On the face of it, the Australian guitarist Ben Lurie joining The Jesus and Mary Chain in 1990 was the beginning of the end for Douglas – not for any specific reason, just because it changed the dynamic of the band in a way which made his diminishing commitment to us hard to ignore (and also because Ben switched to bass to replace him after Douglas had gone). It wasn’t that Douglas was a terrible bass player, it was just that he had no discipline about learning the songs. We’d arrive for the first night of an American tour and he’d be playing completely the wrong bass lines. All he seemed to want to do was get wasted, which was something we all liked to do, but by this time me and Jim had got to thinking ‘If you’re going to do something, you might at least do it as well as you can.’ Douglas hadn’t got to that point yet (at least, not as far as the band was concerned – he was very conscientious in his new career, making videos).
To be honest I’d say the seeds of his ultimate departure from the band were planted a lot earlier, when we were making demos while we were unemployed and everything we had was going to fix the four-track which kept breaking down. Meanwhile Douglas was travelling all over Scotland following The Cramps – staying in hotels and buying big leather biker boots ’cos his ma adores him and he’s the baby of the family. I remember us thinking ‘How much did those boots cost? Couldn’t you have given us that to help fix the Portastudio?’ And if I’m honest the memory of that probably sprang into my mind when we were considering his future. Plus there’s the fact that he’s a very handsome man – he’s only put on about half a pound in the last forty years and he’s still got quite a chiselled face now, the bastard…
Sacking Douglas was difficult but not too big a deal, as he had a lot of other stuff going on – both professionally and with his busy social life – and we’ve still got a good relationship with him today. The situation had just progressed from him not really learning the demos and me thinking ‘I might as well just do it rather than have him do a bad version’, to us no longer asking him to come to the studio and him not seeming to be that bothered. After a couple of years of that we’d thought ‘Fuck it, let’s ask someone who can actually play.’
Sadly we never found our Mani or our Peter Hook, so from that point on it was more a case of rhythm sections coming and going. Hopefully no one felt fucked over by us, though we did have so many drummers I can’t really remember them all. If someone asks ‘Who was that guy who was drumming with you at that point?’, I have to say ‘Give me something to go on, what did he look like?… It’s so hard to put names to faces.’ People used to say it was like the bizarre gardening accidents in Spinal Tap, but at least our drummers were alive when they left.
Douglas had been a big part of the whole experience of the band so it was good we were able to part on friendly terms. The other break-up I went through that year was a lot less straightforward. Laurence had started working for McGee as a press officer by that point. Although I’d made it up with Alan by then, Creation were riding very high at that time, and – although it sounds a bit dramatic to put it this way – I was having something of a mini nervous breakdown, which made her professional involvement in all that quite hard to take. All the new ‘shoegazing’ bands seemed to be getting all the attention, without anyone feeling the need to acknowledge how big an influence we’d been on that sound.
There was a little bit of jealousy from me, when I look back on it. At a time when (at least in critical terms) it seemed like we were the dog in the corner that everybody just booted, Laurence was out there getting NME covers for 18 Wheeler. We argued a lot and it was mostly me being a bit of a cock, to be honest. I didn’t even care about the other bands, I was just feeling a bit sorry for myself and I picked fights to push her into leaving, which she eventually did. It was unfair because it was nothing to do with Laurence, but the minute she left, everything was fine, because I had to sort myself out and she didn’t have to put up with me blaming her for everything.
I was still with Rona at the time, but when she went away to go to college and took the car with her, it was an incentive for me to do one of the best things I’d ever done, which was learn to drive. We were living in Muswell Hill by then. The worst thing about living in Muswell Hill, which is that it doesn’t have a tube station, is also the best thing about it, because it’s like living in the countryside. But better than the countryside, because it’s full of soap stars. They were everywhere – I’d be sitting next to Fred the butcher from Coronation Street in the local diner. I’d liked it when Rona was the driver and would give me lifts everywhere, but I liked it even better when I acquired the skills to do it myself. I was into my thirties by then – in 1991 – so I learnt pretty late, but I was pretty good at driving and passed my test first time, which was brilliant. I used to trundle around north London thinking ‘I can’t believe I’ve never done this before – this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life!’ If for some reason I couldn’t have been a musician any more, I’d have definitely opted to be a delivery driver at that point, or better still get an HGV licence.
By the time I was picking up Jim (who hadn’t learnt to drive himself yet) to head down from Muswell Hill to our own studio just south of the river – because we’d realised it made much more sense to channel some of Warners’ money into getting a place of our own – I was really living the dream. Having your own studio meant you could record at your own pace. It also gave us a base independent of the record label, so it was a win–win, or at least it seemed that way at first.
When we went to Warners and said we wanted to take the budget for Honey’s Dead – which was somewhere around a hundred grand – and use it to buy a studio, there was a big argument. ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you’re saying it and we disagree with everything you say.’ You could see their point, in that getting a studio of our own gave us more power to call the shots away from Warners’ influence, which was the last thing they wanted. But somehow we persuaded them to agree that it could come out of the recording budget, and we ended up with The Drugstore, which was in Amelia Street in Elephant and Castle, just around the corner from what was then the Labour Party HQ in Walworth Road.
We had no connections to the neighbourhood and it was nowhere near where any of us lived, but it was a great studio and we made really good records there. Honey’s Dead was our last sober album, in that we kept up the discipline we’d always maintained (excepting the odd line of speed in the Psychocandy era) of not getting drunk or high when we were recording. We gave the record that title because we were very aware that the earlier version of the band didn’t exist any more and we were leaving a lot of baggage behind (not to characterise Douglas as baggage). And yet, when the album eventually came out, the critical response was ‘How can they use “honey” in the title again? They’ve run out of ideas.’ It was very frustrating when the whole point of it was that we were moving into a new phase of our history. At least ‘Reverence’ shook things up a bit…
Being blasphemous means to show disrespect – even hatred – towards God, which that song doesn’t do. At least, I don’t think if does. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful, I was trying to make something which was pop art. When you use iconic names like Jesus Christ or JFK in that way, it’s more of a compliment…
We were glad that no one tried to assassinate us as a tribute. There was a Travis Bickle-looking guy in the front row of a New York show once who I didn’t like the look of, and when we took t-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Jesus Fuck’ to America, there was a promoter somewhere in Texas who was so outraged by them he wanted to put a bit of tape over the word on the one that was pinned up on the merch stand. I thought ‘OK, if you must.’ We thought he was going to cover the word ‘Fuck’, but instead he taped over the word ‘Jesus’.
The Pixies covering our song ‘Head On’ in 1991 was a nice tip of the hat from America, but by the early nineties it was clear that if we wanted a musical community that we could fit in with, we were going to have to create it for ourselves. That was where the idea for the Rollercoaster tour came in. In my mind it happened after Lollapalooza, though it was actually before, so I guess Chris Morrison must’ve got the idea after we were initially booked for the American alternative rock circus. The plan for Rollercoaster was to be more of a stripped-down affair, like the original punk tours where you’d pay to see The Clash and get Buzzcocks and The Jam as well.
The bands got to play in bigger venues than they otherwise would have, and fans got great value for money as tickets were only £12 a pop. We put together a really good bill with all the different areas of our musical hinterland being represented – Dinosaur Jr from the American guitar upsurge which at that point was solidifying into grunge, Blur for the indie/baggy pop crossover contingent no one was quite calling Britpop yet, and My Bloody Valentine from the Shin-ei fuzz pedal fan community. We headlined every night with the other bands in rotation but with everyone getting the same time on the stage and being treated equally off it. We weren’t just paying lip service to this ideal, we actually followed through with it.
They were great shows and the bill clearly demonstrated the part we’d played in influencing a number of different scenes. Posterity didn’t really see it that way, though, as everyone else’s reputation was enhanced – especially Blur’s, as they couldn’t really get arrested before that tour, to the point where we actually got a fair amount of stick for including them in the line-up, but after it they went from strength to strength (with the help of our manager Chris Morrison, who had been recommended to them by Laurence), so it was kind of the turning point for them – whereas the critical response to our participation was more along the lines of ‘Oh, the Mary Chain… are you still here?’ As Blur’s star rose over the next few years while ours sank into the mire, we would sometimes idly wonder if some kind of reciprocal gesture might be forthcoming from them in our hour of need, but nothing like that ever happened.
Pretty much all the things that had been good about Rollercoaster were bad about Lollapalooza. It was one of the hottest tickets going in 1992 and it was sold to us as a travelling festival that was a complete democracy. No matter who closed the show everybody got the same deal – obviously not when it came to money, so that was bullshit for a start. And when we asked if we could bring in extra PA to beef the sound up like the Red Hot Chili Peppers had done, it turned out it was fine for them to do that, but not for us.
I must admit it did dent our ego a little bit that we were on in broad daylight at two in the afternoon. Had we just gone out and done what the Mary Chain do with a ‘Fuck you’ attitude it would have been a lot better, but I think we were a bit spooked to be playing in sunshine while loads of little Beavis and Buttheads wearing Chili Peppers t-shirts ate hot dogs and looked at us with complete indifference. We didn’t have our baseball caps on backwards so what could we possibly have to offer them? It was kind of hard to take… that was day one and day two, and then we thought ‘Fuck, there’s ten weeks of this.’ We tried to pull out but they threatened to sue and so there was no option but to knuckle down and try to get through it.
My strategy was to do a mountain of the cocaine that was everywhere on that tour in the hope of numbing myself to how grim it was. That was just one strand of my self-care strategy. I would also get legless before the show because I couldn’t bear to face that crowd in daylight otherwise, then I would crash out for a couple of hours afterwards and wake up at about 5pm feeling disgruntled and somewhat sobered up. At this point I would go out hunting for cocaine and I didn’t have to look far. So I ended up getting wasted twice a day for ten weeks. It wasn’t healthy.
Another thing that made Lollapalooza really hard to deal with was that everyone seemed to get on with everyone else except the Mary Chain. The Chili Peppers were slightly aloof but only because they thought they were bigger than everybody else (which I suppose they were). Soundgarden and Pearl Jam was one big love-in ’cos they’d come up together in Seattle, but even the people that had only just met were acting like they’d known each other their whole lives. Everybody else seemed to be having a great time while we were miserable, but there was a kind of phoniness about the whole thing that meant we wouldn’t have wanted to be part of it even if that had been an option.
Ministry and Lush were the only other bands we could even halfway relate to on that tour. William nearly got in a fight with Ice Cube’s entourage after they were messing about with water pistols and Rona got soaked. The only thing that kept me slightly sane was walking around the downtown areas of US cities that I hadn’t visited before when we got stuck in hotels while the endless sea of tour buses disgorged their heavily branded cargo. People said it was dangerous but it wasn’t as dangerous as having to get in a lift with some guy in shorts going ‘Hey buddy, what’s up?’ I never knew how to respond to that because it seemed that once I started I might not be able to stop.
The pretend positivism of Americans started to really grate on me, and even though it’s a terrible thing to say, the whole experience of Lollapalooza left me with a better understanding of the people who shoot up shopping malls. Whether we were scouring junk shops looking for underpriced semi-acoustic guitars, photographing diners or fifties cars, or going to look for what remained of the places in New York where The Velvet Underground used to play, a lot of the stuff we did when we toured America had always had a nostalgic component, but I think the disillusionment of Lollapalooza was probably the moment I finally realised that the USA I loved was a place that now only really existed in my mind. The actuality of what the place had become – as represented by and in that festival – was much harder to love, although I guess William must have felt differently, otherwise he wouldn’t have ended up moving there.
With a lot of the successful musicians I’ve met – especially Americans – I’ve got this huge vibe of ‘Yeah, the school bully really did a number on you, but now you’re winning.’
It was the same with a lot of the other people on Lollapalooza. American high schools – like any others – can be cruel places for people who seem a bit strange. Jim and I had done a pretty good job of staying out of the way of that kind of pressure growing up, but we could still see the impact of it on others. And I think that’s the root cause of a lot of the very conspicuous health kicks a lot of those musicians were on – they were still trying to shake off childhood trauma.
As far as the ongoing social ordeal of Lollapalooza was concerned, I was grateful for the extra confidence cocaine gave me, because I don’t think I could’ve got through it otherwise. On all of those early tours where we’d been burning the candle at both ends, as soon as I got back home I’d think ‘I don’t need to do that for a while’, and then I’d go for months without touching a drink or doing a line. I’d be happy that I didn’t have to get shit-faced every night to do my job. ‘Slippers on, cup of tea, read the papers – this is great.’ At that time – although professionals in the field might disagree – I’d say I didn’t really have a drinking problem.
At first when I got back from Lollapalooza, things went more or less as they had done before. I sank gratefully into the arse-shaped dent in the sofa and contemplated a spell of sobriety with total equanimity. Touring had almost been like aversion therapy as far as drinking was concerned, but this was the point where the aversion therapy started to stop working. It wasn’t long before I started to notice myself editing experiences which didn’t involve drinking or taking drugs out of my life. Next thing I knew, I was drinking, on my own, in the day time, in my living room, and even as I was thinking ‘Hmmm, I’m not sure about this’, I was also realising that even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t stop. Then daylight-hours drinking went all too smoothly from something that happened one day to something that was happening every day, and the louder the alarm bells rang, the clearer was my realisation that I was powerless to do anything to turn them off.
What I hadn’t yet realised was the extent to which cocaine had also become a problem for me. In early 1994 we were in LA making the video for ‘Sometimes Always’ with Hope Sandoval, when Alan McGee – who I was fully friends with again by that time, although there was always some reserve between him and William – had his famous drink- and drug-induced meltdown where he got off the plane and had to be hospitalised straight from the airport. We were staying at the Mondrian, which is one of the big rock ’n’ roll hotels, and we’d asked Alan to come down and see us. I definitely wasn’t good company for someone in his vulnerable condition at that time because I offered him a line of coke and he had a kind of panic attack. He never fully explained what had happened, but as far as I was concerned it was all water under the bridge – ‘Taken away in an ambulance, nearly died, blah blah blah’ – so when I saw him in the restaurant later I asked him a second time if he fancied doing a couple of lines and he freaked out again. I can see now that the offer of more drugs probably wasn’t really what he was needing, but he looked all right to me, and at the time ‘Have another line of coke, you’ll feel better’ was the outer limit of my capacity for human sympathy.
While we were making Stoned & Dethroned, I’d walk past the Labour HQ and see the party’s then leader John Smith giving interviews on the steps. He’d be doing his level best to bring a long-overdue end to the Tory rule which had divided the country since 1979, while I’d be on my way to some debauched recording session involving high levels of drink and drug use and all manner of strange characters, the strange characters being the rest of the band.
One unforeseen consequence of not being on the clock in the studio was that it was only a matter of time before someone suggested we might make a better album if we got fucked up. This was not a good idea. As it turned out, we didn’t make a better album – or a worse album – it just took much longer. You make records in a different way when you’re under the influence because you’re looser and you’ll try things. But when you’re drunk or stoned in the studio, everything sounds great, so then you listen back when you’ve sobered up and you realise ‘Ah fuck, we’ve really got to do that again.’ The idiotic thing is at that point you quite often start drinking again because you’re so pissed off with how badly the recording turned out.
I don’t suppose Exile on Main St. would’ve sounded the way it does if the Stones had been on nothing stronger than a cup of tea when they made it, and Stoned & Dethroned ultimately turned out to be a perfect reflection of the circumstances in which we made it. The Drugstore was over the road from a horrible sleazy pub where we ended up spending way too much of our time in the mid nineties. We went in there for a pint at the start of the recording process and the pint lasted about two fucking months. ‘What are we doing here again? Oh right, we’re making a record.’ You could see that place out of the studio’s live room window and it would kind of beckon to us, even though it was very rare that any good came out of going in there. Let’s just say it had a strong Irvine Welsh vibe – we got in a fight in there once when someone randomly headbutted William.
The album we were trying to make was initially a fully acoustic record. This was a plan which had been on the back burner for several years. We’d both loved that Johnny Thunders acoustic album, Hurt Me – it was rarely off our turntables in 1985–86, around the time we were doing that first acoustic Peel session – and when we’d told everyone we were going to make our own version of that record they kind of wouldn’t let us forget it, so we thought we might as well give it a go. The problem was we needed things to hide behind so people couldn’t find out how limited we were as musicians. We’d got away with it with the Peel session because there were only four tracks and we’d whacked the reverb up so much they might as well not have been acoustic. So we decided on a compromise – which ultimately worked really well – which was not to be too rigid about just using acoustic guitars, but also to take the foot off the gas a bit and let the album evolve at its own pace.
An important part of that slowing-down process was doing a track with Shane MacGowan…
I remember seeing The Pogues on The Tube and just thinking they were brilliant. The reason I never went to see them in the early days was because we were coming up around the same time, and we were always so busy. There was a time when we lived in Fulham and they were playing regularly at The Greyhound down the road, and I was always saying to Rona and Jim, ‘Let’s go and see The Pogues before they get too big’ – we’d have had so many stories to tell, but unfortunately we didn’t go.
Over the years we’d bump into Shane around town and every time we met him he’d always mistake me for Jim. It didn’t matter how many times I’d say ‘I’m William’, he’d still say ‘Jim, you’re a fucking genius’, until eventually I just decided to go with it. He’d always tell us how much he loved The Jesus and Mary Chain so we’d thought about maybe getting him to do something. When we were doing Stoned & Dethroned, I’d written a song called ‘God Help Me’ which I’d tried to sing but I didn’t like my vocal. Jim had a go, too, but his version didn’t sound right either, so I said, ‘Why don’t we ask Shane MacGowan?’
Because Jim’s the spokesman or the ambassador of the band, he was the one who ended up speaking to Shane, and he ended up doing that a lot, because even though Shane had agreed to do it and we’d been told he’d be coming down on a Monday, he never turned up. Every week for several weeks Jim would ring him up: ‘Hey Shane, what’s going on?’, ‘Who’s this?’, ‘It’s Jim Reid, you said you were gonna come and sing on our record’, ‘What? When?’, ‘Last week.’
Every time Jim called him, he’d forgotten all the previous conversations. Until he finally remembered, and when he came down to The Drugstore, it was very interesting. Shane turned up drunk, which was fine, and did one pretty decent take, then another take that was not so good. I think we got four takes out of him altogether, which got progressively worse until Alan Moulder went away and performed a miracle, shaping the four vocals into one absolutely brilliant one, which to this day nobody would say was a compilation because it’s so beautiful.
Shane always used to call me William, so at least he was consistent. I’d never actually tried a vocal on ‘God Help Me’, but we’d had an earlier plan to do a tune with Lee Hazelwood – which Lee was quite up for, until he came to meet us at Lollapalooza in LA and the security were rude to him and wouldn’t let him backstage – so we were really happy to get Shane involved, as we both saw him as one of the greats. It wasn’t just four takes Shane did, it was many more than that. Because he had no idea what song he was doing – I think he thought we were going to do one of his. He had to learn ‘God Help Me’ virtually line by line, then Alan had to cobble it together literally one word at a time.
The interesting thing was that even though we’d spent ages getting that version together, when we finally listened back to it, Shane’s delivery just seemed too aggressive – it was done with too much gusto. So we told him, ‘This song is about a man at his lowest ebb, sing it like you’re just about to top yourself and you need to talk to somebody, but there’s no one around.’ Shane did it like that, with the vocal almost a whisper, and that was the version we put on the album. The more upbeat, Poguesy take got released as a bonus track on one of the compilations years later.
We’d also done a cover of a Pogues song, ‘Ghost of a Smile’, as a B-side, so when the time came for the album launch and we were playing at Madame Jo Jo’s – just a little club gig to get a bit of a buzz going – we asked Shane down to sing both tunes, and I think we also did ‘Sunny Side of the Street’. The funny thing was that after our earlier experience with him, this time he turned up totally sober. Everyone else in the band was falling over the place drunk and he was glaring at us as if to say, ‘You fucking amateurs.’ At one point William and Ben even played the wrong part of his song and Shane turned around and looked daggers at me – ‘I didn’t fucking do it, it was them two!’
It was Jim and Ben who started the drinking in the studio. I walked in one day and they’d installed one of those things you press and it gives you a shot of whiskey – an optic. I didn’t complain and I would sometimes join them in a glass of Jack Daniels’ (I wasn’t on the vodka yet), but I was more the person who takes a drink of milk from the udders of a stray cow than the one who bought the cow. Do you see the difference?
Tensions between us had started to rise by then, and when he was drinking Jim would sometimes attack me in a weird coded way where no one else noticed but I knew exactly what he was doing. A mild example would be something like him saying ‘Aren’t people with small toes just weird? They’re the worst – almost prehistoric…’ This could build up through the course of a day or an evening with him saying little things like that to hurt me (because I have small toes) until I’d explode: ‘You know what, Jim, you’re a fucking prick!’ And everyone else who hadn’t realised what had been going on would think ‘Oh William, he’s so out of control.’
The whole ‘feuding brothers in bands’ thing always comes down to territory. It’s natural for siblings to compete anyway, and in the unnaturally close proximity of a band – where you’re sharing the same creative space in the cramped physical surroundings of a rehearsal room or a tour bus – there is bound to be friction. Right from the start of the Mary Chain, when we were on the same page about pretty much everything, William and I could still scream at each other for half an hour, to the point where other people would feel uncomfortable enough to have to leave the room. Because you know each other so well, you know exactly the right buttons to press. So even when we were getting on perfectly well, we would still have arguments where people would be thinking ‘Oh my God, did he really just say that?’
They’d be astonished to find us laughing and joking together again ten minutes later, but because you’re brothers, you know you can say unthinkable things to each other and it will be swiftly forgotten. You almost get a kick out of how amazed people are to see you sharing tea and biscuits moments after an apocalyptic row. ‘But you said…?’ ‘But he said…?’ And then suddenly something changes, and the no-holds-barred stuff starts to leave scars.
If you plotted our relationship as a graph, in the early stages of the band the two lines of our interests almost coincided, we virtually thought the same thoughts, but as the nineties went on – for a variety of reasons which at this point in the book we’re probably going to have to go into – the lines started to diverge, so that we moved gradually from a place where nothing was taken personally, to a place where everything was. This trajectory is common to pretty much all bands, I think, but it’s more deeply felt in bands with brothers in (and presumably sisters as well – I bet The Shangri-Las had some arguments) because that relationship is so important in terms of the whole of your life.
Me and Jim used to fight all the time back when we were younger, but the thing we would never fight about was anything in the artistic realm – whether it was music or films or sculpture – because when we were talking about that there was no bullshit and no ego… Have I mentioned that Jim’s a little prick? Sometimes he can be, let me tell you. I love that little prick, but anyway, the reason I would never call Jim out when it came to an opinion on the arts was because – and I’m talking about the time before we’d had any kind of success or even properly started the band here – me and Jim were the elite, at least in our own minds. In the eighties, we used to feel like our joint opinion was the best opinion in the world, and sometimes we were right.
Other times it was almost a wee bit embarrassing, the extent to which we would be in agreement over things. You don’t want a timeshare personality, do you? You want a whole one of your own. And there were times when it was a weird situation. Imagine you had a brother who was three years younger than you, and you were in this band together, and you started to have some success, but because your brother was the singer, everyone thought he was the leader of the band, even though a lot of the songs he was singing were words you’d put in his mouth.
It wasn’t him singing the songs in itself that I found frustrating, it was the fact that he didn’t correct people when they thought he was responsible for songs I had actually written. I first noticed this happening in the eighties, when everyone was walking up to to Jim and congratulating him on ‘Some Candy Talking’, and I’d be like ‘What the fuck? That was me! That was me!’ But I didn’t actually mind too much at that point. We’d made the decision right from the beginning – which I stood by – that the songwriting would be 50/50 Reid/Reid, straight down the middle, so no one knew who’d written what.
I’m not saying that my songs were necessarily better than Jim’s – he wrote ‘Upside Down’ and ‘Never Understand’ for a start, which are two of the defining Mary Chain songs which are also my favourites – but I did tend to write more than him, and as time went on we did start to fall out over the times when people would be fawning over him, like ‘Oh yeah great, Jim, “Reverence” is amazing, dude!’ And I’d be looking at Jim waiting for him to put them right, but it seemed like he never did. This definitely got worse as the nineties went on – I guess whatever else you say about cocaine, it’s not a drug that makes people more inclined to share the credit.
‘Sometimes Always’ ended up being the perfect visual representation of that, because it was my song, and at the time Hope was my girlfriend, but it was quite a complex situation because I had only just split up with Rona, and you can just about see me in the background of the video while Jim and Hope sing away to each other.
I felt bad afterwards that maybe I was a bit judgmental of Hope in the time she and William were together, implying she was a bit of a diva, when looking back I don’t really think she did anything wrong… certainly nothing worse than the kinds of things I was doing at the time.
What’s the male version of the word diva? This is what I’ve seen in the world: when a man walks into a place and says ‘Do this, do that, shut up, blah blah blah’, do you know what people say? ‘What a good, strong man.’ But when a woman does it, they just call her a diva or worse – it’s not fair. It was complicated when I was in that relationship with Hope, though, because I was, and still am, a big fan of Mazzy Star, and I did feel that David Roback was probably the love of Hope’s life. So everyone else was… what is it the kids call it these days? An NPC, or Non-Player Character – the people who made the game spent a lot of money on the hero and he can walk good, but the NPCs just look like robots. That’s how I felt.
On top of that, I really liked David, and you know how I spoke about Jim not being comfortable jamming? Well there’s not been a lot of guitar players that I could relax with the way I relaxed when I was playing with David. When you’re jamming with someone, it’s a kind of musical intimacy – you look in their eyes trying to guess what comes next, it’s kind of the opposite of shoegaze – and because Jim is very reserved emotionally, I think that sort of thing makes him a bit uncomfortable. Whereas me and David used to get totally wasted and have these great fun jams together, a couple of stoned guys just laughing and playing. He’s one of the few other guitar players I’ve ever had that sort of real connection with. There’s a lot of trust in it, because when you fuck up you’re not judged, in fact your playing partner might even run with it.
Either way, it’s a great thing and I wish I’d had more interactions with musicians like that. But the fact that I had that musical bond with David, and Hope had that emotional and musical bond with him, meant it always felt like there were three of us in the relationship. It was quite overwhelming enough, even before Neil Young got involved…
One time when we were touring America with Mazzy Star, Hope told me she was going for dinner with Neil Young the next day in San Francisco. I just thought it was funny but while I was thinking about it I went away and got really stoned, then I was panicking because we had to go on in half an hour and I was all stoned and I was thinking ‘Fuck, what have I done? I can play a bit stoned but not fully stoned’ – you don’t want to be on another planet when you’ve got to pick out some chords. The fact that I was also drunk out of my fucking noggin’ only made it more of a huge mistake.
At this point I walked into Hope’s dressing room and Neil Young was standing there – it was the last thing I needed. Before I was stoned but now it was like I was on acid. Neil Young was shaking my hand and I saw him as a giant – it was like he was nine feet tall, and as I went off to play the gig, off my fucking tits, I had to keep telling myself ‘No, no, no, he is a tall man, but he’s not a giant.’ I’m talking in physical terms there, because obviously in artistic terms he is a giant.
I think we’ve covered the ‘Stoned’ element of that album’s title pretty well by now, but the ‘Dethroned’ part was a reflection of how we felt at the time that also ended up becoming quite prophetic, because the process of us recording the album aligned with Britpop starting to happen. The Mary Chain had always felt like outsiders, but by the time that album came out it was like there was double glazing on the patio and they’d thrown away the key.
What made it even harder was that I kind of liked a lot of what was happening. Britpop bands wanted to be on Top of the Pops but kind of underground as well, just like we always had. The only differences were that they got asked back to play the show more than once, and no one thought of them as a sell-out indie band once they were signed to majors (as Oasis were, once Creation inked the deal with Sony which saved Alan’s financial bacon).
I liked Oasis and I liked Pulp, who were actually our contemporaries – they’d just been going a long time before they achieved any success. Blur got a bit too middle of the road for me in the ‘Country House’ era, but they came back with some good records afterwards. My problem was that I couldn’t see why we were excluded. Why couldn’t we be a part of this thing? I used to think ‘Fuck, what about us?’
Now I look back on it with more perspective I can understand how we fell through the cracks. The fact that we said we wanted to be pop stars and did interviews with magazines like Smash Hits and Number One had put the music press’s nose out of joint at the time when that early-eighties thing where all sorts of experimental post-punk people were suddenly having number one pop albums had kind of ground to a halt. Meanwhile the new idea of what ‘indie’ was meant to be was coagulating around The Smiths, so we were left out of that as well. And then by the time baggy and shoegaze and grunge had come and gone and Britpop had taken over, it didn’t matter how good the music we made was – and I honestly think Stoned & Dethroned and the next album Munki are as good as, if not better than, anything else we ever did – we were destined to be a back number.
The other part of it was that we were absolutely terrible at playing the game – something Blur and Oasis and Pulp in their own different ways were all very good at. You’ve kind of got to hang around with music journalists and buy them pints of beer and pretend that you’re their friend, but we would never do that. If someone appeared to us to be a bit of a dick, we would let them know it, and the sad fact about music journalists is a lot of them are dicks.
I know this is a cliché, but with a lot of the people we met who were journalists you could see that they were frustrated musicians. They wanted to be you but they couldn’t be, then the next best thing was to be your best mate, and if you weren’t having that, then they hated you and were waiting for you to fail. Even at the height of their huge fame, Oasis and Blur still managed to give the people who were writing about them the feeling that they were part of the entourage – an impression that we never managed (or in fact even wanted) to give to people from our much lower level of renown. That’s why there were journalists who liked us and appreciated what we were doing, but we didn’t really have any champions – there was no Paolo Hewitt to our Paul Weller. When it came to making the case for us being relevant to some new scene, there was no one to do it because nobody really gave a fuck.
William’s song ‘I Hate Rock ’n’ Roll’ with its heartwarming final chorus of ‘Rock ’n’ roll hates me’ was a pretty fair reflection of where The Jesus and Mary Chain stood by 1995. In the long term I think that’s worked out well for us, because it’s meant our music has survived and ultimately thrived on its own terms, not being tied to any particular time or any particular movement, but in the nineties it was fucking hard work. It always felt like we were swimming against the tide, and ultimately the tide overwhelmed us.
When Oasis were really happening it was like Liam and Noel were the big Hollywood remake of our little indie film of a brotherly rivalry which maybe did OK at Sundance. I remember seeing an interview with Noel years ago where he basically said ‘We go on tour and after the gig everybody goes to a club and I go back to my hotel room and write the new album.’ I was like, fuck, that was my life in the nineties! The older mousier one is upstairs working on the songs and the younger handsomer one is down in the bar going ‘Yeah, baby, I’m the singer, c’mon.’ Then the next morning everybody is asking ‘Why weren’t you there last night?’ ‘Because I was in the hotel room playing my guitar and trying to work out the difference between an A7 and an A7 diminished.’ I’d sit there smoking a joint for four hours working that out…
What really broke us apart over the last two or three years of the first period of the band’s life was that the self-fixing mechanism we’d had in the earlier years stopping working. So where in the beginning an argument would be forgotten in minutes, now it would fester for weeks. Jim would feel slighted about something where even though I didn’t think I meant it that way, maybe at some level I did. Then that would become a chip on his shoulder and because we were getting drunk all the time and he was doing coke and I was stoned, there was no way of us really reaching out to each other. Everything was broken.
By the time we were making the album that became Munki, we were spending more time in that awful sleazy pub over the road than we were in the studio. That place just seemed to attract the dregs of humanity – I suppose that was why we felt at home there. The barman used to sell drugs in the toilet and when he just disappeared overnight we seriously suspected he’d been killed, because no one knew what happened to him and he was one of those guys who just tended to blether about all sorts when it seemed like it would be safer for him to keep his mouth shut.
That was sort of how it felt making Munki. It had become quite a soul-destroying ritual delivering what we considered to be great records to a company that just wanted to chuck them in the bin, and by this time me and William had started to lose that sense of a common cause that had been the only thing that made life at Warners bearable. We weren’t dropping obscure reference points we knew they wouldn’t have heard of at meetings any more just to have a laugh afterwards about the tumbleweeds crossing the room. The record company had always hated us, and now the media and the general public seemed to be coming round to their way of thinking. In the meantime things between me and William were going from bad to worse. At the time I couldn’t put my finger on why, but we just seemed to be arguing all the time – we’d gone from agreeing on almost everything to agreeing on almost nothing, to the point where we made Munki on something closer to the dual template we’d initially imagined in our late-night planning meetings in East Kilbride in the early eighties.
In the context of those fractured and difficult circumstances, I think it turned out pretty fucking well. I guess the fact that I wrote a song called ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’ as a more positive counterpart to William’s earlier burst of negative energy was a sign of the way the band was now embodying alternative perspectives. We weren’t actually twins, but the egg had certainly divided.
It really annoyed me when Jim wrote that song. I didn’t feel that ‘I Hate Rock ’n’ Roll’ needed any further qualification – the love part was in there already.
One of the few upbeat elements in our situation when we were making Munki was the involvement of our younger sister Linda. She’d got credits on a couple of earlier records for contributing design ideas but this time around she actually gave us the title, which came from the Japanese anime cartoons that Linda really liked. After a series of album titles which had expressed where we were coming from at the time very precisely but no one seemed to like, we decided to opt for one that seemed to have no connection with the Mary Chain whatsoever – even we were bored of ourselves.
Because there’d been such a big age gap, in the early eighties Linda had been into things like Madness so we just kind of let it be. But as she got older we could talk to her about music and she got into all the stuff we were into. Linda was around at The Drugstore when we were recording so we decided to ask her to sing on a track, in the spirit of Karen Parker singing backing vocals or drumming at the Haçienda. She said OK and we liked the way her voice sounded like Moe Tucker from The Velvet Underground. It was actually a song about taking cocaine – the original title was ‘Suck My Coke’, which would’ve taken a bit of explaining to my mum once her daughter was singing on it – so at Linda’s suggestion we changed the title to ‘Moe Tucker’, which worked just fine.
It was a sign of how far we’d drifted apart that I don’t think Jim realised this at the time, but what happened with that song was a big factor in the band eventually splitting up. Not because of Linda’s contribution – which I really liked – but because I wasn’t allowed to play on it. I went away to America with Hope for a couple of weeks in the middle of the recording process, but all the time I was away I was thinking about what I was gonna play on that song. It was important to me because it was the first one that Linda had appeared on. But then when I got back and went into the studio, the engineer Dick Meany lived up to his name (though I realise this wasn’t his fault as he was only obeying orders, and it was all Chinese whispers and ego problems between me and Jim by this stage) by telling me it was already mixed and ‘sounded good’. I phoned up Jim and told him I wanted to play on that song and he – all coked up or whatever he was – said ‘No need, it’s perfect.’ I didn’t think it was perfect then and I don’t think it’s perfect now – it’s pretty good, but it could’ve sounded a lot better if I was on it, because I’m the guitarist in the band – but I didn’t push back hard enough, and this became something I really brooded on.
The problem was that the different drugs Jim and I had got addicted to – he was hooked on coke and I was addicted to weed (I know people say weed is not addictive but I am living proof that it is) – were taking our brain chemistry in different directions. Cocaine tells you ‘Go ahead, you’re the best, you can get the better of him, keep attacking…’, where what weed does is make you reflect too much to the point of being paranoid, so you won’t fight back because you’ve got too many thoughts in your head.
Years later, when we were trying to talk through where things had gone wrong between us, I told Jim ‘I know I’m no angel, but I would never have done that to you. If you’d said you wanted to add something to my song, I would never have said no, because the whole point of being in a band together is you don’t say no, you say yes – you take on ideas. That’s why Fleetwood Mac have sold a hundred million records, because they all flowed towards each other musically even when they were all getting divorced.’ I still don’t think he really gets it, though.
As far as I remember – and this is within the confines of my memory not having a lot of clarity because I was pretty out of it at the time – William was in the studio with us when we were recording ‘Moe Tucker’, and the two of us just hated each other at the time so we were glaring at each other across the whole room. I don’t know whether I actually asked him to come up with a solo, or maybe I was just waiting for him to do it because that was what he was supposed to do, but either way he wouldn’t do it, and I knew I couldn’t do it because I’m not a lead guitar player, so in sheer desperation I just picked up the little Oscar synth that was sitting in the corner and started making mental little noises with it. I only did this out of utter desperation to try and fill the space I’d left for the guitar solo, but then when I listened back I thought ‘That actually sounds really good, so William can fuck off’ – which not too much later he actually did do.
I was going to say that if William remembers all this differently from me, then so be it, but on reflection I think the two different versions of the story are actually quite compatible. Although I don’t know why he’d have thought of nothing else but this solo he was going to play for the whole two weeks he was on holiday with Hope in America, because he was there when I picked up the synth and made that noise, so he must’ve known there was no space left.
Either way, as the good ship Mary Chain ploughed on through ever more turbulent waters, an iceberg was heading towards us. Jeannette Lee – Geoff Travis’s partner in running Rough Trade management at that time – had come down to the studio while we were working on the final mixes and she had raved about them. It was a real morale boost, thinking she and Geoff were really on board, as we geared up for the painful experience of playing the new record to Warners. Then, a couple of days later, we got a call from Geoff telling us that Munki wasn’t up to our usual standard, in fact it was the worst record he’d ever heard. He went through the album trashing it track by track and then told us he didn’t want to work with us any more. We were devastated, and twenty-five years later I still don’t know what caused him to have such a drastic change of heart. We knew he had a reputation as quite a ruthless operator, but we hadn’t really seen his dark side before. Given where our band stood at the time, maybe he just didn’t think we had a future. Looking at it in narrow commercial terms – which is something Geoff doesn’t get as much credit for doing as he possibly should do – he might’ve had a point.
After a final one of those chess match-like encounters with the eternally forthright Rob Dickins – who told us he would put out the album if we wanted him to, but since neither he nor anyone else in the Warners building gave a shit about it, we might be better off trying to find someone who did – we were fully out in the cold. No record deal, no management. Happy Fucking Christmas (figuratively speaking – it wasn’t actually Christmas).