Remember Indie? It's His Fault

Nick Duerden / Q
05.1998

The Jesus And Mary Chain are back on Creation and they're a disaster waiting to happen. Following the Reids on a grotesque LA odyssey, Q are snubbed by William, browbeaten by Jim and see a large drag queen offer the band blow jobs. "Everything we did was amazing," they tell Nick Duerden.

There is a large black man on stage in the throes of orgasm. It is, hopefully, a simulated orgasm, although one cannot be entirely sure of this. His hulking great body - imagine a cross between RuPaul and Mike Tyson - is shuddering violently, and his tight white dress clings to his muscles and stretches over various protrusions like cellophane. He kicks his head back, almost losing his blonde wig and teeters precariously on skyscraping stilettos, gasping furiously.

Every Sunday night, Dr Vaginal Davis - who, it is perhaps superflous to state at this point, is halfway through "the change" - hosts Club Sucker at The Garage in downtown Los Angeles between the decidedly sober hours of five and 10pm, where (s)he plays disco music, camps it up royally and introduces the occasional band. Tonight it's the turn of The Jesus And Mary Chain, here to play a 30-minute semi-acoustic show to herald the release of their new album, Munki. The show turns out to be a howler. For starters, the sound is terrible, a predicament not ameliorated by the fact that both Jim and William neglect to open their mouths when singing. Instead, all that's audible is a high-pitched mumble and the occasional burst of drunken laughter. Between songs, they address the alien audience in a cartoon Glaswegian brogue that renders them unintelligble.

At first the audience - comprising James Dean lookalikes and large women in Shirley Temple garb - shout "More voice!" and "Louder!", before gradually losing interest and directing their gaze instead to the television screen behind the bar, which shows a series of hirsute American men dropping their jeans and waving their flaccid genitalia in the direction of some bikini-clad women who promptly bend over in a pose that needs very little deciphering. They then go at it like the clappers.

"So you boys," begins the good doctor, "come on up here and let me slurp on your cheeses!"

When this doesn't work, (s)he changes tack. "I'm not budging until you lovely Scottish boys come back up here and toss my caber! Come on you boys, you beautiful, beautiful boys!"

As (s)he writches on the stool vacated not 60 seconds earlier by Jim Reid, the shimmering dress rides up, revealing more and more thigh, rippling muscle and no hair. The DJ slips on the 12-inch of the Ashford & Simpson classic, Solid. The crowd sing along, replacing the chorus of "solid as a rock" with "solid as my cock". Ha ha. The three members of one of Great Britain's more influential bands disappear into a car, burning rubber as they flee.

Not an average Mary Chain crowd, then.

 

The next day, Jim Reid allows an uncharacteristic smile to lighten up his features. "Reminds me of when we first started out," he says. "Get up on stage and not have a fucking clue as to what's going on..."

Back a bit. Back to 1984. Alan McGee, head of his very own fledgling record label, goes to see a band on the recommendation of his childhood pal and sometime Mary Chain drummer, Bobby Gillespie. JAMC play for less than 20 minutes and are terrible. The noise they create rips the air in half, then proceeds to shred it. Ears bleed, stomachs convulse, Nurofen becomes the drug not so much of choice as of need. McGee duly notes that they cannot sing, cannot play their instruments, and that the cacophony hints at devil worship. "They were either the best band or the worst band I had ever seen," he said later. "I had to sign them."

Upside Down, the band's first single, was issued on Creation and sold over 35,000 copies at a time when the label had difficulty selling a tenth of that figure. With the kind of speed that only really happens in music and films, the brothers Reid suddenly became incredibly important, instantly iconic, the most dynamic force in music since The Sex Pistols. During an era when rock was personified by its good behaviour and, ultimately, its charitable disposition, The Jesus And Mary Chain was the snarling beast that skulked in the corner experimenting with unholy feedback. As befits those brought up with religion, they wrote songs in which the words "fuck" and "Jesus" followed in close succession - thereby incurring many a ban from the Radio One playlist - and would perform 15-minute sets in venues that were plainly too small for a band of their increasing status. If these gigs didn't end in a riot, then the band simply weren't trying hard enough.

"We didn't do those 15-minute shows to consciously wind people up," says Jim. "We believed they were a good idea. If people through we were ripping them off, then they were obviously tight bastards because the tickets only cost £2.50, for fuck's sake. And anyway, the absolute racket we made back then was like a bomb exploding. If it went on for 90 minutes, it would have been totally stupid."

And intolerable.

"Aye, you can say that again."

 

They subsequently signed to Warners' subsidiary label, blanco y negro, released one of the '80s' most influential rock records in Psychocandy, encouraged Gillespie to leave and form his own band (which he did), and sacked McGee as their manager. The hype that surrounded them was beginning to take its toll. The drink was getting out of all control. And the drugs? Don't even mention the drugs.

"It all became a little too caricature," says Jim. "Y'know, I was Jim From The Mary Chain, the drunken drug addict who would down a pint of whisky before going on stage, then fall over midway through the second song and kick somebody's teeth in. At first, we needed it - we were terrified of what was happening to us. If we didn't have the drink and the drugs, we'd have been total fucking nervous wrecks unable to even stand up, much less play guitar. But is soon got to the stage where it wasn't caricature at all. I was that drunken fucking bastard.

"See, we weren't particularly confident people," he continues, ruefully. "Off stage, we were both kinda shy, we didn't mix easily, liked to stay indoors as much as possible. But music was our one area where we both had absolute confidence in ourselves. We had this utter conviction that we were fucking incredible, that everything we did was amazing, world-conquering stuff. But pretty soon the whole thing become circus-like, and we kinda lost it. If there was one word to sum us up back then, it was paranoid. We were really fucking paranoid."

 

Eventually, the paranoia eased and, in Jim's case at least, it was replaced by another all-encompassing emotion. Frustration.

"Sometimes, I'll be spotted in the street by a kid," says Jim, "and the look he gives me... it's like I've just given him a million quid or something. When we first started out, we really believed we were going to change music forever. People were supposed to see us and come away so impressed that they'd go and start a band of their own. And looking at a lot of the music that has come out since, our message does seem to have got through. But not on the scale we wanted. We've taken on the music industry, but all we've come away with is a lot of knocks and bruises. There have been bands since who have taken on the industry and won. Look at Oasis, at The Prodigy. The Prodigy have done everything their own way. They've got to Number 1 in America, which is like the whole world. And the fact that they've done it with the kind of music they make... well, that's genius."

In an ideal world, says Jim Reid, The Jesus And Mary Chain would be held in the same regard as Nick Cave. Cave does what he likes, makes lauded reocrds and then manages to sell healthily through-out the world. The Jesus And Mary Chain may have inspired the late-'80s surge of indepedent-label guitar anti-rock, but sales haven't reflected their legend status. Darklands was Psychocandy's rich, dramatic follow-up, but subsequent albums ploughed an increasingly wearying industrial-strength-Bo-Diddley furrow, and when the Reids presented Warners with Munki three years ago, the company's response was emphatic to say the least.

"They dropped us," laments Jim. "They fucking hated it."

And so that band retreated into themselves and spent days, months, years, drinking themselves towards misery, pondering, What next? They had no manager, no idea how to go about getting another deal, and secretly hoped that their old boss would come to their rescue. Eventually, he did.

"Alan (McGee) loves the record," says Jim. "He's very encouraging, which is gratifying after everything we've been through. And I'm finding that just being appreciated is enough now. That's what keeps us together, keeps us recording. That raging ambition has all but disappeared now. I'm happy with what I'm doing. Y'know, I'm 36. It's time I learned how to relax."

William Reid, Jim's brother, will be 40 this year. It may also be time for him to learn to relax.

Until recently, William was half of drone-rock's one celebrity liason (with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval), but William is now single. The night Q leaves town he insults a pair of policemen and is locked up for the night. More soberingly still, he has just released a solo single, under the name William (no surname, no JAMC reference, no photo on the sleeve), entitled Tired Of Fucking, a lo-fi dirge that sounds like the ramblings of a madman. An album of more sonic indulgence is promised soon.

Meantime, he refuses to talk to the British press on account that it "fucks" with his head. He agrees to having his photograph taken, however, until he sees the camera, whereupon he changes his mind. "No offence," he says, "but I'm not into this. Bye."

And with that he leaves Jim and bassist Ben Lurie, and walks off down Sunset Boulevard, his gait unsteady, unsure of quite where he's heading, but not caring either, as long as it's away from here.

Even his hair looks confused.