White Noise, Black Moods
‘I want to make as much money as Phil Collins. I don’t think mass appeal always has to be bad. People think: “Football stadiums? Crap! It can’t be any good.” I’d like to be the band that proves that isn’t true.’
William Reid to Nina Malkin for Raygun magazine
When the BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Smith heard ‘Some Candy Talking’, which was, at this point, safely residing in the UK Top Twenty, he was incensed. He believed the song was clearly a love song to heroin and refused to play it on his show, fearing that the nation’s Radio 1-devoted youth would be corrupted if they heard it. The press required a response from the Mary Chain, and McGee was no longer there for them to deliver a statement. Jim became the voice of the group, whether he liked it or not.
‘“Some Candy Talking” is not about heroin,’ Jim confirms. ‘When that whole thing kicked off, I was in Paris. I got a call and they wanted me to go live on Radio 1. I’m having a holiday, let somebody else do it. William didn’t want to, so it ended up being Rob Dickins. At the end of it I said, “Did you tell them that the original recording was commissioned by the BBC? That it was originally recorded as a John Peel session?” “Ah, no, I never thought of that.”’
When a record is banned it generally becomes a sure-fire hit, but the Beeb had made this mistake before, and they weren’t going to make it with the Mary Chain. The record, therefore, was never officially axed; Radio 1 just starved it of airplay, letting it sink. ‘They’d got wise because of all the stuff with Frankie Goes To Hollywood and “Relax”,’ Jim explains.
With regard to any narcotic references in the Mary Chain’s songs, Jim has always been dismissive, at least partly because it is no one else’s business unless he or William chooses to be explicit about those themes. But also, people are famously quick to pin the blame on stars when their fans, in a supposed attempt to emulate their heroes, choose to experiment with drugs.
‘Sometimes people see drug references that aren’t there,’ Jim offered in an interview with The Aquarian Weekly. ‘I’m not saying there’s none at all, but some fans go over our lyrics with a fine-tooth comb. People should take responsibility for their own life. If someone in a band says, “Yeah, I took smack,” then if some fans take it because of that, they’re just idiots.’
*
The Mary Chain still had no replacement in mind for the position of manager, so they tried their best to make their way without one, organising their affairs on their own. Jim’s then partner Laurence was an invaluable support; she was a strong but approachable character, she knew about music, and obviously she was close to the band. However, once the music press discovered that Laurence was helping out, they immediately wrote about it as if the Mary Chain had turned into a Spinal Tap-style operation, which was some way off the mark.
Jim says: ‘There was a classic thing in the music papers saying, “In true Spinal Tap tradition, the Mary Chain have sacked their manager and got the singer’s girlfriend in.” I thought it was quite funny. I think Laurence laughed.’ She didn’t.
‘I was really offended by that,’ says Laurence. ‘It wasn’t the attention, it was just that my role was to kind of be a glorified personal assistant more than anything else. I wasn’t going to be making any decisions but I went with Jim to meet people to make sure I knew what was going on. So that was not very nice.’
Laurence was also trying to maintain some domestic balance for Jim because the tension within the group was reaching seemingly impossible new heights. The Reids wanted to start working on their next album, but Psychocandy had been such a success that the pressure was on to make an album that would be just as good, if not better.
‘Shortly after I moved to London, they had to start Darklands. Oh my God . . .’ says Laurence. ‘The process was painful, to say the least.’
‘I remember being a lot more uptight,’ William admitted in a 2009 interview with Pitchfork. ‘Once we made Psychocandy we were burdened, and it put a lot of stress on the relationship between me and Jim.’
The Reids had already started writing songs and forming the concept of Darklands – Jim, who felt like ‘a rabbit caught in the headlights’, relaxed a little when he heard the quality of William’s song ‘Darklands’ – but they also needed space in which to come to terms with their rapidly changing lives. It wasn’t just about the loss of McGee, and the inevitable if temporary animosity between them, but the simple fact that they were now very much in the public eye and, therefore, targets. Not just for libidinous teenage girls, either.
‘Jim would get people wanting to hit him,’ John Moore remembers. ‘“You’re that guy with the shit band . . .” He got beaten up at a Birthday Party gig, someone just decked him. I think Jim and William needed a bit of time away to come to terms with what had happened with McGee too.’
On being asked about their next tour by Smash Hits, Jim warned ominously that, whatever happened, they couldn’t go away together for longer than a month. ‘If it was any longer than that, I don’t even like to think about what might happen.’
The Reids admittedly spent most of their time on the road screaming at each other; it’s no wonder they had to press ‘pause’. ‘William is the really intense one,’ says John Moore. ‘Jim would be fun, but then when he was working with William it was like a battle. You know the Scanners film, where one of their heads is about to explode? They were scanning each other. They say you shouldn’t get involved in a boy-girl fight; well, don’t get involved in a Reid-Reid fight.’
There was no use in trying to work out what the triggers were either. According to William, it took next to nothing to tip them over into savage combat and they would argue about anything and everything – ‘Whether it was a grey day or a slightly sunny day. Whether the new McDonald’s vegetarian burger tasted like Mexican food or Indian food . . . that actually was one of the big fights.’
*
The Mary Chain had six months until their next major shows: two nights at the National Ballroom in Kilburn, North-West London. By this point another change had taken place: John Moore had moved from drums to guitar, his main instrument. The Reids were keen to move on from the two-drum Moe Tucker set-up, and this change would soon herald the Mary Chain’s drum-machine era, although this was really nothing new for the Reids; their early Portastudio demos had programmed drums, after all.
In the meantime, Laurence Verfaillie put the Reids in touch with a drummer called James Pinker, playing with the Australian fusion band Dead Can Dance at the time. He was booked to play drums for the Mary Chain at the Ballroom on 15 and 16 December. It felt like he was in the band for ‘a minute – but a long, fun, scary minute,’ from which, he jokes, he ‘never fully recovered’.
‘I was pretty scared as I had to learn all of their songs in a week,’ Pinker remembers. ‘It was daunting. Jim and William were like twins. Douglas was like a brother too. Lovely bloke. They carried a box of SM58s [microphones] with them as Jim smashed up a few at each gig.’
Mary Chain gigs may have been chaotic, but it was an organised chaos. Much was deliberate and carefully decided, particularly the elements that were seemingly accidental or out of control. ‘They had it worked out perfectly,’ says John Moore. ‘On one occasion they’d forgotten their fuzz pedals and they didn’t have anything to make feedback with except a cassette recorder onto which they had already recorded feedback. They just held that up to the microphone. That’s preparation, isn’t it?’
James Pinker’s tenure didn’t last beyond those two pre-Christmas gigs, but the Reids hadn’t yet decided for certain that they definitely wanted a more electronic sound. They actually wanted a drummer, but they couldn’t find anyone who was right.
‘We auditioned dozens of drummers,’ says Jim. ‘Purely on ability, we could have got one easily, but we wanted somebody we could spend ten weeks on a tour bus with. We kept getting these guys that started going on about what type of sticks they would use. We didn’t give a fuck what type of sticks they were going to use! It’s a bit of wood, you moron!’
One contender was the now sadly departed Nick Sanderson, sometime drummer in The Gun Club, a group the Reids and Douglas had always loved. Nick would join the Mary Chain in later years, and all who knew him recall his boundless charm and energy, but his first audition for the band did not go well. To be fair, considering the perversity of the Mary Chain, this makes it hard to imagine why they didn’t instantly fall in love with him. He was more appropriate in terms of attitude, feel and humour than many drummers who would later work with the Reids.
‘We’re all a bunch of wasters, but Nick was the king of the wasters,’ Jim says. ‘He turned up to the audition hungover as hell. I said, “Right. Do you know “Never Understand?’” “No, how does it go?” “Er . . . do you know any of our songs?” “No.” So I said, “Well, just start playing a slow beat.” “I haven’t got any sticks.” He didn’t pass the audition.’
Eventually the Reids decided to quit the search and opt for drum tapes instead. Drum machines don’t go on about their favoured brand of drumstick. They don’t drink the rider or throw in unnecessary drum fills. You can switch off a drum machine. But this change also reintroduced a cooler, mechanical sound to the Mary Chain’s music. Jim just wishes they’d made a better choice of drum machine.
‘I love tinny, biscuit-tin drum machines,’ Jim says. ‘But we made a mistake. We should have used one that sounded more like a drum machine. We used a 1980s drum machine that just sounded like a crap drummer.’
In the studio it soon became clear that Darklands would be a Jim-and-William-only operation. The songs they chose for the album reflected a different kind of light and shade to that of Psychocandy, and there was a distinct lack of white noise – perhaps a sign that the Reids were becoming more assured in their voices and their playing. They no longer had to hide behind an opaque wall of protective distortion, like a roaring sea separating themselves and the listener. They also didn’t want to do what people expected of them, and they had no intention of making Psychocandy: The Sequel, which is, of course, what the label was hoping for.
This very different sound and mood on their latest studio recordings would be a revelation to Douglas and John as well as to the fans, not least because the Reids’ bandmates were not involved in the proceedings. Douglas says: ‘When they were about halfway through, I realised, “I haven’t seen them for a while, what are they doing?” I’d started making films, I was always doing something. I’d visit them in the studio a couple of times, and it was very much the same sort of thing as with Psychocandy: tea and toast, not cocaine or anything. That came much later with the Mary Chain.’
The Reids would concur; they were as fond of getting obliterated as the next man – in fact they were arguably quite a bit fonder – but when it came to writing songs, stimulants were wisely eschewed because, as William puts it, ‘when you get drunk or stoned or do speed, the stupidest ideas make you feel like a genius. I’ve written songs in that state that I’ve thought were fucking brilliant. Then I’ve woken up the following day and realised what shite they are.’
The new album would feature ‘April Skies’, the song that would become their biggest hit in, naturally, April 1987; the slow, obsessive ‘Nine Million Rainy Days’; the lighter ‘Cherry Came Too’; ‘Happy When It Rains’, and one of their earliest songs, ‘On The Wall’.
‘On The Wall’ was originally to have appeared on Psychocandy; the Reids took their Portastudio demo of the track to Rob Dickins, who instantly loved it. And so, in true Mary Chain style, they forgot all about it. ‘Another classic Mary Chain shooting-themselves-in-the-foot situation,’ says Jim. ‘Rob raved about it, he was saying, “That’s a number one hit single!” We just went away and recorded the album without the track that the chairman of the company was raving about. I think at the time we thought we couldn’t do it justice.’
The demo would be included on the 7-inch release of the single ‘Dark-lands’ in October 1987, and also in 1988 on the Mary Chain’s much-loved Barbed Wire Kisses – B-Sides And More collection. Even the demo version is a nugget of 1980s alt-pop perfection, a clear example of how the Reids were crafting pop gems years before they’d even left their shared bedroom. Echoing, sparse chords turn towards and away from each other like moving figurines on a Black Forest clock. William’s guitar drones shimmer and the track concludes with dripping rainwater and moaning guitar wails that rise and fade. For all the beauty of the Darklands version, there is a purity to the demo which sets it apart.
For Darklands, the Reids were under pressure from the label to work with a producer. They had found a way of recording that worked for them, but it was clear they had to at least try to play the game to keep Warners happy. One suggestion from the Warners camp was that they team up with Chris Hughes, who had produced Tears For Fears. Hughes worked with Tears for Fears’ keyboard-player Ian Stanley as a production duo, and so the Reids duly travelled to Bath to stay at Stanley’s house to record some demos. It didn’t go well.
‘One of the demos we recorded with them was the song “Darklands”, says Jim. ‘We weren’t getting into this at all. They’d be getting super-enthusiastic about things we didn’t give a fuck about, and by the end of the week we’d just had it. They had some idea they wanted to try, so we said, “Oh, just help yourselves,” and went to bed. We got up in the morning, these idiots had been up all night, and they were going, “You’ve got to hear this! This is going to blow you away!”
‘They played us “Darklands” and they’d been up all night recording a double bass on it. William and I looked at each other, and we just burst out laughing. You know when you can’t control yourself? I was nearly wetting myself.’
Word immediately got back to Warners about the Mary Chain’s dismissal of Hughes and Stanley’s best efforts, and the usually composed Rob Dickins lost his rag with the Reids, which set them off again. ‘Rob called us and went, “You fucking losers! You had a world-class producer, and what did you do? You laughed at him!” And then we started laughing again . . .’
Fortunately, the suggestion of working with Bill Price on ‘April Skies’ was more successful. ‘They liked the association with the Sex Pistols,’ says Laurence. ‘I remember going with Jim to meet Bill at the studio in Highbury, Wessex Studios. He looked like a middle-aged geezer, but musically things worked out.’
‘I was there when they recorded “April Skies”, says John Moore. ‘Even contributed a line to it. Sun grows cold, sky turns black . . . In this day and age, you know, “change a word, get a third”. Ah well. I think I’d had enough from the Mary Chain without that.’
Naturally, the whole process from the writing to the artwork was painstaking and considered. Laurence remembers being at home with Jim as he crouched in front of the TV with a video of cult 1971 movie The Jesus Trip in the VCR. ‘He was trying to find the perfect freeze-frame of the guy on his cross for the cover,’ she remembers. ‘How many times did I see that gesture of the hand coming out and the gun being pointed?’
‘April Skies’ reached number 8 in the UK, their highest singles chart position, and, despite the only musicians on the actual track having been the Reids, the video still featured the four Mary Chain members playing along with the song in an abandoned building, the sight of John thumping the snare and floor tom proving somewhat incongruous with the electronic drum track.
Psychologically, a line had been drawn in the sand. The Mary Chain was, now, truly the Reid brothers. Darklands was solely their production, and, to be fair, much of the work on Psychocandy had been executed by Jim and William too. From this point forth the group, as it was, became more of a touring line-up. As William once admitted, it was only in the early days with Bobby that they were really ‘a band’.
‘It must have been hard for Douglas,’ says John. ‘It was hard for me, and I wasn’t an original member. Any involvement I had would have been a bonus. What can you say? We’re talking about a time in musical technology where, all of a sudden, using a drum machine becomes the favourite tool. Everything became very exact, very clinical.’
That said, for many – even within the band itself – Darklands is the preferred LP. It is unusual for the ‘difficult second album’ to eclipse the first, but there was a maturity that shone through on this record. Something new and bewitching had burst out of the chrysalis. ‘My favourite album is Darklands,’ says Douglas. ‘The songs were better. But I wasn’t really involved in it. I don’t blame them, they were young and things were happening. It was just different.’
The Reids played Darklands to their loved ones, who were impressed by the new sound, not to mention the songwriting, the clarity, the contrasts, the humour. ‘Nine Million Rainy Days’, an obsessive love song augmented by a wry reference to the Stones’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ with its ‘ooh-ooh’ backing vocals, was a particular favourite.
‘The Rolling Stones thing was to lighten it,’ William explained to Steve Sutherland at the time. ‘We thought “Nine Million Rainy Days” was brilliant but too heavy, [so] that last bit we thought was quite a good little joke. Nobody seemed to get it, though. I think everybody thought we’d done it with deep frowns. Oh well . . .’
‘I loved “Nine Million Rainy Days”,’ says Laurence. ‘But people were shocked. “Where’s the feedback?” Jim and William were like, “We are not performing monkeys. That’s what we wanted to do, that’s how it is.” Darklands really was the album they wanted to make.’
The lack of feedback would prove a shock to the press and many of the band’s fans. More than one journalist would refer to the Reids ‘doing the unthinkable’ and creating an album that was, basically, not Psychocandy. Their debut album had, like the Mary Chain themselves, seemingly burst out of nowhere, a startling, fully formed force of nature and noise. However, as William suggested in an interview with Sky TV at the time, why should the Reids repeat themselves when they had simply been using feedback ‘the way other people use keyboards’? White noise was just another instrument at their disposal.
‘Simply Red used keyboards on their last single and they didn’t use them in this one, and it would be a weird situation for people to say, “Where’s the keyboards?”’ said William. ‘That’s how it sometimes feels to us.’
The Reids were also more than aware that their greatest strength was their songwriting, and as their confidence continued to grow, they were less inclined to drown out their songs with distortion. But part of the thrill of releasing an album as unexpected as Darklands would be that, just as people were getting used to the Mary Chain’s penchant for cranking out the kind of metallic, industrial screams one might otherwise hear at an international welding convention (maybe William’s time working with sheet metal was not entirely wasted), they could then yank the rug unceremoniously from under their feet and present something that no one had predicted. The songs had always been there, and yet even in later years William would have to defend the Mary Chain’s more melodic output. They were hardly ‘going soft’, there were just two sides to the Reids’ songwriting and they wanted to express them both, even if the pop world would have preferred to tidy them into a narrow box labelled ‘noisy’ and be done with it.
‘Probably fifty per cent of our music is slow and very melodic and not at all noisy,’ William explained. ‘It wasn’t a conscious effort but we have the same kind of songwriting sensibilities as the Beatles, who could write “Helter Skelter” and “Penny Lane” and be the same band – it’s two different aspects. That’s something a lot of people don’t appreciate. Whenever we play something slow and melodic, people turn on us and say we’re soft. We’ve always done that, but there seems to be a side of us that we’re not allowed to be comfortable with.’