Cracking Up
We were like a weird married couple who had a baby called The Jesus and Mary Chain. By Munki, it was obvious we were going to be divorced.
William Reid to Nick Hasted in Uncut
It had been some time since the Mary Chain had emerged blinking into the live arena, so a run of promotional dates was arranged in the early months of 1998 to create a buzz around Munki in the US. The band’s New York date proved eventful from the off: the night before the show at The Fez, William was arrested for ‘abusing a policeman’, according to the NME. As the gig was about to start the following day (4 March) William merrily told the assembled crowd of journalists and record executives: ‘If anyone wants to suck my cock, come backstage afterwards.’ ‘That’ll be the shortest queue in living memory,’ muttered Jim. After briefly tearing a strip off the invited audience for probably never buying a record, William thundered into the opening riff of ‘Cracking Up’ and they were off.
The following day, after a handful of interviews that William managed to avoid (Q magazine was informed that speaking to the press ‘fucked with his head’), the Mary Chain boarded the plane home.
It was time for the Reids to consider bringing in some new blood for the forthcoming UK tour – Ben Lurie had taken care of bass duties in the studio, but a new bass player was needed for the upcoming dates as Ben would be moving back to guitar. One name that lingered in the Mary Chain’s mental Rolodex was Lush’s Philip King, who had auditioned to play guitar with the group years earlier.
Lush had recently split after the tragic suicide of their drummer Chris Acland in 1996, leaving the remaining band members in a state of shock and grief. Philip wasn’t sure he even wanted to play at all when the call from the Reids came. ‘It was awful,’ he says. ‘Initially I thought I didn’t want to do it, but then I thought, Come on, it’s the Mary Chain.’
The first gig they played together was at Reading’s Alleycat as a warm-up before an industry gig at the Water Rats in King’s Cross. Philip recalls being unsettled by the occasional false starts during the shows. ‘There were, and still are today, quite a few songs where you get into it and someone makes a mistake, Jim goes, “Stop!” and you have to start again. I’m used to it now.’
The Jesus and Mary Chain were plunged straight back into life on the road for the promotional tour for Munki in June 1998 to coincide with the album’s release that month. Touring was something William still hated, and considering that the previous two years had been spent recording and tinkering about in the Drugstore or at home, this would most likely have been something of a shock to the collective system. It is impressive that they managed to tour as much as they did that year, considering how fraught things were behind the scenes.
It was soon time to go back to the US to play Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles’ Garage venue. This final date in LA would be marked by another William-insults-police-officer incident and a night in the cells. It was also notable because the Mary Chain played a bizarre gig at the Garage’s Club Sucker, hosted by Dr Vaginal Davis – a large, black, pre-op transgender woman who enhanced the Mary Chain’s set by mounting the stage in a tiny dress and announcing her intention to give them all blow-jobs. The show reportedly ended when the DJ played the 12-inch of the Ashford And Simpson pop hit ‘Solid (As A Rock)’, with the audience happily bellowing the words ‘Solid as my cock’ along with it. The Reids and co. didn’t stay to sign autographs that night.
After returning to Europe and playing a selection of summer festivals including Roskilde and Glastonbury, the Mary Chain headed back to London to appear at the South Bank’s Meltdown festival alongside New York proto-punk duo Suicide. This Meltdown was curated by John Peel, an early supporter of the Mary Chain, and there were guest appearances from Bobby Gillespie (singing Hope Sandoval’s part on ‘Sometimes Always’), My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, Primal Scream’s Andrew Innes and Emma Anderson of Lush.
Terry Edwards also joined the band for this live performance, but it was, as he recalls, ‘a bit of a splitting-up gig’, which concluded with William venting his spleen into the microphone long after the rest of the group had left the stage. Philip King says: ‘He started ranting about how John Peel never played them on the radio or something. It was kind of par for the course though.’
By this point, Jim admits, the Reids’ relationship had completely disintegrated after several years of dwindling communication between the pair. If there was any hope of a reconciliation in the near future, the brothers would need to have some space from each other – not in the studio, not on the road, just living their own lives and trying to find their own equilibrium. The last thing they needed was to pack their suitcases, grab their passports and hit the road again, least of all for six weeks in America. But that, unfortunately, is exactly what they had committed to.
‘If someone had looked at it who gave a shit,’ says Jim, ‘they’d have said, “They need to not see each other for a year, then the band might be able to continue.” But no, we were booked on this tour. It started with a festival in San Diego, and we were driving to Los Angeles when we had a big row.’
Ben Lurie remembers: ‘There’d been all sorts of fraught moments on the Munki tour. Everything had become magnified. You’ve only got certain ways to flex your muscles, so if that’s always turning up half an hour late when everyone’s waiting to leave the hotel, that’s one of the things you can do, and that irritates the shit out of everybody. Things like that develop.’
The San Diego show had not gone well, and, in Ben Lurie’s opinion, it was William who had ‘screwed up’. The journey to LA was tense even by Mary Chain standards, but the atmosphere took a nose-dive when a very stoned William started insisting that he wanted to drive the van. ‘I thought, Maybe if I punched him he’d just shut the fuck up,’ Ben remembers. ‘I’m not really a punching kind of person, but I thought, Maybe it will just startle him.’
Jim was sitting between Ben and William when the argument kicked off. He’d threatened to punch William himself, but then decided it wasn’t worth it and lay back down for a nap. ‘The next thing I know, Ben hit William and both of them started fighting on top of me,’ Jim says. ‘I was getting trampled.’
At one point the tour manager pulled the van over to try to break up the scrap. ‘It was like a schoolteacher with naughty children,’ says Philip King. ‘I remember the lighting guy was actually on the phone after it all went off, trying to get another job.’
This was the point at which, after so many years and so many fights, Jim knew it really was the end of the Mary Chain. This was at least something he and William weren’t going to argue about. William declared that the LA show at the House of Blues would be his final gig. ‘It was rather distressing,’ says Jim. ‘What I should have done then was have a good night’s sleep and then review the situation in the morning, but what I actually did was stay up all night snorting cocaine with Ben.’
Jim and Ben lounged in the hotel’s hot tub downing champagne in a bid to numb their shock and anger and, to be fair, they didn’t believe they were actually going to play the gig the next day at all. By the time they realised it would be going ahead, they were ‘obliterated’ and, as a result, saw no point in stopping. When the band were due on stage, Jim admits, ‘I was not in any fit state to be in public. I remember going on and screaming at William and then thinking, Oh fuck. I’m on stage.’
What happened next would go down in rock ’n’roll history. Philip King remembers: ‘We’d start a song, and then Jim would just start going, “Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby . . .” You’re playing and thinking, OK, so . . . when do we change for the chorus? William just had his head down. Every song we started collapsed.’
William remembers yelling at Jim to ‘get his shit together’, feeling that, while he too was relatively wasted, he had the upper hand because at least he was playing the same song as the rest of the band.
‘William used to annoy Jim all the time onstage by tinkering with his guitar between songs,’ says Ben, ‘and I think Jim thought, I’m going to teach him a lesson, I’m going to annoy him. Anyway, it worked. Everyone just got so annoyed . . . I was looking down, and when I looked up everyone had just walked off stage.’
‘Jim was trying to pull the amp over,’ Philip adds. ‘He was swearing at Nick, and Nick was like, “Fuck off!” It was Nick and I who walked off first . . . When the fifth or sixth song collapsed, we just looked at each other . . . we’d had enough and walked off. Then everyone else left.’
After severally storming into the dressing room, the band had never needed a drink more, but the fridge had been locked. Meanwhile, they watched the backstage CCTV screens in horror; ugly scenes were erupting in the audience. ‘There were people trying to pull down the curtains, throwing stuff,’ says Philip. ‘The worst bit was that we couldn’t get a drink, though.’
The promoter was furious, and it was, as Jim recalls, the only Mary Chain show that ended with the audience having their money refunded. ‘And quite rightly so,’ he says. ‘It was totally non-musical. I’m just glad it was before the days when everything went on YouTube. That would have been fairly humiliating.’
The Mary Chain were no more, but the reality was that they still had tour dates to honour and stood to lose a fortune if they pulled out. They had no choice but to fulfil their commitments without William, although beyond that point, that was it. ‘There was never any thought of the band continuing,’ says Jim. ‘The band is me and my brother. It’s not me, it’s not my brother, it’s me and my brother.’
William was understandably in shock and not wanting to be alone, he decided to travel to Seattle to be with his girlfriend (and future wife) Dawn. At William’s request, tour manager Laurie Small booked a plane ticket for the next day and, when he went to deliver the ticket to William’s hotel room, he asked him one last time whether he really wanted to leave. After a moment’s hesitation, William grabbed the ticket. No more Mary Chain.
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William was so traumatised by the split that he could barely speak for days. He had obviously known the writing was on the wall – they all had – but he thought the band would complete the tour and then dwindle away, rather than having to make an announcement to the media. ‘It was a violent end, like somebody took a gun and shot the Mary Chain,’ he said. The brothers didn’t speak again for ‘a year, maybe more’, says Jim. ‘We completely went our separate ways.’
The night after William left, the Mary Chain played their first date without him in a supper club in San Juan Capistrano. Poignantly, they had set up William’s amp just in case he turned up after all. The band’s set was cut short, as William sang “Cracking Up” and “I Hate Rock’n’Roll”, but, as the promoter readily reminded them the moment they left the stage, they were under contract to play for a certain amount of time. They had to go back on and play ‘Reverence’, extending it for fifteen minutes to fulfil their obligation.
The Mary Chain had to cope with cancellations and pulled fees by promoters who wouldn’t go ahead without William. Laurie Small was instrumental in ensuring they minimised their financial losses, but the emotional loss was considerable. ‘It was bloody awful,’ Jim admitted to Uncut’s Simon Goddard in 2001. ‘We were standing on stage as the Mary Chain, but I looked to my left and that big mop-top wasn’t there.’
The final date of the US tour was supposed to be in Providence, Rhode Island, but it all fell apart when the promoter disappeared. Providence indeed that night, Philip decided to get some much-needed space from the rest of the band and get away, while the others, he discovered later, rather surreally ‘almost got into a punch-up with the cast and crew of Riverdance at the hotel bar’.
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After the tour was finally over, the band staggered back to London to lick their wounds. The period that unfolded post-Mary Chain was, as Douglas Hart observed, ‘a real struggle’, and it would be nearly a decade until the brothers would play live together again. Jim sank into ‘an ocean of booze’ and was soon broke after ‘chucking money about like an idiot’. His solution was to take in lodgers to bring in some cash. However, his lodgers included Ben Lurie and other friends, and Jim’s Kentish Town home soon became a bit of a party house, much to the chagrin of the neighbours. ‘It was very bad for my health,’ Jim admits. ‘Every night was drink and drug hell. Or heaven, depending on which way you look at it. I got pretty fucked up.’ Jim, understandably, was so scorched by the last Jesus and Mary Chain tour and the incidents that had led to the split that he couldn’t bear to even go near a guitar, he didn’t play music at home and he certainly didn’t want to step out onto a stage any time soon.
William, meanwhile, had plunged into work mode, developing his solo project Lazycame. He released the ‘Taster’ EP and the Finbegin LP in 1999, while Yawn! and Saturday The Fourteenth came out the following year. The work is pure, unfettered William, but a William evidently at a singularly difficult point in his life. Musically, while often beautiful, whimsical and Syd Barrett-surreal, lyrically William occasionally veers into disturbing territory (‘She’s been fucking since the age of ten . . .’ he croaks on ‘510 Lovers’) and Saturday The Fourteenth is cathartic to the point that, when William listened to the album sober, he didn’t want to release it. The songs also have a loose, disjointed feeling, as though some of them were being worked out for the first time in an unaired bedroom, curtains closed and, as with ‘Tired Of Fucking’, released in the same year as Munki on Creation Records, there is a spatial oddness that ventures into free improvisation.
William also wanted to play live, with Philip King and Nick Sanderson as his backing band, but ‘rehearsals’ usually ended up in the pub and eventually the project was shelved. It wouldn’t be long until William decided to leave his former life behind altogether and move to LA.
Perhaps William’s adoption of Los Angeles as home isn’t such a surprise; William’s then partner was American after all, and psychologically it was important to put some miles between himself and the Drugstore, London, everything that had such strong associations with the Mary Chain. Also, while the Reids had always appreciated the UK’s musical broadmindedness, William increasingly found that looking at Britain from the outside, that is, from the US, left him feeling ‘embarrassed’.
He didn’t miss Britain much; indeed, he managed to make himself feel he was still there, just with nicer weather, because of his Slingbox, a device connected to his mother’s TV back in East Kilbride. The Sling-box allowed him to watch British programmes and, according to John Moore, ‘change her channels from LA, which infuriated her, but also reminded her she was not watching alone’.
Slingbox aside, was William changed by the hard-boiled showbiz glitter of Los Angeles? ‘No,’ Jim insists. ‘He stumbles around Beverly Hills like Rab C. Nesbitt.’