Sometimes, when the worst happens, it can actually be a relief. As grim as it was, the break-up of the Mary Chain in 1998 seemed so utterly final that in a strange way it almost took the pressure off – especially once I realised I wasn’t going to be sleeping in a cardboard box in a doorway. After all those years of anxiety, of being ground down by the music industry, worrying that every record might be our last, so we could never relax and enjoy it because it always felt like there was a noose around our neck and we were standing on a rickety chair, it was actually quite comforting to tumble into the abyss. And it was a huge weight off my mind to find out that my whole world didn’t need to come crashing down around me just because the band was over.
I wasn’t loaded by any means, but I could get by. Royalties still trickled in, and I took in lodgers to make ends meet, so I had enough money for pizzas and beer and I could still afford something of a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Not on the scale I’d had before, but hanging around with the right people and sitting at the right tables, you could get their crumbs. At that point I was free and easy and nobody depended on me and it was a merciful release not to have to think about the band any more.
The last few years of the Mary Chain had been such a shit-show that part of me was glad to be free of it. I’d spent too long dwelling on the negative aspects of our career. It’s like you get to the Emerald City and you meet the Wizard of Oz and he’s not quite what you expect (no disrespect to Rob Dickins), and then you get behind the scenery and you see it’s all held together with bits of string and old rusty nails, but being free of all illusions is actually quite liberating. Now I didn’t care what William was doing and I don’t think he was bothered what I was up to either. There was a year – maybe two – when we didn’t even speak. The unbearable pain of losing this beautiful thing we had created and loved and then watched slowly disintegrate for no very good reason was an emotional landscape I wasn’t ready to admit I inhabited.
In the meantime, I more or less completely stopped listening to music – everything seemed to sound like something else, and the joy had gone out of all of it – and with time and space at last available to consider my options, I decided to go for full-spectrum alcohol and cocaine addiction. Part of the problem was the identity of my lodgers. One of them was Ben Lurie, with whom I shared a number of unhealthy enthusiasms, and who would sometimes cut out the middlemen by paying his rent in cocaine. The other one was a young guy who worked for a mate of mine and every weekend twenty of his mates would turn up at the flat with a big bag of ecstasy, or ‘disco biscuits’ as they called them, which were shit by the way because every now and then I’d take one to check.
They’d be mumbling ‘Oh man, I’m on one’, and I’d be the older guy in the corner saying ‘I hate to tell you this, pal, but the stuff we had at Creation in the late eighties was a whole different ballgame…’ It was a party house where no one needed a reason to get fucked up, and that was just the way I liked it, because I didn’t want to have to think about what my reasons were.
My memories of this period are quite hazy for obvious reasons but I remember feeling quite… relaxed. I didn’t have to worry about going on another fucking tour or making another fucking record with a brother who didn’t even want to fucking know me. Everything might have gone totally to shit, but as far as my short-term objective was concerned – which was not thinking about the Mary Chain – we were golden.
My alcoholism was (and is) definitely linked to my awkward behaviour around people. I had felt painfully shy for as long as I could remember and the only thing that ever helped was drink. For a while when I first started drinking it seemed like the magic solution, because all of a sudden I could chat with people and make small talk which was something that I could never manage before – ‘Why would anyone want to talk about the weather? I don’t give a fuck about the weather, talk to somebody else.’ Beneath that protective layer of arrogance I’d be squirming inside, thinking ‘I can’t deal with this, I want to get away.’ But get a pint or two or a couple of whiskies inside me and I could natter away like Joe Normal. It was always a high-wire act, though, because a couple of drinks too many and you’re a fool, but a couple of drinks too few and you’re still the person you were at the beginning. The fear of the second option always takes precedence, so you reach for another drink too soon and then that happens again and then you’re stumbling towards option one.
It was always about walking that fine line where I’d have a couple of drinks to feel relaxed, then try to leave it a bit longer before I had the next one so I could stay in that place for as long as possible – I believe Renaissance philosophers called it the golden ratio. My problem was that I could never just have the couple of drinks I needed to be what I always assumed everybody else was like. So if you took a vox pop on a crowded room where I’d spent an evening, you’d get three different responses from people according to which stage of the evening they caught me at – ‘Yes, I talked to Jim and he was a nervous wreck’, ‘Yes, I talked to Jim and he was charming’, and last but not least, ‘Yes, I talked to Jim and he ended up puking down my trousers.’
Eventually the time came that I started to think ‘I can’t just sit around at home drinking for the rest of my life – I need a reason to go to America and drink.’ At this point the band Freeheat was formed with Ben Lurie, Nick Sanderson (whose shoulder had eventually got better) and Romi Mori, who’d been the bass player in The Gun Club. Instead of sitting in the pub moaning about being excluded from everything and wondering ‘Why aren’t we famous?’ ‘Why aren’t we adored?’, we decided to take that show on the road and did two tours of America that were almost completely built around alcohol.
The amazing thing is I’ve seen live clips and we were actually playing pretty well – we were a tight little band in every sense. It was fun to make music on a very small scale again – four friends just travelling round and playing for the hell of it, with no pressure or structure of any kind. That was how William and I had started off and it was very enjoyable to do it again, even without him. Unfortunately, with no management, no record label and no agent behind us – we tried to get other people interested but for some reason no one would take us seriously – it could only go on for so long. And when that fell apart, my drinking really went into overdrive.
My life has offered me many illustrations of the wisdom of the saying ‘don’t meet your heroes’, but my two-night run as a guest vocalist with Primal Scream would provide one of the most painful. I’d done a guest vocal on the Primal Scream album Evil Heat in 2002 and when Bobby asked me to join them on tour for a couple of dates I really appreciated the gesture. That was a bad period of my life in terms of how heavily I was drinking, but for some reason I broke the habit of a lifetime by doing the warm-up gig stone-cold sober. It went well, even though Primal Scream’s music was so heavily sequenced at that point – like ours had been in the early nineties – that it was easy to get tangled up in the gears.
So we headed off to a festival in Belgium, maybe it was in Bruges. I think I was feeling a bit fragile about being on a tour bus that wasn’t mine with so many people, some of whom I knew but many of whom I didn’t. I got tanked up to calm my nerves on the way over, so I was already pretty far gone at the point where someone produced a big bag of speed. I thought ‘Well, that takes me back a bit, have you not got anything else?’ But that was all there was, so I was dipping in the bag the whole trip while also continuing to drink.
By the time of the gig I was in really, really bad shape, and as I was lying down backstage with the room revolving around me, I could hear someone doing vocal exercises to warm up before going on – all that ‘Fa-la-la’ stuff. I shouted at them to shut the fuck up because I was trying to sleep. Then I got up to see who the offender was and found myself face to face with a very sober David Bowie. I didn’t know what to say, but David Bowie did. He slowly looked me up and down and then said something quite poised and sarcastic like ‘Well, it’s a look.’ I just grunted ‘Uh huh.’ Then he walked one way and I walked the other and that was it – the time I met David Bowie. It was not my finest moment and worse was to come.
When I walked out to do the song with the Primals, the intro started up and at that point I realised I had no idea what I was doing. I started singing at some random moment then saw the horrified looks on everyone’s faces and realised I’d come in at the wrong time. It was a fucking disaster and Primal Scream never asked me to sing with them again, but they were all total gentlemen about it and I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise for letting them down.
So that was David Bowie and Iggy Pop ticked off the bucket list. Thank goodness I’d avoided a full house of the holy trinity of pre-punk by turning down the chance to meet Lou Reed when the agent we shared suggested I should ‘Come and say hi to Lou’ at a festival we were playing in the nineties. I knew he could shred people, remembered the Iggy Pop experience, and decided ‘I will cling to the version of Lou Reed that I already have.’ Of course he would probably have been charm personified, but I’ll never know now, will I?
It wasn’t just on the European festival circuit that my drinking was causing me problems. There were also the driving lessons. Driving round London had always seemed like a nightmare so I’d never got round to learning – I used to get more cabs than I could really afford and justified the expense by thinking about how much buying and running a car would cost, never mind the price of lessons. Towards the end of my several-years-long lost weekend, I did make an ill-advised foray onto the roads. I would turn up for the two or three driving lessons I had (before common sense prevailed) hung-over and reeking of whisky. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, I haven’t had a belt of anything since six o’clock.’ ‘Last night?’ ‘No, this morning.’ ‘But it’s only nine now.’ ‘It has been a few hours – have you got a drink on you?’
The death knell of my capital city driving career was signalled by me smashing into a traffic island in Chalk Farm – ‘What the fuck was that? I’ve not hit someone have I?’ ‘That was a traffic island, Mr Reid.’ Luckily, the traffic island was located right outside a tyre repair shop – ‘That’s convenient – did they have that put there so they could get custom?’
It would take one more similarly embarrassing onstage experience to bring me to my senses. I’d been starting to think seriously about trying to get a solo career off the ground, and Phil King from Lush – who had also been in some of the later versions of the Mary Chain, so he couldn’t say he wasn’t warned – helped get me a solo show in London. It had sold well in advance and there were going to be loads of reviews. True to form I decided to calm my nerves before this big occasion by getting totally fucked up and had scored a gram of coke as insurance. Unfortunately my coke consumption had fallen off a little at that point – I was prioritising alcohol due to financial constraints – so I’d lost my grip of the old balancing act between booze and cocaine that I’d previously been able to manage quite successfully (or at least to my own satisfaction).
I started drinking and snorting in the afternoon, and when Phil was telling me ‘You’ve got a gig, you’ve got to keep it together’ I just waved him away, airily insisting ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been doing this for years.’ What I’d not taken into account was that I was some way short of match fitness after a few years out of the spotlight, so by the time I got onstage I could hardly stand. I kept thinking my guitar was out of tune so I was trying to tune it up, but I was too wasted to do it and I just ended up standing there bashing my guitar without the first idea of what was going on. I can vaguely remember people in the audience were laughing at me – it was like something in a nightmare, but sadly others who were in attendance will tell you that it did actually happen.
The morning after that total public humiliation I woke up and went to start drinking again, before I realised that my drinking was out of control. I decided more or less there and then not to have another drink, and embarked on what turned out to be a five-year-long experiment with sobriety. I also moved to Devon – which meant I had to learn to drive, because you need to if you want to see the bright lights of Exeter without waiting three hours for a bus – and had two kids. I’d only just passed my test when Candice was born (we just liked that name, nobody calls her Candy), so in my early forties I became a dad with a driving licence and therefore a responsible member of society. I was a late developer but I got there in the end.
Obviously weaning myself off booze and cocaine at the level of dependence on them that I had achieved was a more complex process than what I’ve just said suggests, but there was a certain simplicity to it. There was no rehab, no therapy and (initially at least) no AA. It was just a decision I made. The way things panned out over the following two decades suggests that I have a pattern. I can stop drinking for about five years, then I hit the wall and fall off the wagon for a bit. At that point it usually takes me about six months to wean myself back off the booze.
The first time I fell off the wagon, a year or two after I’d moved to Sidmouth in Devon, where I still live, there was an AA meeting around the corner so I went there for a few sessions, but I couldn’t get into it at all. There’d be all these people whining on, telling these terrible stories about how drink ruined their lives, and I’d be sitting there thinking ‘Well, yes but what about the good times?’ I suppose this went back to my formative childhood experiences at family parties in Glasgow, but when people would share their traumatic memories of the terrible things they did at their sister’s wedding, my response would be ‘Wow, fucking great. Wish I’d have been there.’ Obviously I’ve got my share of depressing stories too, and I’ve told a few, but I have to say that if it wasn’t for my health I would probably keep drinking forever, because I love drinking, and I only don’t drink because I know that if I drink the way that I like to drink I’m going to die prematurely and I’ve got two kids and I don’t want to do that to them. That said, I have been back on the bottle at the time of writing – the pressure of making a new Jesus and Mary Chain album can do that to a person – but once I get a few months of sobriety under my belt, I know I can keep it going for at least a few years.
Giving up the cocaine, in a funny way, was easier. First, because it tended to go hand in hand with the drinking anyway, and second, because I’d had so many of those horrible bad nights where I was wired and sick and ill and didn’t know what to do about it, that those fucking awful experiences were kind of seared into my memory, so once I was away from it, it was easier not to go back.
I’ve always been pretty straight up about what I’ve done in these terms – it’s just shit that happened and I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it. I don’t like people that glorify drugs, and I hope no one could see this book as doing that. I hate the way that loads of people became junkies because of Johnny Thunders or even Charlie Parker, and in my experience there’s nothing particularly glamorous about drugs. Quite the opposite in fact, because you find yourself in really horrible seedy situations and you feel like shit much more than you feel good. The bit where you feel like a god wears off almost immediately and the rest of the time is trying to chase that feeling… that’s what happened with me anyway. The insanity of it is that once you come down and crash and get yourself together for a couple of days, then you’re back out doing it again. There’s definitely some research to be done into why people put themselves through that.
My problem when I was younger was that as soon as I started drinking, everything was a good idea. If someone came up to me in a party environment and said try something, I always would – ‘Try this arsenic, it’s new.’ ‘What does it do?’ ‘It kills you.’ ‘Great, give me some of that then.’ If you name a drug, I’ve probably done it, but even though some people thought a lot of our songs were about heroin, that was never a big thing with the Mary Chain. I did dabble with it for about a year in the nineties but I think with heroin I realised that with my somewhat addictive personality it was probably something to be wary of.
The thing that clicked with me was coke. I think one of the reasons coke is so prevalent in the music industry is that any music sounds good when you’re on it. That’s one of the reasons I used to love doing it – because sometimes you go through a period where music just doesn’t do it for you any more, but if you take drugs, music sounds great again.
I remember when I first used to listen to the Velvets, I used to say to people ‘This music is like being on drugs’, because it made me feel something physical which, when it wore off, was something I was always trying to recreate – you take drugs to get things back up to the level that they used to be without them. Obviously now I’m in my sixties I don’t feel music in my body the way that I used to when I was seventeen, but I’ve learnt to be OK with that because it’s part of life, so I no longer need to make up the deficit with cocaine.
Did you ever get your ma or da stoned? I got my ma stoned one night when we played Glasgow with My Bloody Valentine, and she was so happy. I was smoking a joint and she was asking ‘What’s it like? What’s it like?’ And so I just put it in her mouth and said ‘Here ma, smoke it’, and she did and when she got stoned she was giggly and hungry – all the clichés like if it happened in a sitcom.
In another life my ma could’ve been an actress – she was always showing off and being funny – but It’s kind of weird when your ma is on the same weird drug high as you, in fact because you’re stoned yourself it’s quite overwhelming. It’s like you went to the swingers club and found your parents there. Have you ever seen the episode of Seinfeld were George is single and he goes into the dating world and it turns out that his mother is doing that too? Well that’s what I felt like when I saw my ma smoking dope – it brought out my inner George Costanza: ‘I’m a rock ’n’ roller but you’re in my world and you shouldn’t be here.’
Did my ma miss the sixties? Everything has many angles. She lived through the real sixties, where she had two children and we were poor as fuck, and then maybe later on some of the more easy-going side of it trickled through to her. I’d be proud to think that we helped with that, because as she grew older she became what you could call a late young person. She got very liberated. I remember going back to East Kilbride once and she was watching this show on TV called Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Oh my God it was so fucking filthy, it shocked me, but she was absolutely fine with it. She gave up smoking in her fifties too, which I was really proud of her for.
My ma never thought me and Jim had a problem with alcohol, even though I told her we were alcoholics. She said ‘You’re not’, and I said ‘We are, ma, we are.’ She thought an alcoholic was someone begging on the street in rags, so she wouldn’t accept that my da had been one either. Her reasoning was my da was not an alcoholic because he was not drunk all the time. I would say ‘Well, I’m not drunk all the time, but when I have one drink I can’t fucking stop till I’ve had thirty and I’m the most drunk person on the night.’
For people of my mother’s generation – not so much for the women, who would just drink to get buzzed, but definitely for the men – that was thought of as par for the course. I had plenty of uncles I never saw sober, in fact pretty much every adult male in my childhood would now be thought of as an alcoholic, and I think that’s a very specific culture. It’s not just a Scottish thing, it’s a British thing. That’s why British soap operas were nearly always set around a pub – Coronation Street was the Rovers Return, EastEnders was the Queen Vic and Emmerdale was The Woolpack. I guess it’s a lazy way of giving your characters somewhere to meet, but there’s more to it than that, it’s also about signalling an acceptance of alcohol dependency as something that is perceived as normal.
I was in an AA meeting once and a woman gave an amazing speech about all the terrible things that had happened to her while she was drunk. You hear a lot of harrowing stories in those meetings – everyone’s invited to stand up, you’re not really going to be there unless alcohol has taken you to some dark places, and a lot of those people are born storytellers. But even in that context this woman was exceptional. She was telling us how she’d hide all these little bottles of vodka at work and then she’d wake up in the street and she’d done this and she’d done that and it was all just awful. But then she started talking about how she wasn’t really an alcoholic and everyone was just looking at her in amazement. Isn’t that extraordinary, that someone could tell you all those things and then insist that they weren’t an alcoholic?
The other side of it when you admit that you are one is that if you tell someone something that’s happened to you, the first thing that will come into their head is that perhaps you’ve been drinking, as if that invalidates every other aspect of your perception. Let’s say you went to the Chinese takeaway and the man that serves there, who usually likes you, spat in your face, but when you tell people they just say ‘You were drunk’, and then three weeks later he’s in the newspapers because he was spitting in people’s faces. Well, that sort of thing happens to me with my family all the time. When they tell me ‘But you’d had a beer’, I’ll say ‘I’d had a beer, not a fucking tab of acid.’ Yet pretty much everything I tell my sister, she’ll still ask ‘William, have you been drinking?’ If I sent her a text message saying ‘I’ve been half-eaten by a bunch of cannibals and here are my coordinates’, she’d still ask me the same question. On reflection I suppose she’d have a point with that one.
When I told a psychotherapist about ‘pretending to be confident because women like that’, they seemed to think that was fair enough as a teenager but wondered why, years later, as an adult, I still felt the need to do it. Surely, they said, I’d have reached a point where I no longer needed to pretend and could actually just be confident? After all, I’d been in a band who were a wee bit popular in the eighties… On the face of it this seemed a reasonable suggestion, but looking at the way my relationships with therapists themselves developed probably shows you why it was not consistent with my reality.
From the beginning I found it completely impossible to talk to a male therapist. The first time I was assigned one was through the NHS in the late nineties. Me and Jim weren’t wealthy at the point where the band broke up, but we had a bit of money. Still, we wouldn’t have liked the idea of ourselves resorting to BUPA, so when I felt I needed to talk to someone quickly it was always going to be done through a referral from my GP. It was a personal thing I was dealing with – I had split up with a girlfriend and I wasn’t handling it very well. I was trying to be musical and play solo shows and make records, but I just kept crying all the time and I knew I had to go and talk to someone to get over it. Not get over the woman herself – if someone’s not going to love you any more, what can you do, apart from kill yourself? You just have to move forward – but get over the fact of the loss.
It was a traumatic point in my life and I didn’t feel good about being alone and I needed to talk to someone quickly about my mental health. I don’t know if I was gonna top myself but I was feeling pretty fuckin’ desperate. So I went to this psychiatrist, and I don’t know why but I thought it was going to be a nice woman in a long flowery dress. Instead it was a fucking bloke and he was dressed like a Smiths fan – in black denims and Doc Martens. He wasn’t quite wearing a Jesus and Mary Chain t-shirt but he might as well have been, and I knew this cunt knew who I was because he was startled when I walked in. I remember thinking ‘What the fuck? I can’t tell him what’s going on – he’ll just send it straight to Melody Maker.’ I just said ‘I can’t talk to you, I can’t tell you things’, and when he said ‘Why – what’s your problem?’, I didn’t really have an answer so I just said ‘OK, I’m going to go.’
When I went back to my GP they looked at me like I really was insane – ‘You walked out of your session? Don’t you know how lucky you were to even get one?’ If it had been a hundred years ago they would’ve put me in an asylum at that point. They probably thought I was homophobic. But what I couldn’t explain was a fear which was actually quite rational, which was that if the therapist never let on he knew who I was, then how could I trust him while I did what you’ve got to do with a psychiatrist, which is say your innermost everything? How can you pour your heart out to someone who only really wants to ask you ‘What was it like when you were on that tour with Sonic Youth?’ Or ‘Did you ever actually meet J. Mascis?’ I guess maybe I could’ve put up with a male therapist if he didn’t look like he was in The Housemartins.
Apart from the fact that the North Circular was driving me crazy, one of the reasons I left London for America was all these gangs of little teenage idiots who give you shit at bus stops. You know if they came at you in a fair fight you could just kick their fucking head right off their body, but you also know the chances are they’ve got a knife, so when they say ‘Oh, you’ve got funny hair, why don’t you get your hair cut, mate?’ – which is something that has been happening to me for decades – you’ve kind of got to watch what you say back.
Usually I’d ignore it, but every now and then I got pissed off and there was one time when we were at The Drugstore when this kid who thought he was so fucking witty with four or five of his mates said ‘Oi, who cut your hair, mate?’ Without really thinking about it, I replied ‘Who cut yours? The same guy who cut everyone else’s hair in the world.’ Then I looked up and saw them looking at me like they were actually going to kill me. Part of you is thinking you could just swat them away, but another part is thinking, ‘Am I going to die for these little fucking idiots?’
So that was one reason I moved to America – because I didn’t want to be a hair martyr. Someone looking at the situation from outside might’ve also thought I was trying to get as far away from Jim as possible, but that wasn’t actually what it was. Yes I was fed up with Britain in general and Muswell Hill in particular, but ever since I was a child America had always been a beautiful thing in my mind – shiny and attractive and exciting. And luckily because of my job I’d been able to go there often, sometimes as many as three times a year, and I’d kind of got to know it as a real place and not just as the fantasy of my childhood.
I’d started to talk about maybe moving to America as early as the late-eighties, when I was still with Rona. She was all gung-ho about it until I got serious enough to present her with some forms to fill in and then she backed out, which I was disappointed by at the time. So after the band broke up I felt like there wasn’t really anything keeping me in Britain and I might as well give it a go.
I had met and married my first wife Dawn by then, who was American (from Seattle), so that was another factor in finally making the move. She already had an eight-year-old daughter, and we had a son in January 2000, so when we first went out there we moved to a family house in Redondo Beach, California. Part of the attraction being that it was mentioned in The Beach Boys’ ‘Surfin’ USA’. But once I got to this mythical sun-kissed location, I hated it – it was a terrible judgemental suburban place full of Martha Stewart types who didn’t like my wife because she had tattoos and a nose ring (I suppose I must’ve looked pretty weird to them as well). Everyone had this smug thing going on and by the time we realised we’d been given bad information and a house in Redondo Beach wasn’t really much less expensive than a house in the Hollywood Hills, it was too late to do anything about it.
I guess it’s funny that The Jesus and Mary Chain had to break up before Jim and I could have children – maybe because it meant we didn’t have to look after each other any more. But I wasn’t turning my back on every aspect of British culture. I had a gadget called a Slingbox which enabled me to watch British TV over the internet. Although this seemed like something from the world of science fiction at the time, it wasn’t really high technology in that the people who ran it just rented a warehouse in Wembley and filled it with a hundred and fifty video or DVR recorders. Obviously in the modern world the idea of having all those different bits of hardware seems ridiculous, but at the time it was a good way of keeping up with Coronation Street or the British news, and one of the Slingboxes connected up to my ma’s cable, which enabled me to switch channels on her sometimes during her favourite shows so she knew she wasn’t watching alone.
When it went wrong – which it did quite often, just like our first four-track tape recorder before it (that’s what you get with new-frontier technology) – you’d have to call this guy in Washington. He was a flamboyant ex-pat, a real Noël Coward type, who smoked cigarettes in a cigarette holder so they didn’t have to touch his mouth. I’d ring him up to complain when things hadn’t recorded properly and he’d argue with me in an accent I couldn’t even begin to approximate.
I’d get quite irate if I missed certain shows, especially Coronation Street. To me the theme tune is like that poet that always gets mentioned with the cakes – Marcel Proust and his madeleines. That ‘dah, da da da da dah’ has been there all my life, from when I was crawling around on the carpet in Glasgow in 1962, to living in California forty years later, and you could make a case for it being one of the best pieces of music ever recorded, because people have heard it hundreds and even thousands of times and yet there’s no petition to change it.
When you think about the theme for a soap, it’s a tune you’re going to hear several times a week for years on end, so it’s got to be somehow not offensive and yet not too bland. I doff my cap to Tony Hatch for writing not only ‘Downtown’, which was one of the greatest songs of the sixties, but also the theme tunes for Neighbours and Crossroads. They had two versions of the latter, with the sentimental one Wings played for the times when someone died. Tony might’ve been a bit of a bastard on New Faces but that was pretty good going. I wish I could make a piece of music with those powers of endurance. The best Beach Boys singles are a bit like that – how many times have I heard ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and I’m still not sick of it.
For some reason Coronation Street is something, like fish and chips, that always has the power to make me feel part of Scotland and part of Britain. Do I watch it for entertainment? No, I watch it to criticise everything about it – the dialogue, the acting. I just love to sit there and mock it. I remember reading a few years ago that Nick Cave had done this European tour and for every one of about ten gigs in four different countries this same guy was there at the front, shouting ‘You’re shit! You’re shit!’ Cave said he admired the dedication involved – all the hotels and planes just to do that – and I’m like that with Coronation Street. I boo it, but I’m still there to boo it.
When the band broke up, my ma and sister couldn’t stand it. I think women feel emotional pain a lot more than men, or maybe they feel it better. I hope I’m not being sexist here, but I think the fact that women have babies shows they have a higher tolerance for physical pain than men, and maybe they experience emotions more directly.
I know I’m generalising because obviously plenty of men feel plenty of emotion – that’s why The Guardian exists – but I think the reason me and Jim falling out hurt my ma and sister so much was because we’d all grown up together as a family, and in working-class families especially it’s a given that you should stay together because you’re so poor you’ve got nothing else to fall back on. So when two of your family start a band and they’re quite successful, but then they have a big fight in Tokyo over some macadamia nuts and another even bigger fight in Los Angeles and everything has got too fucked up for them to even talk to each other, of course that’s going to be incredibly distressing to you. And I feel bad for putting them through that.