Love, Hate, a Departure and a Homecoming
By the time it got to [final album] Munki, we’d argue about anything. It was ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ ‘No, coffee.’ ‘Why do you want coffee?’ It just wasn’t going to work.
Jim Reid to Thomas H Green of The Arts Desk, 2010
The Mary Chain were soon ‘pregnant’, as Laurence Verfaillie put it, with their sixth studio album, and it would be the longest and most difficult birth yet, with neither Reid prepared to hold the other’s hand throughout the anguish. Still, there was an abundance of powerful songs to choose from for what would be the last Mary Chain studio album to date.
The brothers were more divided than ever, and William’s seething dissatisfaction with the music industry was never more evident; he even wrote a song to prove it: ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’. Released in May 1995, it detailed starkly how William had increasingly been feeling over the past decade. The Reids were always honest in their lyrics, but while William’s words in particular were usually open to interpretation, this time the message was cold and literal.
William doesn’t flinch from naming names either – MTV, BBC . . . (‘I love the BBC/I love it when they’re pissing on me/And I love MTV/I love it when they’re shitting on me.’) Euphemisms and thinly veiled references would have no place in this song. Some would feel he was biting the hand that had kept him in beer and weed for quite some time, but William wanted to reveal the other side of the music industry for all to see.
‘When you work for a living,’ he explained, ‘you get fucked with from nine to five. When you’re in a band, you get fucked with 24 hours a day on every continent in the world. Even when you’re sleeping you’re being fucked with somewhere. I wish I didn’t have to write this type of song.’
It was of course the business of rock’n’roll, rather than rock’n’roll itself, that William was lambasting in this song, which poured out of him in five minutes flat. ‘I came into this industry as an idealist,’ he told Rolling Stone in 1995. ‘I thought I was going to make art, but I got that kicked out of my system after about ten minutes, when we did our first single for Warners and they asked us to turn down the feedback and turn up the voice and drums for a radio mix. That felt to me like somebody saying, “Hey, Picasso, could you redo this painting, because there’s a nipple in it, and we want to show it to schoolchildren.”’
William felt resentment towards the music industry not just because he didn’t want to compromise his art, but because their success – and the Mary Chain really did want success – largely depended on how much money could (or would) be spent on promotion.
‘I have an acquaintance in an American record company who is in charge of Sheryl Crow,’ William said in an interview with Rockin’ On, ‘and I hear that, if you’re lucky, you can spend $1.5 million on promotion for one record. But we can only spend $180,000. If we had had that amount of money at first, we would have sold hundreds of times more records. I envy big bands like REM; sometimes I’m driven by envy and think, damn it, I want to sell twenty million copies too, but this is the way this business is.’
‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’ would be the first single released from the Mary Chain’s third compilation album, Hate Rock’n’Roll, which included the tracks ‘Snakedriver’ and ‘I’m In With The Out Crowd’. This compilation, released in September 1995, would also, although they didn’t know it at the time, be the band’s final release on Blanco Y Negro.
‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’ launched a new chapter for the Mary Chain in that it marked the inclusion of the band’s newest member – Nick Sanderson. Nick locked in with The Jesus and Mary Chain more than most despite a shaky start to their relationship, although that undoubtedly had more to do with the circumstances around the Reids at the time. ‘We were on a tour after Lollapalooza, and Nick was back in the picture,’ Jim explains. ‘Everybody was tense. For some reason we still didn’t hit it off with Nick, but Nick, I didn’t realise, was nervous and trying to impress us. We hardly said two words to him. He bore a grudge about that for years. Sorry, Nick . . .
‘But Nick was one of the greatest drummers I’ve ever met. He wasn’t a great technical drummer, but it came from somewhere in his gut. It always sounded just right for the Mary Chain.’
‘Monti was great, but Nick was the most exciting drummer I’ve ever worked with,’ adds Ben Lurie. ‘I mean, he’d speed up incredibly during a song. There was one song on Munki, “Degenerate”, and he did this fantastic take, but it just got so fast. The engineer sent off the tapes to have it duplicated with somebody slowing it down as it went. It just brought it back on track.’ Whatever works.
By this time Nick’s own group Earl Brutus was well underway. Combining influences such as The Fall, Kraftwerk and glam-rock, their live shows were something to behold, always highly visual, high-octane and loud. They remain one of Jim’s all-time favourite bands, and their gigs had plenty in common with the Mary Chain in terms of the atmosphere – there was always an underlying sensation that, as Jim says, ‘something bad might happen’.
‘Nick said, “We’re playing at the Café de Paris on Saturday.” I said, “What’s your band like?” And he said, “We wear pastel-blue safari suits and have our names written in neon in front of us.” They spent a fortune on these neon signs, then they all got drunk and broke them; it was great! But when he said “safari suits”, I thought, That sounds awful. That sounds bloody awful.
‘They’d get these weird gigs. They played at the Austrian embassy one time and there were people coming up to the stage trying to punch them – it was surreal. They were brilliant, they should have been bigger.’
By the time ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’ hit the charts, reaching number 61, the Mary Chain were on their latest tour, which did at least guarantee them some time in the sun. The band initially flew to New Zealand to play the first date of the tour in Auckland, only to discover the gig had been called off. This gave the Mary Chain a chance to relax in warm, idyllic surroundings; an unusual way to start a tour.
‘Auckland is a beautiful city on the water,’ Ben explains. ‘We thought it would be nice to rent a little boat, so we set off down the road and pulled in at this little marina.
‘When I think about it, three guys wearing black, wandering out of some hired car, and Jim and William asking in strong Scottish accents if they could hire someone’s boat . . . it’s no wonder no one let us have one.’ Ordinarily, the Mary Chain weren’t adept at making the most of the sometimes heavenly locations they found themselves in. Perhaps angst and exhaustion made it harder to enjoy the beauty around them, perhaps it was because they assumed they would probably return, or, perhaps, as Ben Lurie suggests, they were ‘just idiots’, we can’t know for sure. A perfect example of this would be their trip to Hawaii: on a day off, the crew rented a car and explored the island, however, Jim and Ben went to the cinema and sat in the dark, watching a movie about the island instead.
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The summer of 1995 would also see the Mary Chain crossing paths with Paul Weller yet again, this time at the Dessel Graspop Festival in Belgium. The Jesus and Mary Chain were headlining, but, as Ben recalls, ‘We got word that Paul Weller was having a hissy fit because he wanted to headline. I remember sitting at a table in catering next to his dad, a big ex-boxer, saying if he got his hands on the Mary Chain he was going to . . . whatever. I was sitting there thinking, I’m right here, dude! That’s how well known our faces are.’
After some considerable bristling of egos, Bennie Brongers, the Mary Chain’s tour manager at the time (now managing Suede), discovered that whoever did headline would be going on very late, by which time the public transport taking people away from the festival site would have finished for the night. ‘He was of the opinion that most people were going to leave after the second to last act anyway,’ says Ben Lurie.
When Bennie explained the situation to the Mary Chain, it was agreed that this was a solution that would ensure everyone had their way, supposedly. By the time Weller realised going on last at Dessel wasn’t maybe such a great idea, the Mary Chain would already have left. And so Weller was informed that the Mary Chain were graciously giving up their headline slot for him.
‘So, we did our show and were about to leave, then it started raining,’ Ben Lurie says. ‘Some rain dripped into the desk, which blew, and they had to delay Weller for a couple more hours.’ Sure enough, thanks to the rain and lack of public transport, everyone had left by the time Weller hit the stage. Be careful what you wish for.
*
Work slowly continued on the new album once the Mary Chain returned home and reconvened with engineers Alan Moulder and Dick Meaney at the Drugstore. The Mary Chain’s sixth album would, like Stoned & Dethroned, feature guest appearances from other artists, including Hope Sandoval (on the track ‘Perfume’, with William), Gallon Drunk’s Terry Edwards on trumpet, and the Reids’ younger sister and official peacemaker Linda, who would sing the song ‘Moe Tucker’ on a later session. Linda, also known as Sister Vanilla (so named by William because of her ice-cream-pale skin) had been present at the recording of most of her brothers’ previous albums, but this time she would also provide the title of the LP, Munki. The Reids wanted something ‘un-Mary Chain-like’, which meant no honey, no candy and no guns. The idea was also to have something ‘less dark, miserable, rain-drenched, all the things we’re usually seen as,’ Jim explained. Linda was going through a phase of being ‘obsessed with monkeys’, as she puts it, and the phonetic spelling gave it an odd, ambiguous quality.
Terry Edwards, a well-known multi-instrumentalist from East London who began his professional career playing with The Higsons, had long been a fan of the Mary Chain. He’d even made an EP of cover versions of Jesus and Mary Chain songs in 1991, titled Terry Edwards Plays The Music Of Jim And William Reid. The EP quickly reached the ears of the Reids themselves thanks to Laurence Verfaillie passing the cassette on after Edwards sent a copy to Creation. The band approved, ordering a boxful to give to people they knew. Terry was an obvious choice when it came to looking for a horn player.
The tracks Terry would play on were ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’ and the eerie ballad ‘Man On The Moon’, a silvery paean to alienation, both written by Jim. ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’ was a direct answer to William’s ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’, and while William was convinced this response was a deliberate dig, Jim simply felt that, after years living as rock stars (which, at times, probably wasn’t too bad), it was ‘worth showing the other side of the coin’. William’s furious swipe at the music industry got Jim thinking.
‘I thought, I love rock’n’roll, and I do love rock’n’roll – so does William. But to this day William still thinks I only wrote that song to piss him off. At the time, though, I might have given him that impression. “Yeah, you’re right. I did . . .” But I didn’t. Rock’n’roll changed our life.’
When Terry Edwards first arrived at the Drugstore, he was, he admits, ‘uncharacteristically five minutes late’. This prompted everyone immediately to head to the pub. ‘Five-minute grace period,’ laughs Terry. ‘I got there and the pints had just started. That was my memory of first getting in there to play.’
Once it was finally time to return, lubricated, to the studio, Jim explained to Terry what he wanted for ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’. It was just three notes. ‘It was funny,’ Ben Lurie remembers, ‘because Terry was ready to score out a horn section, but we said, “No, just these three notes.” That worked out well, so we brought him back for another day, another three notes. Probably the same notes but in a different order.’
‘It’s a very simple line,’ Terry adds. ‘They just wanted it to be played on a trumpet rather than a guitar. Sound-wise we thought, instead of having an artificial reverb, we’d play it in this concrete stairwell and quadruple-track it, so there are four trumpets playing single notes. “Man On The Moon” was, again, a very simple line, and it just has that great feel to it.’
Another memory Terry has of the Drugstore was that, even while they were mid-session, Jim and William were taking Polaroids for use on the album artwork. As always they were considering the whole, and the visual side was vitally important to the Mary Chain.
‘They took a picture of me with my trumpet and screwed with the colours,’ Terry remembers. ‘At the time it wasn’t usual to have your photo taken while sitting on the settee, not even posed, just “bang”, that was that. These days I make sure I wear suits . . .’
The initial sessions for Munki went as well as could be expected, and the Mary Chain managed to record a lot of material relatively quickly, although the tracks they had weren’t quite ready to be revealed to Blanco Y Negro. But the fact that the band had been playing well live, and were musically as match-fit as they’d ever been, meant the process of laying down the tracks they had chosen was quite straight-forward, and the record had an immediate ‘live’ feel.
However, in direct contrast to the early fluency of the Munki sessions, Jim and William’s relationship was grinding to a halt. They could barely be in the same room as each other, and soon Jim and Ben were coming in to record in the day, while William took over the studio at night to work on his parts with Dick Meaney. It was with Meaney that William made the track ‘Nineteen666’, a song that seems to collapse into an accidentally perfect slumped position of sensual, wasted nonchalance. On Munki, perhaps more than ever, we hear the distinct personalities of the brothers in bold relief, their individual expression more defined as a result of their increased segregation from each other in the studio. One morning, Jim and Ben came into the studio to find the ceiling had been burnt – William had spilt whisky on some of the channels on the desk, and the resulting fire shot up to the ceiling. ‘Fortunately we had lots of channels,’ says Ben dryly.
‘I know William had stuff going on with Hope, but William just stopped showing up when we would,’ Ben Lurie continues. ‘It was like we were making two records at the same time. I know William sometimes felt that Jim and I were ganging up on him, but he wasn’t around. He was bringing this on himself. There were lots of little incidents. Silly stuff. You look back and think, God, what a bunch of children.’
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The Reids’ sister Linda’s role in the history of the Mary Chain is far greater than many realise, particularly at this point in the band’s fractious story. The brothers had reached a near-stalemate, but Linda was, in Jim’s words, ‘the Kofi Annan of the Mary Chain’, which was no easy feat. She could receive a phone-call from either brother at any time of the day or night, and frequently did. As their sister, Linda couldn’t take sides, but ‘she tried to steer us in the right direction,’ Jim says.
‘The band would have split up a long time before if it wasn’t for Linda’s UN peacemaking deals,’ continues Jim. ‘Poor Linda, she was always getting calls from me or William saying, “Do you know what the fucker’s done now?” I stopped doing that after a while because I realised it must be fucking hard for her. But when you’re wasted and you’re in this situation, it seems like life or death.’
The music press would merrily grab on to the idea that ‘Jim nearly killed William’ during the making of Munki. It went perfectly with the ‘Brothers Grim’ tag the Reids had earned, and perhaps it wasn’t far from the truth. But ‘brothers are supposed to love and hate each other at the same time,’ as Jim said in an interview with Option in 1998. ‘We’re cooped up together in this space called The Jesus and Mary Chain. There’s about enough room for a midget, but there happens to be two non-midgets fighting for the same little piece of territory.’
The two non-midgets were avoiding each other completely while still managing to record Munki at this point, and, although the tracks weren’t quite finished, Jeannette Lee was eager to hear how things were going. The Reids reluctantly agreed to let Jeannette hear the tracks at the studio. What happened next would sadly mark the end of the Mary Chain’s association with Blanco Y Negro.
‘This was awkward for me for many years,’ says Jeannette. ‘They played me some songs which I thought sounded great. Not radically different, but good. I came back and told Geoff, and then they sent us the tracks. But then Geoff told them that we didn’t like the songs, because collectively we decided we weren’t going to do it.’
‘William seemed to be in not that good a state,’ recalls Geoff. ‘Speaking personally, I don’t think Munki was a very good record, and so we said, “No, thank you.”’
The news was a bombshell. Jeannette had enthused, genuinely, about the songs she’d heard in the studio, but when Geoff took a dislike to the album and the collective decision was made not to pick up the option, the Mary Chain felt they’d received something of a mixed message. ‘They felt betrayed,’ Jeannette recalls.
Jim says: ‘Nobody [at the record company] seemed to be into Munki, and for the first time neither was Geoff Travis. Geoff was like, “I don’t get it, I don’t hear any singles.” I said, “What do you mean in particular?” He said, “The lyrics don’t make sense, for a start.” I was like, “What are you on about?” It shook us.’
Rob Dickins, to his credit, stepped in and suggested the Mary Chain should go back to the studio and record some singles. William duly recorded the menacing ‘Cracking Up’, which, appropriately, detailed ‘relationships that were once there and then not’, Jim explained at the time, referring no doubt to the label’s sudden rug-pull and also William’s volatile romance with Hope Sandoval. ‘Mentally it’s been like Vietnam for William over the last couple of years,’ Jim added.
The song, imbued with sinister confidence, casts a glowering eye back on what ‘they’ said of him (They said I was weak . . . One said I was a priest . . .) overriding all claims, good or bad, with the spectral but defiant affirmation I am a freak.
For Jim’s part he decided to record the track that would become the energetic ‘Moe Tucker’, introducing his sister Linda as a singer for the first time, a typically spontaneous development that injects an insouciant freshness into the Mary Chain sound. Linda was still living at home in East Kilbride while studying English in Glasgow, but she came down to the studio when they were about to record the track. Originally titled ‘Suck My Coke’, Jim felt it was probably a good idea to choose a different title if he was going to hand it over to his kid sister to sing.
Jim says: ‘I was supposed to sing it, but she was just there, so I said, “Do you want a go?” Then I thought the title was rather inappropriate, so she made up the title. “Maureen Tucker”. Perfect.’ Linda came up with the name when it became apparent that her no-frills, slightly childlike vocal was not dissimilar to that of Tucker’s own voice, as heard on Velvet Underground songs such as ‘I’m Sticking With You’.
Although the brothers were recording separately, William wanted to watch Linda sing, but it wasn’t to be. ‘William called and asked if he and Hope could come,’ Linda says. ‘I was too nervous to sing in front of Hope, so I asked them not to.’
Later that year, however, the Reids invited Linda to sing ‘Moe Tucker’ during their show at Benicassim in Spain. Not only did she agree, she felt totally at ease, even in front of 20,000 fans, and with her favourite band The Stone Roses watching from the wings.
‘I’d been watching William and Jim downing their whisky to take away their nerves,’ remembers Linda, ‘and I was sitting sipping my water, being so calm. They’d just laugh at me.’
Munki was completed in the summer of 1997, but the label was still not happy. Rob Dickins told the Reids he would release it if they wanted him to, but warned Jim that ‘nobody’s into it in this building’. He followed this up by gently suggesting the Reids find someone else to put it out.
It was a cruel blow after over a decade with the same label, but after years of feeling Warners were never 100 per cent behind them, they were ready to find someone passionate and likeminded; someone who would put as much energy into promoting Munki as they had making it. Someone like Alan McGee, perhaps.
After a difficult period in the early 1990s, which saw Creation in debt and McGee on drugs, the label’s fortunes had turned around. After selling half of the company to Sony, Alan signed Oasis, and in 1995 he was hailed by NME as a ‘Godlike Genius’. Creation was now seen as one of the best independent labels of its time.
The Mary Chain at this point were kicking their heels. William was using the downtime to record tracks of his own for his EP ‘Tired Of Fucking’, credited on release simply to ‘William’, before working on further songs for his side project, Lazycame. Jim and Ben continued jamming in the Drugstore, recording a handful of demos under the name TV69. But the Mary Chain/Creation story was about to come full circle.
Jim, who had long since patched up his differences with McGee, didn’t approach Creation directly, perhaps concerned that McGee would feel obliged to take them on, but Munki reached his ears via mutual associates. Jim admits that, while he strongly believes Munki is ‘one of our best’, he wasn’t sure whether McGee had just stepped in to do the Mary Chain a favour. McGee’s recollection of what happened confirms otherwise.
‘Simon Esplen – the husband of Oasis’s marketing manager Emma Greengrass – gave me the Mary Chain record,’ McGee explains. ‘“Cracking Up” was on it. It was fucking great. Me and Bobby Gillespie were listening to it, and we looked at each other and Bobby said, “You’ve got to do it.” We phoned up the lawyer and signed them.’ The Mary Chain had come home.