The Jesus And Mary Chain On New Album, Glasgow Eyes

Portraits by Mel Butler, Courtesy Of The Jesus And Mary Chain

Just over forty years ago, two brothers would begin their course to change rock music forever.

Writing and recording from their parent’s house in East Kilbride, Scotland, Jim and William would go on to create a sound that would forever change the course of rock n roll. Brazen enough from the start to know they were onto something revolutionary; they were also tremendously shy.  So shy, in fact, that when it came time to define their roles in the band, they flipped a coin. And the loser would become the lead singer.

Outwardly, this timidity played into their favor, often coming off as pompous and punk. It was an infectious nonchalance that fit neatly into their cooler-than-thou image. Combining their love for 60’s girl groups, the Velvet Underground, and up-and-coming generation of noise bands, the Jesus and Mary Chain created a unique juxtaposition that would not only define the band’s sound, but would also provide a sonic blueprint for the next several generation of indie/psych/alternative/noise/fringe bands to come.

When Psychocandy was released in 1985, no one had heard anything like it. It was bubblegum and barbed wire. It was a wall of sound crumbling from its own foundation of cheap lo-fi Japanese guitar pedals. From the start, there was an inherent pop sentimentality that shined through even the darkest, most turbulent moments. Beginning with the devastating and now iconic “Just Like Honey,” the album followed with an onslaught of distortion—especially heavy at the time, and still seething today. Bouncing back and forth between a reverbed quietude and an angry hiss, the record sputters, slices and shimmers into a controlled chaos and impending sense of danger. And that was just the beginning.

This week, Jesus and Mary Chain are set to release their eighth album, Glasgow Eyes. It’s their second since the band’s notorious midtour breakup back in 1998, and one that embraces those lost days, ultimately using them as subject matter for this new chapter. The band still shows their influences proudly, this time highlighting the anxiety-inducing synths of bands like Suicide at the forefront. We caught up with Jim Reid (the loser of that original coin toss), to talk about Glasgow Eyes, sibling rivalry as inspiration, and just how important that last scene in Lost in Translation was for the band.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jim Reid…

How do you guys go into recording mode? Does it differ from the early days?

We bring in some songs, each of us, and then we collaborate on the recordings of those songs. That’s generally the way it works. It becomes a band when we get into the studio. We’ve got a bunch of songs, and we look at what we got. Then we start recording probably more of them than we need to. During the course of recording an album— I wouldn’t say the ‘weaker songs,’ but the songs that aren’t coming together, just kind of fall away, and you’re left with the album.

I’ve read that the lead single ‘Jamcod,’ is essentially about the demise of Jesus and Mary Chain, and the fight between you and your brother. Is it an odd thing to be sitting in a studio next to the person that you wrote a critical song for, and about.

I mean, not really. I guess we’ve been over that by now. The significance of that evening is not something we haven’t discussed. It’s not like something he has no knowledge of. He was there. The shit happened. It was horrible. It was unpleasant. But it was in the past. And the fact that it was in past, and the fact that we are still making music together, it illustrates perfectly that the wounds have been healed. But it was a pretty extreme time in our lives, so I think it was kinda worth talking about as far as subject matter for a song.

People associate Jesus and Mary Chain sound with the guitar distortion sound of Psychocandy. On this new record, there are some equally anxiety inducing sounds, but this time it seems to be much more electronic based than guitar. Was that something new you wanted to explore?

On this album, sonic and otherwise, I suppose there is nothing that we haven’t done before in some way or another. We’ve used synths a lot. We’ve used drum machines a lot, but never quite so much. Never on a whole album. We’ve done much more experimental stuff on B-sides I suppose. There’s an element in those particular recordings that we wanted to get into these albums. We’ve always been interested in drum machines and bands that use them. Bands like Kraftwerk and Can and D.A.F., all of those bands from the 70s and 80s were massively important to us. Perhaps it has not been as obvious in the past. But here we are, another case of the Mary Chain doffing our caps to the many people that made us start a band.

Yeah, I was sad to see Damo Suzuki of Can pass. And Mary Weiss, I know you’ve said the Shangri-las were one of your biggest influences.

Yeah, I saw that. They’re all dropping all around us.

Do you have a favorite Jesus and Mary Chain record?

I don’t because I remember the reason why each of those records was made. They are all important to us. It’s almost like asking who is your favorite child — it doesn’t really work that way.

Munki had its twenty fifth anniversary recently, and because of the fighting and breaking up mid-tour, people associate that as a breakup record. How do you look back at that record? What do people get wrong with that record. What should they know?

We talked about it a lot because Munki was the record that came out at the wrong place/wrong time, that record. There were all sorts of reasons that that record didn’t do well. The main few reasons were that the two main guys in the band, myself and my brother, couldn’t even be in the same room together. So that didn’t help. Britpop seemed to be the big thing in the UK, and something we seemed to be excluded from. And America was still at the tail end of grunge, which we also seemed to be excluded from. There seemed to be no place for the Mary Chain. It almost seemed like people just wanted us to go away. That’s what it felt like. And the frustrating thing was, against all of the odds, we couldn’t stand each other, people didn’t want it, and we still made one of the best records of our career. Which was the most frustrating thing about it. So, we went out and toured that record and there weren’t many people who came out. But those who were, were enthusiastic.

It's hard to imagine your early shows being filled with violence and riots. How do explain that atmosphere? Was it the noise and distortion?

It sounds crazy, but it was mainly because we would get on stage very late. [Laughs] We would sit in the dressing room getting in the right state of mind, so there’d be a few beers. It was all about getting the right mood, the right vibe, and then the promoter would come in and tell us to get out there because they were going crazy. So, we would wander onstage about an hour late and people would be in really bad fucking moods. And we just did it one too many times. That one time was too many, they literally tried to tear the house down, and tried to tear us apart too.

It must be interesting to get these attentive respectful, reverent audiences all these years later, even though you’re playing a lot of the same songs.

It was certainly different. That’s the thing, we had performances of Psychocandy, but it’s not a Psychocandy show. Those are two incredibly different things. The Psychocandy shows were incredibly chaotic. We used to do a couple of covers, a couple of B-sides back then— and we would generally be pretty fucked up on stage as well. There was a feeling that anything could happen at those shows. Not always bad, and not always good. But there was a kind of chaos that was part of the show back then. And like I said, there were songs on Psychocandy that we didn’t do in the set ever. I don’t know why, but we didn’t. The Psychocandy performances was completely different from Psychocandy-era shows. Obviously, we are older, but playing the record from start to finish, nobody in the audience with a baseball bat looking for trouble. It was just a different thing. But a better thing, I thought.

‘Just Like Honey’ being played in the final scene of Lost in Translation is one of those perfect cinematic moments of memorable song placement. Given that the state of the band, would you say that movie played a role in the band’s resurgence of popularity? Did you see any direct impact after the movie came out?

Yeah. That did have a huge impact. It’s become, for lack of a better term, our signature song. Everybody expects that song. Before that film, it was just another song in our set, and if we didn’t play it, nobody was that fussed. Now if you look on streaming sites, it is by far our most popular track. And it is to do with that film. It brought us a whole bunch of new fans. It was a gift; it was great for us.

Your music continues to have a huge impact on music today. Is that something you hear as a listener, or do you not think about that sort of thing?

I generally don’t think about that sort of thing. People say it. Lots of young bands out there namecheck us, and that’s great. That’s the way it was meant to be for us. We didn’t just see it as showbusiness and entertainment for the year that those records were released. When we made Psychocandy, were listening to Beatles, Stones, Velvet Underground, obscure punk bands, 13th Floor Elevators, and we thought it was amazing that those people had made those songs so long ago, but us, and people like us, were digging them out and making new music because of them. And we kind of hoped that that’s the way it would be with the Mary Chain. When Psychocandy came out, we had our eye on the future. If that record had just entertained a few people in 1985/86, then it wouldn’t have been what we hoped.

I was reading Bobby Gillespie’s autobiography and there’s a passage where he speaks about what it meant to be a member of the Jesus and Mary Chain: ‘All of us were obsessed by rock n roll. It was a religion to us. In the Mary Chain, everybody was a fanatic, equally obsessed about music and image. During my time in the Mary Chain, I felt part of a heroic quest. I knew what we were doing was of some cultural importance. There was a deep, unspoken connection that all of us shared. It felt fated that we had all been brought together for this sole purpose.’

I think what Bobby is talking about there is that for certain bands, it’s not just show business. At that time, and not just then, even now, when you walk on stage, it is an extension of you. It's not an act. I used to get annoyed by our American manager who would say ‘You’re one of the best acts I’ve ever seen.’ It’s like, it’s not a fucking act. What it is, is that we actually lived and breathed it. It was something that we would oversee every single element of the Mary Chain. If somebody was designing the cover, we would be standing over them telling them exactly what we wanted the cover to look like. It used to drive people mental because we would have a video director, but we would be directing the video director. And he’d be thinking, ‘Why don’t you go to the pub and let me finish editing this’ and we’d be saying ‘We’re not doing that because if we do that then it would be shite now. So we’re going to sit here and make sure you do it properly.’ Everything that had the name The Jesus and Mary Chain on it, we had to approve it and if not, do it ourselves. It was an entire lifestyle. It was not just the band, it was the people in the band, projected as a band.

I heard that you are doing a book as well?

Yeah. It’s finished, but not sure when it will be out. Perhaps in the summer.

Did you really flip a coin to determine who would be the singer and who would be the guitarist.

Well, you know nobody believes that it’s true, but it fucking well is true. We were then, and still now, very shy people. The idea of being front man of a punk rock band was —terrifying doesn’t cover it— so I was like, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. And William’s like ‘well I’m not doing it.’  So we flipped a coin and I lost. I lost.

So the loser was the lead singer!

Yes, the loser was the lead singer.

There’s a lot of sibling rivalry in the music world today. Do you have any sympathy or empathy for the Oasis brothers? Do you relate to that at all.

It was all so spookily familiar. When I saw that all happening, I was like ‘Here we go again.’ [Alan] McGee [of Creation Records] once said in an interview that he was prepared to deal with the Gallagher brothers because he had already been together with the Reid brothers. And it’s true. It’s true.