and run with them. It’s a bit depressing when a band are pure emulation. I have heard bands and thought it’s just the Mary Chain. What’s the point? But there are a lot of bands who have elements of us in their music, and that’s great. In essence, that’s what rock’n’roll is. Borrowing things from the past and updating them.
SB: I’m out of questions, but I’m friends with Bobby and his question was: “On what record or song do you think you achieved the perfect combination of the Shangri Las and Einstürzende Neubauten?
JR: Oh. I wish he had emailed me this question, I could have thought about it better. That’s too difficult. Maybe Some Candy Talking live.
