The Jesus and Mary Chain – An Interview with Jim Reid

The Jesus and Mary Chain play their milestone album Darklands in full length on their upcoming tour (click here to check dates and buy tickets). Our author Shawn Ciavattone reviewed the album and talked to Jim Reid about the album, touring, and the band’s influences.

The Jesus and Mary Chain play Darklands – the tour opens in Glasgow in March 20. Are you excited to play the entire album live for the first time?

Yeah, I’m looking forward it. It’s kind of a strange trip. Having done the Psychocandy tour, a lot of people suggested that a Darklands tour would be a good thing to do back then… so, who are we to argue. To a certain extend you have to listen to what people’s expectations are. Obviously that doesn’t apply to everything, but at the end of the day we are band and we have to take our audience’s wishes into account.

Your songs are so raw and stripped down, and yet full of these great melodies. Is it difficult to reproduce the albums on these tours?

When we did the Psychocandy tour, the idea was to do it as close to the album as we could manage, we weren’t interested in doing a version of Psychocandy that people wouldn’t recognize. Personally, if I go and see a band play and I’m used to hearing their records, I wanna go and hear them reproduce these records.

Before that particular tour, we booked a rehearsal room to see if it would work or not. Because we just didn’t knew if it would, we never did it before- there are 4 or 5 songs on Psychocandy that even back in the day we never, ever played live. But it seemed to come together really quickly, and I expect that it will be the same with Darklands.

Does modern technology make it easier to play those songs today?

On the Psychocandy tour we didn’t cheat too much and kept it very light with the technology. We were just a bunch of guys on stage making a hell of a racket, and we still used the same Japanese fuzz pedals that we used back in 1985. It was more about recreating the sound on the album, and the album was done pretty straight forward.

When you first started to record and develop your sound, no other band from that time frame sounded like JAMC.

Yes. We felt that rock music in the mid eighties had taken a wrong turn. You put the radio on and immediately wanted to turn it off again. We would listen to older stuff from the 60s and 70s, and we asked ourselves, “What has happened, why don’t people make records with an attitude anymore?”. Nobody seemed to do so, so we would.

Who did you guys listen to back then?

Everything. At the time we were listening to anything really, Burt Bacharrach records as well as to Einstürzende Neubauten records. And the Velvets and the Stooges, Suicide, and bands that were around like the Cocteau Twins and the Birthday Party. There were good bands around, it just wasn’t enough of them. We tried to adjust the scales a bit.

I always thought that JAMC also sounded influenced by Neil Young with Crazy Horse, but also American Surf.

Well, yes. Neil Young is always great, he just always seems to come up with the good. He even today sounds great, you would still want to check out a new album from him. I saw Neil Young live in the 90s at a festival- always a great show. And the Beach Boys were massively influential. Absolutely huge in England. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like them. They influenced the Beatles, after all.

Like you said, there were always good bands, but you had to look out for them more in the 80s, and they didn’t get the support from the music industry like bands before did. Why was that in your opinion?

I think after punk the music business kinda lost control over a bit. There was a chemical reaction against all of that.Not just from the suits in the music business, but also from the musicians. Everybody got into this big showbiz-glam thing, Culture Club and all that – it meant nothing to us. I just thought that we have to go back into raw rock’n’roll the way it was meant to be.

My favorite album by you is Barbed Wire Kisses. Did you see that as the new record at the time?

Those songs were as important as a proper album. Just because they came out as b-sides does not mean that they are not good. They shouldn’t just be lost. In some ways, because maybe people aren’t paying attention, you are more free about how you record it. You can sometimes get a better feel for those tracks because you are less under the microscope. We absolutely felt it was as important as an album of new material.

In fact, we will probably play songs from it after we perform the entire Darklands album. We will do two sets. One set of the entire Darklands album, then come back and do another set of songs that were around at the time. ‘Sidewalking‘ or ‘Kill Surf City‘ or ‘Who Do You Love‘. That’s the plan anyway.

JAMC sometimes gets compared to bands in the shoegaze movement.

I’m not really sure what shoegaze is, to be honest. Some guy at the NME made up the term and scene. I get it, I think it was about bands that felt uncomfortable with being on stage. I kinda relate to that feeling, an anti-show biz vibe. We just stood there like a bunch of awkward people starring at our shoes.

What we were doing was years before that whole scene existed. The bands probably had listened to the Mary Chain, but we had done our own thing. Most of those bands did listen to the JAMC, but we were never really part of all that.

The first reunion show was in 2007. What did that feel like, coming together again after being gone for such a long time?

It was enjoyable and terrifying at the same time. It was in Coachella, although we played a small warm-up show the night before, I can’t remember where it was, but it was a small club. The Coachella gig was quite scary, we had been away for nine years, I had been giving up drinking and was sober at the time. Those shows were the first ones I had played sober in my entire life. I was absolutely shitting myself.

I was standing there and thinking, “You can do this Jim boy, you can do this“. And I did! All those years I used to have nightmares at the thought of going on stage sober, but after you do it you realize that it’s possible.

And now it even feels better. That period and time in Coachella still feels like a bit of a trauma, I have to admit, and I do occasionally fall off the wagon. I’ve been sober again now for three years, and it is easier now. But I’m nervous going on stage, and I guess if I wasn’t, then something would be wrong. Because I’m an obnoxiously shy person and the idea of being a front-man in a rock band- it would have been absurd if someone had suggested that to me when I was much younger.

Let’s talk a bit more about your accidental front-man role.

It’s very complex. When we started the band, I wasn’t supposed to be the singer. I wanted to be in a band, not necessarily in the front of the stage, with the spotlights shining on me. I would have been happy to be standing in the shadows, but it just didn’t pan out that way. And it took me years and years to get to that point. Now I feel very comfortable with it.

But for years I tried to be a caricature of a Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop. That’s not me, that’s not what I do. You just can’t force yourself to be what you’re not. People are still coming to see the band- and I appreciate that, it’s fabulous and it makes you relaxed – so I must be doing something right. I probably am a lot more relaxed about being on stage than I ever have been.

Before the reunion, you did some side-projects.

Free Heat was at the height of my drinking. And I really enjoyed our tours, but if I’m being totally honest, it was more of a drinking club than a band. We would just go wherever people would provide us with enough booze to get absolutely shit-faced. That was the driving force behind that band. There was also the Dead End Kids’ track which was re-recorded by JAMC as the song ‘Amputation‘ on the last album, Damage and Joy.

Damage and Joy was released in 2017 and your first album after 19 years. How did it feel to record again as Jesus and the Mary Chain?

It ended up ok, but I had been quite worried about how it would go down in the studio. The making of the previous record was painful. The band was disintegrated at that time, and I worried because it’s such a claustrophobic environment in the recording studio. Months on end, nothing to do but get this record done. And it gets very heated sometimes, you argue, scream at each other. But William was also very keen to get back into the studio, so we took a deep breath and got on with it. We both realized that it was foolish to fuck it up with so much we could do together. We got on really well.

Any chance we will get a new JAMC album after this tour?

We started another album. It’s not finished but we have to go a mix. Maybe something will come out next year. Playing a lot with old synthesizers. Probably a lot of analogue.

Thank you for the interview, Mr. Reid.

by Shawn Ciavattone

Read the ‘3 Wishes’ Jim Reid gave us here

‘JAMC play Darklands’ Tour Dates / Tickets

Read our Darklands review here