The Jesus and Mary Chain have always been a contradiction – shy, yet anchored by total belief; gently spoken, yet famous for playing the kind of gigs that would leave you deaf for a week even if they only lasted for twenty minutes (or ‘until we got booed’, according to William Reid). They created their own genre, born of a cocktail of psychotic noise, Spector rhythms and dark lyrics, delivered via a visual explosion of smoke, leather, big hair, Ray-Bans, silhouettes and searchlights. They took the glittering jewel of pop and casually lifted it up, revealing the darkness underneath. The fractious sound of The Jesus and Mary Chain also reflected a time of significant social tension in the UK, a time of pickets and riots, conflict and change. They were past, present and future rolled into one.
Brothers William and Jim Reid, the core of The Jesus and Mary Chain, seemed to conjure sonic otherworlds inhabited by the ghosts of 1960s pop, swaying beneath layers of powerful feedback and soft, obsessive mutterings. The Mary Chain’s debut album Psychocandy, is a perfect example of this, and the dreamlike slice of doomed youth, underpinned with fractured sensitivity and subtle black humour, is now hailed as one of the greatest pop LPs of the 1980s While the considerable mystique of The Jesus and Mary Chain has always been a huge part of their appeal, the time is right to hear their story and to reconsider an impressive canon of work.
It has been a genuine pleasure to work with the Mary Chain, and to gather so many memories and perspectives for this long-overdue chronicle of their career. Every contributor has been kinder and more helpful than I could have anticipated, and it’s a privilege to present their story. When I was about to start working on this book, one question that kept coming up from various people (including Alan McGee) was: ‘Are you sure they can remember anything?’ Fortunately for me, and you, they could. Or, at least, they’ve respectively made up some very convincing anecdotes, some of which even match up with each other.
I first met Jim Reid and Douglas Hart at the Artrocker awards in 2011, where they were collecting an award for the reissue of Psychocandy. That was, of course, the main reason I went: to see one of the groups who had sound-tracked my formative years be publicly paid due respect. I already knew Mary Chain/Black Box Recorder guitarist John Moore (who, apropos of nothing, once attempted to teach me to play the musical saw), and through John I had met the Mary Chain’s then bass player, and now guitarist, Philip King. But that freezing November day in East London marked my first brief meeting with Jim, who, alongside John, was a touch hungover, speaking in what Smash Hits referred to as the famous ‘spooky whisper’ and concerned largely with the whereabouts of ‘drinkies’. Douglas Hart, who towered over me (as most people do), seemed more immediately open to an initial broaching of the book idea under circumstances that were admittedly better suited to . . . well, locating drinkies.
Cut to today and, after an eventful and industrious two years of persuasion, persistence, anecdotes and characters (and alcohol), The Jesus and Mary Chain’s biography has finally burst into tangible life, and within these pages is the rich, revealing and absorbing account of the band, thanks to Jim Reid, Douglas Hart, Bobby Gillespie, John Moore, Murray Dalglish, Alan McGee, Geoff Travis and as many former alumni and associates as I could get my hands on. William Reid, unfortunately, chose not to be involved.
On the cusp of the 1980s, before the Mary Chain existed, the Reid brothers found little acceptance in their hometown of East Kilbride, near Glasgow, preferring to stay in, or stroll through town in the middle of the night, rather than risk being targeted by gangs of neds (‘non-educated delinquents’). Not unusually for brothers, they didn’t even really want to associate with each other until their late teens, when they found common ground in their love of glam-rock and punk. They actively ‘hated each other’ when they were at school according to William, who was older and didn’t want to hang around with his little brother; by the time Jim reached sixteen he still only looked about ten anyway. ‘That was quite embarrassing,’ admitted Jim. ‘Nobody really wanted to talk to me.’ But the energy of punk, and particularly proto-punk groups such as The Stooges and The Velvet Underground, would soon unite them, motivating them (despite initial outward appearances) to create their own future, a future of making music with integrity, on their own terms. This would provide their escape and ultimately change their lives. All in good time.
The Reids’ shyness was legendary, but they had total faith in what they were doing. It is their sense of being outsiders, never being part of a ‘scene’, combined with a strong individuality and self-awareness, that really defines the Mary Chain for those who felt and feel similar. It’s a lonely but ultimately more rewarding place to be; so many continue to identify with the Mary Chain for this reason. Like the punks who went before them, The Jesus and Mary Chain are the champions of the weird, the poster boys for the misunderstood, and there was no way they were going to remould themselves to suit others. For that alone, they have a special place in my heart. They might have been chaotic onstage, they might have drunk too much, they might have even been thrown out of their own gigs in the early days – but they also knew they were, as they often nonchalantly proclaimed, ‘the best’. Once the hip and enthusiastic Bobby Gillespie joined the line-up as their Moe Tucker-style drummer, their confidence could only grow.
With Alan McGee at the management helm in their early years, the Mary Chain knew they had the power to cut through saccharine mainstream pop like a knife, forcing fans to question the culture they were being fed, just as punk had encouraged them to question the same thing. And hits? World tours? Gold records and Top of the Pops? It was all on the horizon – and once their music reached the ears of Alan McGee, success would come rapidly. ‘It wasn’t a rollercoaster,’ founding member Douglas Hart remembers. ‘It was more like a rocket.’