Kings Of The Wild Frontier
Kevin Westenberg / Melody Maker
23.07.1994
23.07.1994
The Jesus And Mary Chain were causing riots and generating angry editorials in the tabloids while you were probably in junior school. The Stud Brothers talk to the band described as The Sex Pistols of the Eighties about their team-up with Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, their great new album, 'Stoned And Dethroned', and their ten years of delinquency and debauchery on the proverbial rock'n'roll edge. Stoned to say the least: Kevin Westenberg.
"Does it seem like 10 years?" William Reid ponders this. "Well, it has been 10 years. First gig was June '84, first single 'Upside Down', was October '84. And I still really love that record."
"Funny thing about a record," continues his brother Jim, "is it really is like a photograph of some sort. The further you get away from it, the more you've changed, and you look back at it and think, 'God, was that really me, was that really us, was that really what we were about then?'"
Like all the best bands, the best fighters, the best lovers, the best drugs, the Jesus and Mary Chain went nuclear immediately. In their first 15 minutes of fame they were beaten up, banged up, accused of blasphemy, they blasphemed, caused riots and became the greatest thing a band can become - a cause cèlébre. As importantly, perhaps more importantly, they released "Psychocandy", an album that redefined the sound of British rock.
It's been 10 years and six albums - the seventh, "Stoned And Dethroned", is out on August 15th. Ten years since the anarchy that saw them instantly dubbed The New Sex Pistols, nine since "Psychocandy", and, like all enfants terrible, they've had to live with and live up to their terrible infancy. It haunts them in the very absolute way only a very public past can.
Every rock-literate 18-year-old kid will remember the notorious North London Poly gig when the Mary Chain stumbled onstage, hours late and pissed out of their minds, to be chased from the building 20 minutes later by a crowd who'd caused £7,000 worth of damage. They'll also remember the earlier, equally brutal and catastrophic appearance at London's ICA. And yet at the time, these 18-year-olds were probably too young to have bought a record, let alone going to a gig. Even those less well-versed in rock history are dimly aware of the vicious aura that surrounds the band.
The Mary Chain were an instant myth. The astonishing thing is not merely that they've survived the myth, but that the myth has survived them. In the normal course of events, groups have either had to split or rock stars have had to end up six feet under for the legend to prevail. If they don't split and don't die, you can almost guarantee they'll serve a fashionable six-month sentence at the Betty Ford clinic, look like shit and mostly be seen poncing about in tuxedos at the MTV Awards, and the legend will be, if not dead, then certainly just a bittter memory.
The Mary Chain were well aware of this when they described Bowie as a "f***ing scumbag who should've been shot in 1972", Iggy Pop, who they supported in Australia, as "a sad old pathetic shite", John Lydon as "a sad comedian" while "the best thing that could've happened to the Stones was if they'd met Charles Manson in '69 and he'd hacked their heads off with a f***ing chainsaw." Only last week, in an interview with the Maker's News Editor, Carol Clerk, William Reid showed scant regard for Linda McCartney's feelings when he said "John Lennon was a genius, and so was Paul. Unfortunately Paul never got murdered before he wrote 'Mull of Kintyre'."
It's not that Jim and William were being malicious, it's just that they really care about cool, they really care about music and they hate to see it demeaned.
The Jesus and Mary Chain began plotting their ascent, or rather dreaming of it (since most of their notority was gained more by accident than design), as dole boys in East Kilbride, a staunchly working-class suburb of Glasgow. They wrote some songs, sent out tapes, failed to get gigs. Eventually, a friend of a friend, Bobby Gillespie (who'd soon replace Murray Dalgliesh as the Mary Chain's drummer) advised them to send a tape to Creation's Alan McGee. A month later they played McGee's living room, then came the first single, "Upside Down", a bone-shattering blood-and-bubblegum rocker that cost £172 to make and sold 35,000 copies.
Then came the ICA. There'd been trouble before, most notably a few months earlier at the Ambulance station, but for a riot to break out at London's Institute of Contemporary Art, just a a bottle-throw from Buckingham Palace, really did look like the storming of the Bastille. Or rather the storming of Buckingham Palace.
"The so-called riots," remembers Jim. "I think, looking back on them, that it wasn't deliberate but it was our fault more than anybody else's. At the time we were stunned by it all, we would not believe what was going on. We were drinking an awful lot and we'd never been in a band before, we knew nothing about this shitty old business and you really have got to follow the rules to a certain extent. You really can't get shit-faced drunk, go onstage two and a half hours late, play for two minutes then fall over and expect anything other than a lot of f***ing trouble. Really it's amazing there wasn't more. Sometimes we did wanna play for longer but the bouncers would just drag us offstage and beat us up. Either that or we'd be forced to make a speedy exit."
"We did undoubtedly benefit from the controversy," says William, "but only for a couple of months. Ever since then we've had to live up to that. Even now. Like, when we released 'Darklands' (J&MC's second album) people said, 'What the f*** is that?' because we were this group that caused riots. So it was like, 'What the f** are they up to? They're supposed to be ripping our faces off and here they are doing little ole country songs.'."
"The problem was," continues Jim, "we began by playing to the gallery, you know. It does work, it does get your name in the paper. What we began to realise, though, was that wasn't really why we wanted to be in the band. We wanted, boring as it sounds, to be appreciated for the music we make. But people didn't want to do that. It got beyond a joke."
After the ICA came the North London Poly. And then the Electric Ballroom.
"North London Poly was quite satisfying," William later told the Melody Maker, "because it was what we intended to do that night. By the time we did the Electric Ballroom it was all expected. It was pathetic. It was like, 'One, two, three, let's riot!'. In those days the whole group was taken out of our hands. It's the only time in our career we've ever lost control, the only time we were truly frustrated."
"I think," says Jim, "that subversion in music is the easiest kind of subversion there is. It's someone saying boo to a goose and it always makes headline news. It's so f***ing easy to cause a stir. You get so many groups who come along and do exactly what every other subversive band has done before and it still creates headlines. That stuff that went on with us at the beginning, there were probably people around then who were thinking, 'This is pathetic'. It's too easy to do it stupidly and get away with it."
Some may have thought it pathetic, some were pleasantly outraged, others so repulsed that shortly after the Electric Ballroom show, Jim was hospitalised after a gang of thugs beat him to a pulp at a Nick Cave gig. Others took less direct action. The Sun bellowed indignantly about malicious damage, and pressing-plant workers refused to touch the band's track "Jesus Suck" (originally "Jesus F***") on the grounds that it was "blasphemous, obscene and controversial".
By 1987, the Mary Chain had been arrested in Germany, charged with possession of amphetamine sulphate in Britain, banned from Radio 1 for advocating the use of drugs ("Some Candy Talking") again accused of blasphemy (for the crucifixion scene on the sleeve of "April Skies", tastefully released in Easter Week) and Jim had been jailed in Toronto for assaulting two fans.
Somehow, inbetween, they'd found time to released two magnificent albums. The first, "Psychocandy", appearing at at time when pop either cared (Live Aid) or consumed (Madonna, Pet Shop Boys) was a cooly nihilistic Dionysian blitz. It felt like the purest, most terrible seduction. The second, "Darklands", though sonically more restrained, managed lyrically and in its soporific, smacked-out tone to blur the the distinction between love and drugs, between girls and drugs. Drugs, in their early days, were something the Mary Chain talked about a lot.
"I don't want to get into that drug thing," says Jim, wincing when we reminds him of an interview in the Italian rock mag Rockerilla where he and his brother waxed lyrical about the joys of acid and speed. "Yeah, we were doing a lot of drugs in those early days. I don't wanna speak about it. I can name f***ing dozens of bands who people don't even associate with drugs who do an awful lot more drugs than we have ever done.
"At the time we thought it was quite cool to talk about drugs, especially acid and speed. I mean, people werent't talking about speed in interviews, so we thought , 'Let's say it.' I don't apologise for it. People should say what they feel. However, it kinda saddens me that people might be doing drugs because we talked about them. I mean, I've never done drugs because I read an interview with a band, but stupid poeple do read these interviews and do drugs. And I don't even want to influence stupid people, I don't want to influence anybody to do anything for the wrong reason. All I say is, 'Do whatever you wanna do, but only because you wanna do it'."
"The only thing I wanna say about this," says William, "is that when you get drunk or stoned or do speed, the stupidest ideas make you feel like a genius. I've written songs in that state that I've thought were f***ing brilliant. Then I've woken up the following day and realised what shite they are. So we never write songs when we're out of it."
What all the Mary Chain's songs from "Psychocandy" and "Darklands" through 1989's "Automatic" and 1992's "Honey's Dead", have in common, other than vicious hooks and some seriously insidious melodies, is a profoundly romantic notion of escape. Most of the reviews, however, concentrated on insouciant cool and swaggering amorality that, while evident in the sound, is not particularily evident in the Mary Chain's lyrics.
For Jim and William, though they'd never admit it (they rarely, if ever, talk about individual songs), men are renegade wastrels, born outsiders spurred on to glory or, more often, led to destruction by the irresistable allure of impossibly brilliant, impossibly beautiful women. Lyrically, and only lyrically, the Mary Chain are like Bruce Springsteen meets Quentin Tarantino - true romance, in fact. Pick any couplet from any album. We'll pick one from "Stoned and Dethroned". On "Bullet Lovers" Jim sings, "Look out world, here she comes / sucking on her painted thumb". It's uncannily similar to the opening line of the 1985 single "Just Like Honey" - "Look out for that girl, as she takes on half the world."
In 10 years the Mary Chain have not mellowed. The opening track of "Stoned And Dethroned", "Dirty Water", is a gorgeously barbed pop song that, were it ever released as a single, would surely be destined for the Top 10...if it weren't for a chorus that exclaims with a melancholy ecstacy, "F*** with me and I'll f*** with you / Isn't that what we're supposed to do".
The new album took, on and off, two years to write and contains some of their best material to date, notably the heavily analgesic "Wish I Could", "Save Me", a twisted lullaby, and the self-flagellating hymn "God Save Me" (the latter sung, suitably enough, by a surprisingly restrained Shane MacGowan). Musically, it's perhaps most easily comparable to "Darklands", though its confidence and f***-you attitude will have many dubbing it "Psychocandy II" (according to William, that was the working title). In fact, the only letdown is, ironically, the single, "Sometimes Alwyas", wherein Jim duets with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, (with whom, by the way, William is now romantically entwined - although the publicity-shy chanteuse declines our invitation to speak today). It's marred by a lyric that is, by the band's standards, trite, and a melody that never soars in the way Mary Chain melodies ought.
Nonetheless, "Stoned And Dethroned" once again confirms the Mary Chain as a maverick presence.
"I think it's kind of nerve-wracking coming back after all this time," says William. "But it used to be more nerve-wracking, to be honest. I think we always felt more connected to what was going on than we do now. Now I kind of realise we've always been disconnected from everything. So if we go away for two years, two and a half years, and there's five new fashions in that time, I feel like it doesn't matter to us."
It's this distance that's allowed the Mary Chain to survive with their dignity, their myth intact. Despite their early guerilla tactics, imitated by everyone from the Manics to Oasis, despite their casually aggressive indifference to their live audience that would eventually give rise to a thousand insipidly ethereal shoegazers, despite their contempt for indiedom (from Day One they said they wanted to be superstars) - an attitude taken up by the Stone Roses and, again, the Manics), the Jesus and Mary Chain have never belonged to a scene. Despite their enormous influence, they never even spearheaded one.
Very few others in the present pop scene can claim such longstanding influence and reverence. Mayeb the Cure, maybe Siouxie Snd The Banshees. Perhaps only Nick Cave.
"I don't think we have much in common with Cave musically," says William, "but we do share his attitude. He just makes music and keeps a healthy distance between himself and the business. He's doing that, we've always done that."
"I think that's what's really kept us going this long," adds Jim. "We have an ability to keep our distance from the business itself. If you don't do that you're liable to be chewed up and spat out. To begin with, we've got our own studio, we can mosey down and make a record whenever we feel like it. We choose the sleeves, everything to do with the Jesus and Mary Chain we oversee. We're just ourselves.
"All the controversy is difficult to belive now, but I kind of think it was more to do with the music that riots or anything. The music scene was so incredibly lame when we appeared. We came along and upset things, shook things up for about 15 minutes. Since then we seem to have spent the last 10 years confusing the shit out of people."
So, can you imagine another 10 years?
"I don't know, who knows?" says Jim. "Once you get a taste of this you become frighteningly aware that it might not last. Ever since 'Psychocandy'came out I've always felt, 'This is it, this is the last year', that I'll be looking for a job soon, that someone will say, 'Look at that minicab driver, isn't that they guy who used to be in the Mary Chain?' I've spent so long feeling the whole thing is just temporary."
"Do you remember," William asks his brother, "when you, me and Douglas (Hart, ex-J&MC-bassist and now videomaker) were in the dole office and in walked Lance Percival (camp comedian and Sixties/Seventies TV personality)? And when he left the whole dole office was going, 'That's Lance Percival, that's Lance Percival'? Well, that's kind of how I feel. Pop music is such a f***ing fickle thing. I've seen so many great groups just get forgotten. I don't want that to happen to us."
On their toes. And, 10 years on, neither stoned nor dethroned.
"Does it seem like 10 years?" William Reid ponders this. "Well, it has been 10 years. First gig was June '84, first single 'Upside Down', was October '84. And I still really love that record."
"Funny thing about a record," continues his brother Jim, "is it really is like a photograph of some sort. The further you get away from it, the more you've changed, and you look back at it and think, 'God, was that really me, was that really us, was that really what we were about then?'"
Like all the best bands, the best fighters, the best lovers, the best drugs, the Jesus and Mary Chain went nuclear immediately. In their first 15 minutes of fame they were beaten up, banged up, accused of blasphemy, they blasphemed, caused riots and became the greatest thing a band can become - a cause cèlébre. As importantly, perhaps more importantly, they released "Psychocandy", an album that redefined the sound of British rock.
It's been 10 years and six albums - the seventh, "Stoned And Dethroned", is out on August 15th. Ten years since the anarchy that saw them instantly dubbed The New Sex Pistols, nine since "Psychocandy", and, like all enfants terrible, they've had to live with and live up to their terrible infancy. It haunts them in the very absolute way only a very public past can.
Every rock-literate 18-year-old kid will remember the notorious North London Poly gig when the Mary Chain stumbled onstage, hours late and pissed out of their minds, to be chased from the building 20 minutes later by a crowd who'd caused £7,000 worth of damage. They'll also remember the earlier, equally brutal and catastrophic appearance at London's ICA. And yet at the time, these 18-year-olds were probably too young to have bought a record, let alone going to a gig. Even those less well-versed in rock history are dimly aware of the vicious aura that surrounds the band.
The Mary Chain were an instant myth. The astonishing thing is not merely that they've survived the myth, but that the myth has survived them. In the normal course of events, groups have either had to split or rock stars have had to end up six feet under for the legend to prevail. If they don't split and don't die, you can almost guarantee they'll serve a fashionable six-month sentence at the Betty Ford clinic, look like shit and mostly be seen poncing about in tuxedos at the MTV Awards, and the legend will be, if not dead, then certainly just a bittter memory.
The Mary Chain were well aware of this when they described Bowie as a "f***ing scumbag who should've been shot in 1972", Iggy Pop, who they supported in Australia, as "a sad old pathetic shite", John Lydon as "a sad comedian" while "the best thing that could've happened to the Stones was if they'd met Charles Manson in '69 and he'd hacked their heads off with a f***ing chainsaw." Only last week, in an interview with the Maker's News Editor, Carol Clerk, William Reid showed scant regard for Linda McCartney's feelings when he said "John Lennon was a genius, and so was Paul. Unfortunately Paul never got murdered before he wrote 'Mull of Kintyre'."
It's not that Jim and William were being malicious, it's just that they really care about cool, they really care about music and they hate to see it demeaned.
The Jesus and Mary Chain began plotting their ascent, or rather dreaming of it (since most of their notority was gained more by accident than design), as dole boys in East Kilbride, a staunchly working-class suburb of Glasgow. They wrote some songs, sent out tapes, failed to get gigs. Eventually, a friend of a friend, Bobby Gillespie (who'd soon replace Murray Dalgliesh as the Mary Chain's drummer) advised them to send a tape to Creation's Alan McGee. A month later they played McGee's living room, then came the first single, "Upside Down", a bone-shattering blood-and-bubblegum rocker that cost £172 to make and sold 35,000 copies.
Then came the ICA. There'd been trouble before, most notably a few months earlier at the Ambulance station, but for a riot to break out at London's Institute of Contemporary Art, just a a bottle-throw from Buckingham Palace, really did look like the storming of the Bastille. Or rather the storming of Buckingham Palace.
"The so-called riots," remembers Jim. "I think, looking back on them, that it wasn't deliberate but it was our fault more than anybody else's. At the time we were stunned by it all, we would not believe what was going on. We were drinking an awful lot and we'd never been in a band before, we knew nothing about this shitty old business and you really have got to follow the rules to a certain extent. You really can't get shit-faced drunk, go onstage two and a half hours late, play for two minutes then fall over and expect anything other than a lot of f***ing trouble. Really it's amazing there wasn't more. Sometimes we did wanna play for longer but the bouncers would just drag us offstage and beat us up. Either that or we'd be forced to make a speedy exit."
"We did undoubtedly benefit from the controversy," says William, "but only for a couple of months. Ever since then we've had to live up to that. Even now. Like, when we released 'Darklands' (J&MC's second album) people said, 'What the f*** is that?' because we were this group that caused riots. So it was like, 'What the f** are they up to? They're supposed to be ripping our faces off and here they are doing little ole country songs.'."
"The problem was," continues Jim, "we began by playing to the gallery, you know. It does work, it does get your name in the paper. What we began to realise, though, was that wasn't really why we wanted to be in the band. We wanted, boring as it sounds, to be appreciated for the music we make. But people didn't want to do that. It got beyond a joke."
After the ICA came the North London Poly. And then the Electric Ballroom.
"North London Poly was quite satisfying," William later told the Melody Maker, "because it was what we intended to do that night. By the time we did the Electric Ballroom it was all expected. It was pathetic. It was like, 'One, two, three, let's riot!'. In those days the whole group was taken out of our hands. It's the only time in our career we've ever lost control, the only time we were truly frustrated."
"I think," says Jim, "that subversion in music is the easiest kind of subversion there is. It's someone saying boo to a goose and it always makes headline news. It's so f***ing easy to cause a stir. You get so many groups who come along and do exactly what every other subversive band has done before and it still creates headlines. That stuff that went on with us at the beginning, there were probably people around then who were thinking, 'This is pathetic'. It's too easy to do it stupidly and get away with it."
Some may have thought it pathetic, some were pleasantly outraged, others so repulsed that shortly after the Electric Ballroom show, Jim was hospitalised after a gang of thugs beat him to a pulp at a Nick Cave gig. Others took less direct action. The Sun bellowed indignantly about malicious damage, and pressing-plant workers refused to touch the band's track "Jesus Suck" (originally "Jesus F***") on the grounds that it was "blasphemous, obscene and controversial".
By 1987, the Mary Chain had been arrested in Germany, charged with possession of amphetamine sulphate in Britain, banned from Radio 1 for advocating the use of drugs ("Some Candy Talking") again accused of blasphemy (for the crucifixion scene on the sleeve of "April Skies", tastefully released in Easter Week) and Jim had been jailed in Toronto for assaulting two fans.
Somehow, inbetween, they'd found time to released two magnificent albums. The first, "Psychocandy", appearing at at time when pop either cared (Live Aid) or consumed (Madonna, Pet Shop Boys) was a cooly nihilistic Dionysian blitz. It felt like the purest, most terrible seduction. The second, "Darklands", though sonically more restrained, managed lyrically and in its soporific, smacked-out tone to blur the the distinction between love and drugs, between girls and drugs. Drugs, in their early days, were something the Mary Chain talked about a lot.
"I don't want to get into that drug thing," says Jim, wincing when we reminds him of an interview in the Italian rock mag Rockerilla where he and his brother waxed lyrical about the joys of acid and speed. "Yeah, we were doing a lot of drugs in those early days. I don't wanna speak about it. I can name f***ing dozens of bands who people don't even associate with drugs who do an awful lot more drugs than we have ever done.
"At the time we thought it was quite cool to talk about drugs, especially acid and speed. I mean, people werent't talking about speed in interviews, so we thought , 'Let's say it.' I don't apologise for it. People should say what they feel. However, it kinda saddens me that people might be doing drugs because we talked about them. I mean, I've never done drugs because I read an interview with a band, but stupid poeple do read these interviews and do drugs. And I don't even want to influence stupid people, I don't want to influence anybody to do anything for the wrong reason. All I say is, 'Do whatever you wanna do, but only because you wanna do it'."
"The only thing I wanna say about this," says William, "is that when you get drunk or stoned or do speed, the stupidest ideas make you feel like a genius. I've written songs in that state that I've thought were f***ing brilliant. Then I've woken up the following day and realised what shite they are. So we never write songs when we're out of it."
What all the Mary Chain's songs from "Psychocandy" and "Darklands" through 1989's "Automatic" and 1992's "Honey's Dead", have in common, other than vicious hooks and some seriously insidious melodies, is a profoundly romantic notion of escape. Most of the reviews, however, concentrated on insouciant cool and swaggering amorality that, while evident in the sound, is not particularily evident in the Mary Chain's lyrics.
For Jim and William, though they'd never admit it (they rarely, if ever, talk about individual songs), men are renegade wastrels, born outsiders spurred on to glory or, more often, led to destruction by the irresistable allure of impossibly brilliant, impossibly beautiful women. Lyrically, and only lyrically, the Mary Chain are like Bruce Springsteen meets Quentin Tarantino - true romance, in fact. Pick any couplet from any album. We'll pick one from "Stoned and Dethroned". On "Bullet Lovers" Jim sings, "Look out world, here she comes / sucking on her painted thumb". It's uncannily similar to the opening line of the 1985 single "Just Like Honey" - "Look out for that girl, as she takes on half the world."
In 10 years the Mary Chain have not mellowed. The opening track of "Stoned And Dethroned", "Dirty Water", is a gorgeously barbed pop song that, were it ever released as a single, would surely be destined for the Top 10...if it weren't for a chorus that exclaims with a melancholy ecstacy, "F*** with me and I'll f*** with you / Isn't that what we're supposed to do".
The new album took, on and off, two years to write and contains some of their best material to date, notably the heavily analgesic "Wish I Could", "Save Me", a twisted lullaby, and the self-flagellating hymn "God Save Me" (the latter sung, suitably enough, by a surprisingly restrained Shane MacGowan). Musically, it's perhaps most easily comparable to "Darklands", though its confidence and f***-you attitude will have many dubbing it "Psychocandy II" (according to William, that was the working title). In fact, the only letdown is, ironically, the single, "Sometimes Alwyas", wherein Jim duets with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, (with whom, by the way, William is now romantically entwined - although the publicity-shy chanteuse declines our invitation to speak today). It's marred by a lyric that is, by the band's standards, trite, and a melody that never soars in the way Mary Chain melodies ought.
Nonetheless, "Stoned And Dethroned" once again confirms the Mary Chain as a maverick presence.
"I think it's kind of nerve-wracking coming back after all this time," says William. "But it used to be more nerve-wracking, to be honest. I think we always felt more connected to what was going on than we do now. Now I kind of realise we've always been disconnected from everything. So if we go away for two years, two and a half years, and there's five new fashions in that time, I feel like it doesn't matter to us."
It's this distance that's allowed the Mary Chain to survive with their dignity, their myth intact. Despite their early guerilla tactics, imitated by everyone from the Manics to Oasis, despite their casually aggressive indifference to their live audience that would eventually give rise to a thousand insipidly ethereal shoegazers, despite their contempt for indiedom (from Day One they said they wanted to be superstars) - an attitude taken up by the Stone Roses and, again, the Manics), the Jesus and Mary Chain have never belonged to a scene. Despite their enormous influence, they never even spearheaded one.
Very few others in the present pop scene can claim such longstanding influence and reverence. Mayeb the Cure, maybe Siouxie Snd The Banshees. Perhaps only Nick Cave.
"I don't think we have much in common with Cave musically," says William, "but we do share his attitude. He just makes music and keeps a healthy distance between himself and the business. He's doing that, we've always done that."
"I think that's what's really kept us going this long," adds Jim. "We have an ability to keep our distance from the business itself. If you don't do that you're liable to be chewed up and spat out. To begin with, we've got our own studio, we can mosey down and make a record whenever we feel like it. We choose the sleeves, everything to do with the Jesus and Mary Chain we oversee. We're just ourselves.
"All the controversy is difficult to belive now, but I kind of think it was more to do with the music that riots or anything. The music scene was so incredibly lame when we appeared. We came along and upset things, shook things up for about 15 minutes. Since then we seem to have spent the last 10 years confusing the shit out of people."
So, can you imagine another 10 years?
"I don't know, who knows?" says Jim. "Once you get a taste of this you become frighteningly aware that it might not last. Ever since 'Psychocandy'came out I've always felt, 'This is it, this is the last year', that I'll be looking for a job soon, that someone will say, 'Look at that minicab driver, isn't that they guy who used to be in the Mary Chain?' I've spent so long feeling the whole thing is just temporary."
"Do you remember," William asks his brother, "when you, me and Douglas (Hart, ex-J&MC-bassist and now videomaker) were in the dole office and in walked Lance Percival (camp comedian and Sixties/Seventies TV personality)? And when he left the whole dole office was going, 'That's Lance Percival, that's Lance Percival'? Well, that's kind of how I feel. Pop music is such a f***ing fickle thing. I've seen so many great groups just get forgotten. I don't want that to happen to us."
On their toes. And, 10 years on, neither stoned nor dethroned.
