Before we played Coachella I was getting Lollapalooza flashbacks that we were going to be standing on a stage in front of tens of thousands of people at a massive festival in California and the crowd were going to go: ‘Uh, The Mary and Jesus Chain? I don’t know who that is – let me go and buy a hotdog.’ I was also fucking terrified of the idea of doing my first ever sober Mary Chain gig.
And as if the thought of getting through a ninety-minute comeback set in front of a huge crowd without a drink wasn’t daunting enough, I was going to be singing ‘Just Like Honey’ with Hollywood’s own Scarlett Johansson. That was William’s idea, as he was Mr Showbiz, and it was a good idea because she was doing a record at the time with a label who were reissuing our back catalogue, so we had a line of communication, and that song had recently featured on the soundtrack of her film Lost In Translation.
Of course, when the big day came, every fibre of my being was screaming ‘Drink!’ ‘Drink!’ ‘Drugs!’ ‘More Drugs!’ But on this occasion, I managed to ignore that siren call. I stood on the stage telling myself not to think about all the things that could possibly go wrong or how desperate I was to get wasted and just try to lock into the gig, and I did and it was OK. Did I enjoy it? I don’t know because I was too busy concentrating on getting from one end of the show to the other, but I did appreciate the fact that we had a prime evening slot rather than the graveyard shift in early afternoon, so even though our lights weren’t really working at the start of the show because the sun hadn’t fully gone down yet, by the end the stage looked amazing.
Scarlett rebooted a ‘Just Like Honey’ tradition that went back to Bobby’s girlfriend Karen singing on the original version. Nowadays when we’re out on the festival circuit, we’ll always try and find someone on the premises. At Glastonbury in 2023, when Phoebe Bridgers did it, that happened more or less on the day, and it’s nice to feel that there are still people coming through who have listened to our music and are happy to be asked to sing it. I’m sure there’ve been a few people hiding under a table in the dressing room to avoid the call, too, but we’re all right with that.
Once I’d found out that it was possible for me to do a show without being falling over drunk I started to enjoy subsequent live performances much more. Obviously I don’t look like I’m enjoying it, because that’s not really my style, but I have grown to appreciate how much easier it is to understand and correct mistakes when you’ve not had one over the eight. When you’re drunk, your thought processes are very slow, so as you realise a mistake’s been made – and whether it’s you or someone else who made it doesn’t really matter, but let’s say someone starts playing a chorus when it should be a verse – you just think ‘Oh, a mistake, I wonder if that was me?’ And another eight bars have gone past before you can do anything about it. That’s when you end up smashing equipment, because it’s so frustrating not to be in control of what’s going on. But when you’re sober you can work out what’s happened much quicker and adjust what you’re doing to take account of the mistake, often before the audience have even noticed it.
Adjusting my performance settings to new-found sobriety was probably the hardest transition of those early gigs after we reformed. I learnt to shut my eyes and try to forget there was an audience when I could feel my energy dipping, and then before I knew it I’d be back in the room. It took me two or three years to work out what to do with my hands when I wasn’t singing, because I just felt so unrelaxed, but maybe it was good that I had something new to think about as it stopped me falling into old routines. I don’t know how William managed it!
There was one factory setting I couldn’t manage to reset, though, and that was social anxiety. The next year after Coachella we did a South American tour with R.E.M., and on the night Obama got elected in 2008 we were playing in Chile. As usual, things had already been a bit awkward backstage with the two of us sitting in silence staring at the walls, so when we were invited to go and watch the election results come in with Michael Stipe and co, I wanted to because it was such a big moment but I just couldn’t do it. Subsequently when people have asked ‘Where were you on the night of Obama’s victory?’, I’ve always been able to answer, ‘Back in my hotel room on my own, when I could’ve been watching history unfold with one of the biggest and best bands in the world.’ I’d only been sober for a few years at that point and the thought of sitting around with all these famous people I didn’t know was just too much for me. William had a different set of priorities but they directed him to the same conclusion. We could’ve watched Barack Obama become America’s first black president with the band who sang ‘Shiny Happy People’, but we were too shy.
William 2: We weren’t quite living the high life that first year after Coachella, but we did make some money. What I should’ve done was buy property with it, but instead I just thought ‘I’m going to be a big shot for a year’ and spent the lot on clouds and fluff. I went a bit nuts and leased a Jaguar XJ10. I’m not really a Jag type of guy, but I was newly divorced and living in Hollywood at the time, so I thought ‘I’ll show these Hollywood people.’ It was great for maybe ten minutes, but then I went off it because all these women who weren’t my type – surgically enhanced wannabe actresses looking for a rock ’n’ roll sugar daddy – kept trying to get off with me. I know some guys would’ve just said ‘Yeah, OK baby’, but if we’ve got to put everything into little boxes, I like ‘indie girls’ not ‘rock chicks’, and when I had that Jaguar I was not attracting indie girls, because that’s not what they’re looking for.
Fifteen years on and hundreds of thousands of fucking dollars down the drain, I’m not as well off as I should be because I’ve now been through two California divorces (which are the expensive kind, because you have to give your wife of possibly quite a short period of time half of everything you’ve ever had, not just half the money you’ve made while you were together), but I had a good time and I’ve got my memories.
I rented a place in Glendale for so long that houses which cost three hundred grand when I first moved there in 2012 cost nearly a million by the time I left. That’s why I live in a Bruce Springsteen song these days, in the desert on the edge of town near Tucson, Arizona, because I wanted a house that could take me to the end of my life – with a swimming pool and a studio and a wee bit of space so my wife can still hear the TV while I’m making a racket – but without a huge mortgage so I could maybe pay it off with couple of big tours and a few festivals. I wasn’t the only one who had an idea like that – it’s California liberals as far as the eye can see in Arizona now, since they legalised weed. That’s why the Democrats won it for Biden against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Also, I love the dry desert heat where you never really sweat much, unlike New Orleans or New York in the summer where your balls are sticking together two minutes after you’ve left the house. They should make more of that in the estate agents’ brochure – ‘You won’t have to use talcum powder for the chafing.’ The wildlife is another big asset. I’ll look out my window and see a huge desert wolf walk by. I don’t know if it’s a coyote or a wolf but I wouldn’t like to fight one. I feed them, that’s why they come around – I throw out things like apple cores and old eggs and every now and then I’ll chuck them a horrible wee steak thing. I don’t like to touch the steak – it’s disgusting – so I’ll have to wash my hands for about ten minutes after, but the desert wolves are ungrateful bastards. They don’t come by after to thank me saying ‘I know you don’t like to touch the steak, but you did it for me and my kids.’
I still love Britain – I love it so much that I’ve lived in America for twenty-two years. I was just on a green card for ages at first and it seemed like that was solid until Donald Trump and Stephen Miller came along with their hatred of all foreign people and anyone that travels. I thought ‘Oh fuck, they’re gonna kick me out.’ As a rule you don’t see ICE rounding up white guys in rock bands, but I’d got arrested in 2012 for disorderly conduct and when they said ‘Not only are we gonna get rid of illegal immigrants, we’re gonna get rid of green card holders who have had an arrest’, I knew I’d have to do the Patriot test. I passed with flying colours and I could probably still pass the British one as well because I still know what happened in 1066. As shit as it was at the time, the way things went afterwards suggests that Jim and I probably had the best education that was ever available in Britain without paying for it.
It is strange watching historic events unfold from across the Atlantic in what I call ‘Brireland’, which is Britain and Ireland together (because Bernadette is Irish and when I mention something being the case in Britain she’ll often say ‘that happens in Ireland too’ – although I didn’t make that phrase up myself and I do recognise that there are pubs in Dublin, and Glasgow come to that, where this coinage would not be acceptable). Like the queen dying, for instance – obviously she’d been there for all mine and Jim’s lives, but I think the way the monarchy was in Britain probably needed to die with her. It would be better if we adopted something more like what they have in Sweden or Holland – ‘OK, you can still be monarch, because you had relatives in the Middle Ages who killed everyone else to gain their fortune, but let’s do this on a smaller scale.’ It’s basically like the Kray twins had kids, and then their kids had kids, and then eight centuries later they own half the country, but if anyone asks how that happened they just say ‘Oh that was all so long ago.’
From the moment we got back together, it wasn’t just about getting back together to play the greatest hits set, we knew there was more music to make and it was always about making a new album. It was nice not to have the Armani suit guys breathing down our neck any more, but the release of that pressure combined with me living in England and William being in LA to make that process a long haul. We had to be careful not to push anything too hard – this also applied to our touring schedule – because we aware of how deep the fault lines between us still were. I guess it was like a divorced couple going on holiday together – maybe start with a week and don’t book the full fortnight until you know you can do it. Also at times where one of us was trying to be sober and the other one wasn’t, it was important to leave plenty of breathing space.
One reason everything takes us so long is that The Jesus and Mary Chain is a band with two songwriters. That’s why it took a full decade from Coachella to the point where Damage and Joy finally came out. Because I write so many more songs than Jim does I find that very frustrating, but it is what it is and I’m reconciled to it now.
The technology might have changed but the process of recording Damage and Joy – which in the end we did with Youth from Killing Joke – was pretty similar to what it always had been. It was just me and William stuck in a windowless room trying to make sense together of these songs that we had written individually. I’d got no more self-assurance about what we were doing than I’d had the first time we went in a studio thirty years before.
It feels like everything’s up for grabs and you’re not sure if it’s going well – one minute you’re thinking it’s great and five minutes later it’s shite, then another five minutes on it’s not bad again. The shite-ometer was fluctuating wildly on that album, but by the time we got to mixing, it was like the shite-ometer had finally exploded and I started to feel confident that we were pulling it off. And ‘All Things Pass’ is just one of several songs from that album which people tend to think are lost hits from our golden era – whatever that was – when we play them in the live set now.
You never know which are the records which are going to stay with people. I always thought Darklands would be the one for us, but when we played it in full on the anniversary tour, nobody seemed that bothered, where Munki and Stoned & Dethroned – which are two of my favourites that nobody was that into when they first came out – seem to be having a moment now.
One old favourite who couldn’t be written out of our story was Alan McGee. We decided the time was right for a third entanglement with him in 2014. I’d always found it easy to be pals with him, though there was an undercurrent of tension between him and William which maybe got a little stronger with time, and some of the things Alan had said in his book didn’t help.
’Chalk and cheese’ would be one phrase you could use about me and Alan. Jim thinks maybe he was a bit frightened of me, and yes, Alan was someone who could often shout at people and dominate them and he could never do that with me – not at all, he just couldn’t. But I thought we were friendly enough, until my wife Bernadette saw this documentary where Alan was saying I was a dislikeable person, and I just thought ‘Why the fuck would he say that?’ So when he became our manager again about a year or so later I asked him ‘What was that all about?’ And he said ‘Oh, that was just for the cameras – I was talking shite.’ I can’t ever imagine a situation in which I would back down like that.
I’ve thought about this a lot and the conclusion I’ve come to is that ‘Alan’ is the person and ‘McGee’ is the character, and I kind of get that. He’s created this cartoon superhero in his own mind which is the one he wants everyone to talk about and I’m not sure he knows any more where that fantasy self ends and the real Alan begins.
Drinking alone started in my thirties and I wish I could stop it. I had a bit of a crash in 2016 – I was just all over the place, mentally, and going through a pretty horrible time in my head. I think a lot of people say they’re suicidal without maybe really knowing what it means to take yourself off the planet. Even when I’ve felt lower than dirt and that urge has been there, it’s still a small thing which I hope I’m not ever going to explore. I think what happens is people get a little urge and they explore it and then it gets bigger and bigger, and they might end up killing themselves over a problem they could actually have solved. Like with Kurt Cobain, I don’t know what his problem was but it looks like he couldn’t handle fame, but with all the money he made couldn’t he just have sat on a private island and played his guitar – were there not other options?
I hear about artists or writers or musicians who create things when they’re depressed and I think ‘Well, I must have a different kind of depression to them’, because when I’m depressed I can do nothing, never mind pick up a guitar and a pen and paper and write a little tune – that’s what I do when I’m happy. Melancholy and depression are different things – with the first, you might feel miserable and a bit shit but you’re still above ground. With the second, you’re fully down there under the surface. To me depression is like a full shutting down – sometimes you feel like that for a few days or even a few weeks, but a true depression is when you can’t see any possibility of a way out.
At that time of crisis in my life I will tell you Jim was there for me. I knew he would be, but when it happened it was just amazing to see him showing an interest, because Jim shows an interest in nothing. He’s the most blasé, ‘Don’t give a fuck’ guy in the world, but he’s also got the most beautiful heart – he really has. You should see him with his children, he’s just amazing. Everybody thinks he’s a dark character but inside he’s not, he’s this beautiful character of light.
We’re very close but we’re not really guys that sit and talk about our feelings. Sometimes we do, but it doesn’t get too deep and we kind of like it like that – we’re more comfortable talking about music or films or books, and it’s been like that with us our whole lives. But me and Jim do talk about each other’s current mental state and we do worry for each other because we know how bad things can get. I’ve seen him at his lowest and he’s seen me at my lowest and I don’t want to see him feeling pain all the time and I think he feels that for me too.
I would say that with Jim’s help – and Bernadette’s, and David McBride’s (he’s the new manager we took on after the inevitable third parting of the ways with Alan) – I haven’t been properly depressed for four or five years now. And I’m hoping I never get depressed again. That’s one reason we managed to get our most recent album, Glasgow Eyes, finished and released in slightly better time than the previous one, despite a few arguments and an engineer losing all the recordings so we had to start again along the way. If we can carry on picking up speed at this rate, the next record will be done in three and a half years instead of six, but don’t hold your breath.
A couple of months before Damage and Joy was released in 2017, the NME asked me and Jim to come and pick up a prize at their Brat Awards. We asked what it was for. ‘Oh, we can’t tell you till you get there.’ But surely ‘What is the award for?’ is a perfectly reasonable question. ‘Oh we can’t tell you until you turn up’ – can you imagine them saying that to any other band? I thought it was suspicious the way they wouldn’t tell us. What was it – ‘Dopes of the century’ or ‘The world’s biggest idiots’? If it was ‘Heroes’, surely they could have given us a hint?
Luckily, we could survive without an NME award – we’d managed pretty well up to then – because the whole thing just seemed weird. And then my suspicions were confirmed (or someone at the NME took their revenge for us snubbing their awards, depending on which way you look at it) when our album came out – the first new one we’d released for nineteen years – and they wouldn’t even review it. I’m not talking about a bad review, I’m talking about no review, for a band that had been on their cover any number of times. That could only be down to either professional incompetence or a personal vendetta.
Jim still did an interview with them and the guy phoned him from a pub so there was too much background noise to hear what he was saying, then halfway through the interview he said he had to leave. Doesn’t that sound like an insult to you? I said ‘Did you tell him to go fuck himself?’ And Jim was like ‘No, why would I do that? We need to do interviews otherwise no one will know we have a new record.’ And I suppose that’s fair enough, but I personally will never talk to those cunts again. Most music journalists are incredibly pretentious and needy anyway – they’re like groupies, only the transaction has less dignity.
When I’ve mentioned to people in my life that there is an aspect of having a little bit of fame that I don’t like, their response tends to be ‘But you’re not famous.’ Fair enough, I’m not John Lennon, but once you enter into that universe of someone that you’ve never met in another town knows you, then to me that’s fame basically – if you’re in Canada and you’re trying to pump gas into your car and your hands are freezing and someone comes up to you and says ‘Hey, William, you do it this way.’
What I’ve realised about the higher level of fame is that the people who get it want it a lot. A little baby was born called David Jones and all it wanted was for somebody to shine a torch on it and when it was one week old it was trying to shout ‘Hi everyone, I’m David Bowie…’ And then thinking ‘Hang on, that hasn’t worked, I’ll try a new image.’ He was always going ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ Whereas me and Jim were always going ‘Look over there.’ That’s the kind of fame we want, and are lucky enough to have…
When I meet people who class me as some sort of celebrity, I can sense their disappointment at my cheery greeting of ‘Oh, right – did you see Midsomer Murders the other night, pal?’ As they look me up and down I know they’re thinking ‘Fuck me, this is not how it’s supposed to be’, because I’ve felt exactly the same thing when I’ve met people who did things that I admired. The fact that you’re lucky enough to make music for a living doesn’t make you special, and I don’t have that need to hang out with the kind of people who would fan the flames of the vain hope that it might do.
This is what makes the life we have now my ideal rock ’n’ roll existence. I know music is very important to people, because it’s very important to me, and the fact that we can play songs we wrote forty years ago to audiences in Brighton or Tokyo and they’ll mean something to people our age, but for some reason – probably to do with TikTok – there will be loads of teenagers there who are into it as well, completely blows my mind. Knowing that the pain of dealing with Warners for all those years helped facilitate this happy state of affairs even softens up some of those scars slightly, and being able to zip off to Portugal for a couple of days to be adored at a festival and then zip back to south Devon reality and buy a tin of beans in a Tesco Express where nobody knows who the fuck I am totally suits me.
Touring when the band started was rather gruelling – it was big ten-week slogs sleeping on buses that the 25-year-old off-my-tits-on-cocaine-and-booze version of me found strangely unenjoyable. This new weekend festival version seems like a much more civilised way to do what we do and I wish I could send my younger self a message to say that this was how things were going to turn out, as it would really have taken the pressure off.
If you compare the happy crowds in the photos our drummer Justin takes at the end of every show we do these days with the footage of the North London Poly or Electric Ballroom situations, something’s definitely changed for the better. The painful levels of self-consciousness which are evident in my youthful filmed interviews have definitely eased off a bit. And the funny thing about this happy ending is that it’s not something anyone would have predicted, except maybe me and William, because we understood ourselves, even if nobody else did.
It’s great that we can still draw a crowd, but I don’t think it’s really a happy ending until we can make more new records that fully re-establish us. I tell you what I want to do one day – just forget The Jesus and Mary Chain and go and stay on a nice island with a nice recording studio with air conditioning and just sit there all stoned and beautiful and make records. Jim has got a very distinctive vocal style, so of course I will fly him out there to sing on them, and not just at Musicians’ Union session rates either – I’ll give him extra for being family.