The 40-Year Divinity of The Jesus and Mary Chain

You couldn’t blame the listeners for the inevitable eye rolls they surely had trouble holding back. On an April evening in 1987, an unsuspecting public could tune into BBC Radio 1 DJ Janice Long’s show and have zero reason to believe a 25-year-old Jim Reid—lead singer of Scottish band the Jesus and Mary Chain, in-studio with his older brother and bandmate William—when he leaned into the microphone and insisted, “I know you’re going to be able to walk into a shop and buy Psychocandy in like, 20 years’ time. I know it! I know the record’s that good!”

How was everyone who happened to flip to the station at the right time supposed to know that, nearly 40 years later, his prediction about the band’s 1985 debut album would not only be correct, but that those in the critical know would be referring to it as “the only noise pop LP anyone ever really needs to own” and still lauding it as a forebearer of several entire sub-genres—arguably making it one of the most important alternative albums of all time? Plenty of people in the increasingly fractured indie space get their 15 minutes and fade out. Jim Reid knew he wasn’t destined to leave so quietly.

If experimental music’s old wives’ tale is that everyone who bought The Velvet Underground and Nico around the time of its release started a band, Pyschocandy is undoubtedly its closest heir in terms of its massive influence. It’s nearly impossible now to point to any band playing feedback-drenched guitars who aren’t either directly or indirectly furthering the Reids’ agenda of sickly-sweet aural assault on the musical lexicon—literally “psycho” and “candy” melded as one in the form of expertly-crafted pop songs. For all the outward aggression of orchestrated noise and infamous onstage hostility to accompany the shrieks, the Reids not only knew their way around an air-tight hook, but cherished what it could all mean to someone who just happened to flip to the right station at the right time. They thought of themselves in a historical lineage before they’d even picked up guitars—and exuded bravado that told you as much.

“I make music because I’ve got a large record collection,” Jim tells Long, as they discuss the chart-toppers of the day and their shared suspicions about those artists’ unsavory reasoning for wanting to top the charts in the first place. “I make music because I adore music. That’s the difference. I make music because I’m passionate about it.” I am hardly a trailblazing left-of-the-dial radio personality, but the one thing I get to share with the legendary, much-missed Janice Long is the opportunity for an audience with Jim Reid to forthrightly decode the Jesus and Mary Chain gospel as only he can.

“The best music should be intense,” the now-62-year-old, in that same distinctive speaking cadence, says during our call. “Intense” was the descriptor I had just clumsily landed on, as I tried to pinpoint what has defined the Jesus and Mary Chain over the past four decades to its co-founder’s face—as he patiently waited for me to finish rambling. He’s repeating the word I chose to describe his work back to me, but somehow, it holds much more depth coming from his mouth—he speaks in definitive statements when he’s certain, convincing you in the process. “If it’s just music to whistle along to—I mean, that’s musical wallpaper,” he says. “You think, ‘This is just, like, so saccharine.’ It’s not going to make anybody do anything.”

This aligns with a long-held belief I have about the Jesus and Mary Chain and how their musical aim, primarily, is corporeal force. Even the most gorgeous love songs you could dig up from their catalog feel urgent in their mission to disarm, regardless of whether their weapon of choice is sonic or lyrical. Go ahead and discard the piercing distortion of the band’s debut or the post-acid-house semi-psychedelia of a record like 1992’s Honey’s Dead—you’ll still be left with intricate pop songs that demand movement from you, swinging between violence and tenderness if only to maintain a stance of extremity. When a feeling overwhelms, those extremes are the only logical places to hold yourself. It’s not a question of love or hate, but of not expressing enough. Barbed Wire Kisses, indeed.

In re-listening to the entire Jesus and Mary Chain catalog ahead of delving into their new record (their first in seven years), Glasgow Eyes, 1987’s Darklands—the album released mere months after that cocky BBC interview ahead of the band’s Top of the Pops performance of its lead single “April Skies”—strikes me as the purest expression of this JAMC tendency towards extremity. Even in their most straightforward, genuinely beautiful musical turns to date, they’re matched by heart-ripped-out-of-chest pleas to let them shed their skin for you, to drag them to your cross to be crucified—all fittingly biblical tales of tearing flesh in their desire or distaste for your love. Perhaps this M.O. has never been summarized more concisely than on that album’s title track, where William sings, “And Heaven, I think, is too close to Hell.” If you’re not making anyone do something, whether that’s starting a band or understanding the depths of your emotions, you may as well not be making a sound.

I already know that I cannot get anything out of Jim Reid that will more clearly articulate the magic of his band than those nine words his band put out into the world decades ago—and he knows that too. But together, we have an obligation to at least try. So for our brief time on our call, we do.

From the years of planning out an abstract idea for a band in their parents’ front room, trying not to wake up their sister, to their explosive initial breakup following an infamous fight at a show at the House of Blues—“That night we went berserk and tried to kill each other in Los Angeles in 1998,” as Reid refers to it now—it’s shocking to consider how little the brothers Reid have had to compromise their vision. Even when they’ve had an entire label working against them, it’s hard to cite a time they weren’t completely in control of what the Jesus and Mary Chain would or wouldn’t be. “We have to say, ‘Wow, we got a bunch of good songs. This will be a great album, let’s go and record it.’ We never punch in and out of work,” Reid says. “We’ve only made an album because we felt that we had an album. Even back in the ‘80s, we used to leave a couple of years between each album, and in those days, that was quite unusual.”

This approach has allowed them to craft a body of work that feels not only intentional, but consistently pushes the boundaries of the shape the band can take. Incremental change can affect the sound because there is such a potent core personality to the Jesus and Mary Chain sound. Even if their gaze is softer or their choice of instrument different, you can recognize one of their songs (or someone who is trying to sound like they’re making one of their songs) immediately. Reid agrees, “I think the best pop music is when people take it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it and make it into something entirely different from what elements were there before. I think it’s fair to say that with every album, we take the Mary Chain and deconstruct it and then reconstruct it again.”

So, despite its largely electronic musical palette—new territory for the band, in certain respects—Glasgow Eyes isn’t an album that could be made by anyone else. Recorded at Mogwai’s “Castle of Doom” studio in Glasgow, the city in which both brothers were born, it’s an album that can be interpreted as an overt love letter to the acts that birthed the Jesus and Mary Chain in the first place. Just within the first few minutes of opening track “Venal Joy,” there’s a vocal cameo from Fay Fife, the creative force behind original Scottish punks The Rezillos, drawing a line of influence straight through to the project’s closer, a grinding “Sister Ray” riff fittingly titled “Hey Lou Reid.” Even more direct are the affectionate musical references to the rhythmic, unnerving pulses made legitimate by bands like Suicide and Kraftwerk, both of whom have had fingerprints on all the Jesus and Mary Chain’s output from Psychocandy onward. Yet, there’s a prevalent feeling littering this collection of tracks that we’ve yet to encounter on any of the band’s projects to date: a sense of deep reflection. On the same day Jim and I speak, the Reid brothers announce a memoir pieced together from a collection of interviews conducted by writer Ben Thompson, entitled Never Understood.

When the idea of a book looking back at their storied career was first put to the Reids, their immediate answer—perhaps unsurprisingly—was “no.” As Thompson persuaded them that this could be their opportunity to counteract some of the thornier elements still clouding the band’s reputation, they reconsidered. “We’re very shy people,” the younger Reid, who only became the lead singer because he lost a coin toss to his older brother, emphasizes. “A spotlight doesn’t suit me too well. I realize that, on stage, I come across as a bit aloof, and that just has to do with the fact that I’m terrified. I’m fucking terrified! So the idea of doing a book was to get another side of us across, and also [to share] anecdotes that no one’s ever heard before. I mean, Ben went back to the very beginning, and we were telling stories about us leaving Glasgow when I was four years old. I think something about me and William comes across in that that doesn’t in any of the music, doesn’t in any of the interviews.”

Though those clues about the sensitivity laying beneath a staticky, riotous live presence have been there for the past four decades, they’ve never been drawn out quite this explicitly before. As such, the thrumming churn of Glasgow Eyes sonic palette is interspersed with impressionistic lyrics reflecting unsavory memories back through a kaleidoscopic prism. The scuzzy, insular burn of single “Chemical Animal” feels like a memorial to the reason the brothers could put up such an intimidating front for the first twenty years of their career, depicting the song’s narrator as a drug fiend hollowed out by the simple mental focus required by addiction. Its narrative is made even more bittersweet when followed by some of the record’s most open-hearted moments on “Second of June,” which sees Reid name-checking the band directly as they close a chapter of their life’s work thus far, singing, “I don’t feel this anymore / I don’t need this anymore / I can’t be this anymore.” It’s enough to make even the most casual fan pause.

As you gain perspective on a life lived, taking stock gets considerably more tempting. “Looking forward is quite a scary prospect at a certain point,” Reid agrees. “When you get to a certain age, you reflect on the good bits and the bad bits. And you kind of think, ‘Well, what could I have done differently in that situation?’” Perhaps the most clear moment of reflection comes with lead single “jamcod” (whose title is meant to be spelled out), which recounts that drunken fight in Los Angeles which led to the temporary end of the band, as Reid intones over a harsh, metallic dance beat: “Breaking up and then falling down and my heart beats much too slow / Best notify the other brother, there’s no place to go.”

Of course, his plan to have the song be the last word on the incident backfired, as everyone who interviews him during this press cycle is duty-bound to ask about the track. Still, while comparing the slightly hazy depiction of the bloody scene to the work of William Burroughs’ “cut-up method” of writing—famously used on occasion by David Bowie—Reid feels it was inspiration staring him straight in the face and he would be remiss to pass up the chance to use it. “It was just such an extreme set of circumstances, such an extreme event,” he deadpans, “but it’s great, solid songwriting material, really.”

Further bolstering my own musings about the band’s work, that aggressive pull between dark and light that propels each Jesus and Mary Chain track into motion is evident in even the most opaque or universal moments of Glasgow Eyes’ tracklist. The singalong, power-pop-leaning “Girl 71” rubs up perfectly against the more minimal synth workouts of a track like “Silver Strings” or the sludgy mid-song slowdown of “Mediterranean X Film,” which runs on the buzzy power of steady bass and piano when Jim is singing, “It looks like I love everyone,” before sluggishly lowering the volume to sing about his “darkest hell” as he almost gags on the chant of it.

It’s when we come to talk about specifics of making the album that our silent-but-mutual agreement that it’s impossible to fully articulate what the Jesus and Mary Chain does rears its head again. “I don’t know what makes it work, I don’t know how we do it,” Reid literally just comes out and says at a certain point while we’re attempting to get to the grist of the songwriting process. “I know that it’s much harder for me and I know that William is much more natural. He writes more songs than I do, and it’s become much easier for him. When I write a song, I’ve really got to try hard at it. The best songs I’ve written are the ones where I didn’t try to write. It’s a weird thing.” Similarly, he says the process of recording a Jesus and Mary Chain album takes more or less the same form as it did when they first started making records: “An album, to some degree, makes itself, because you just kind of have to start recording, and bit by bit, some songs will develop and you have to let that process take its course.”

If the mechanics of the well-oiled Jesus and Mary Chain machine have remained identical between records, surely something has to have changed in the way the gears move as they’re working. Reid can think of only two things: studio technology and a level of respect that comes with having influenced everyone and living long enough to receive your flowers for that. “Nowadays, it’s much quicker,” he says. “It’s much less painful, because we used to go into recording studios in the mid-‘80s and it was so difficult to get anything done. Then, there’s also just the fact that we’re not young kids anymore. When we used to go into recording studios, people really treated us like we were messing up their furniture or something.” He recounts one instance in the very early days where the band had to turn all the guitars back up on the mixing board after studio engineers had tampered with the track while their backs were turned.

“It would be a constant struggle just to get the basics—just treated with the minimum amount of respect,” he remembers. “Now, you’ll be in the studio and you’ll say, ‘Fuck, we could really use a Kraftwerk drum beat,’ and then someone’ll go, ‘Oh, you mean like this?’ Then, two minutes later, you’re hearing exactly what you just described. With the technology in the ‘80s, it probably would have taken a month just to get that. The rest of it is the same: You go in there, you got a bunch of songs and you need to get them finished.”

Again, given the shyness Reid spent so long attempting to mask onstage and in interviews, it’s also maybe no surprise to find him the chattiest when we are only tangentially talking about his band and mostly focusing on what great musicians love: raving about other musicians. Having read interviews he had done since the release of the last Jesus and Mary Chain album, 2017’s Damage and Joy, I ask about what inspired him to broaden his own musical appetite in recent years, mentioning his known affection for jazz and how it had potentially reshaped his understanding of recorded sound in the context of his own band. “Jazz is a particularly good example,” he agrees. “‘Jazz’ to the Mary Chain was like a dirty word back in the ‘80s, because we just didn’t see the point of it. You’d think, ‘Those guys are just making it up.’ We literally thought they were making the music up, so I didn’t get it at all. Then, somebody gave us a big bunch of free jazz records back in the ‘90s. And I was like, ‘Jazz records? I can use them as a paper weight, I suppose.’ And just before I threw them out actually, I thought, ‘I’ll check these out, just in case any of it is any good.’ They’d just reissued a load of Miles Davis, John Coltrane. I played them and I thought, ‘Fuck! In attitude, this isn’t that far from what we did.’”

“I totally got it,” he continues, growing wonderfully effusive as he does so. “There’s a brilliant Miles Davis quote where he says something like, ‘I can tell that a guy can play just by the way he stands,’ and that is totally it, man. You know what I mean? I can tell whether a guy can fit in the Mary Chain just by the way he holds himself in front of you. You think, ‘Great. You got the gig.’ And we’ve been doing that for years! Once, we were trying to find a drummer when we had a tour coming up, and it was Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream—he was just our mate at the time. And we said, ‘Oh, we’re touring Europe next week. Do you want to come?’ And he said, ‘What as?’ And we said, ‘The drummer, of course! We just fired Murray [Dalglish, the band’s original drummer]!’ And William goes, ‘Can you play?’ And he goes ‘Nooo!’ We went, ‘Oh, fuck it. We’ll work something out.’ And we went on tour having never heard the guy play in our fucking lives. That’s that Miles Davis quote in action, basically.”

Sure enough, in any clip of the band you see around the time of Psychocandy’s release, Gillespie is there—channeling his inner Moe Tucker as he stands, not sits, over his drums, letting the Jesus and Mary Chain’s signature attitude take them a longer way than anyone dreamt possible. Even as the Reid brothers barely attempt to mime along to those tracks with their eyes glazed over, more bored than anyone else has ever looked doing anything, there is so much beauty and terror in the sound coming out of the speaker, all conveying the sheer love for what they’re creating, that you can’t be bothered to care either. The work continues to communicate it all.

Since the release of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost In Translation, the cinematic moment the band will pretty much always be associated with is the “Just Like Honey” needle drop at that movie’s close. However, in terms of the band’s essence being translated to the screen, I feel the urge to skip to the next track on Psychocandy—“The Living End,” the title of which New Queer Cinema filmmaker Gregg Araki borrowed for that of his 1992 second film, released ahead of his “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy” of movies that would cement him as one of the buzziest indie directors of the decade. A Bonnie-and-Clyde story told through the lens of two HIV-positive men faced with their own mortality and left to deal with the persistent stigma surrounding their illness, The Living End introduced audiences to Araki’s furious, irreverent, middle-fingers-up response to the marginalization of queer people that would become characteristic of his work, refusing to become saccharine in translating the fear others felt towards him at the time.

Though the context in which he wrote “The Living End” was different, Jim Reid singing “I cut the road like a sharpened knife / And I’m in love with myself” feels like that same distillation of youthful anger and desperate search for beauty, communicated through song instead of up on a screen. That reckless self-actualization in the face of fear—your own extremity in defiance of extremity—is what the Jesus and Mary Chain can be boiled down to, all the way through their history. (On a less radical note, I am also partial to the quick mention they get in 2000’s High Fidelity, forever pairing the cover of Psychocandy with the memory of several brilliant Jack Black line readings: “They picked up where your precious Echo [& The Bunnymen] left off, and you’re sitting around complaining about ‘no more Echo albums’! I can’t believe you don’t own this fucking record! That’s insane!”)

Under layers of a career founded upon attitude and bravado, there is a sheer love of the artistic medium the Jesus and Mary Chain have chosen, and what it can all mean to someone listening, that has held these two brothers—“weird not-quite twins that finish each other’s sentences,” as the Reid I spoke to has referred to them—together after all these years. “I saw a documentary about Charlie Parker once,” he says as we continue to work through the thread that connects the Jesus and Mary Chain with its jazz influences, “and it was him and his musician friends who were out at a bar somewhere. Charlie went and put a Hank Williams song on the jukebox, and everybody thought he was just taking the piss. He started crying and he told the other guys to shut the fuck up, because they were laughing. He recognized that this guy’s doing it from the heart, man. You would never think Charlie Parker would get country music, and he wasn’t going to ever make country music. But you absorb things! He’s a better musician for having heard Hank Williams. It’s just the way it works.”

It’s spoken like someone who would say “I make music because I adore music” on national radio when he’s asked why it seems like so many people in his line of work can’t say the same. In fact, if there’s one thing I immediately regretted not asking Jim Reid in our brief time together, it’s another question Janice Long posed to him in that same segment: “Isn’t the music business just full of people who are taking themselves far too seriously?”

I couldn’t say for sure what his answer would be now, but without missing a beat, letting each successive thought roll out without taking a breath—like it is his breathing—the 25-year-old Jim Reid refutes it: “The music business is full of people who aren’t taking themselves seriously enough. The music business is full of people who have a total lack of respect for what music is about. It’s like the opposite with me: I’ve got a lack of respect for the music business, but a total respect for music.” It sounds like someone who’d make music with the aim of corporeal force—to shove you into a state of constant, extreme movement as long as he and his brother feel that same creative spark and feel like returning. Maybe the one immovable thing is the Jesus and Mary Chain itself. Maybe Heaven and Hell are pushed slightly further apart every time they come back around. Maybe we should get down and pray the spark keeps returning.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.