Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story Read online

  No matter how fabulous they were, this crowd, despite having paid to get in, was in no mood to listen to them. The Jesus and Mary Chain walked on stage ‘expecting to be worshipped,’ Jim chuckles. What greeted them was an angry mob.

  The band warily regarded the broiling darkness in front of them for a few silent moments. Then Jim pushed the neck of Douglas’s bass out of his way, Douglas and William turned their backs, and they started to play, lit by three pale spotlights beaming over them and on to the crowd like ghostly searchlights. Jim, leaning forward malevolently, thrashed the floor with his mic stand, William struck his guitar like an anvil, notes ringing and sputtering out like sparks – it was as much a show of strength, a roar of defiance to shout down the crowd, as a gig. There was something of a rumble about it, band versus audience.

  This would be one of the first times the Mary Chain played ‘Just Like Honey’ live, and it was utterly lost on the majority of the audience. ‘I was thinking, You fucking idiots, just shut up and listen to this song,’ says Jim.

  Alan McGee was standing at the side of the stage with Laurence, who was hit on the back of the head by a flying bottle. Before eventually giving in and rushing backstage for safety, they watched their friends trying to play under increasingly hostile conditions. ‘Football hoolies had suddenly got involved with it,’ McGee says. ‘One of the bouncers got his head cut open. I remember a quarter-bottle of whisky going flying between Jim’s head and Bobby’s. I just thought, If that had hit either of them, they could have lost an eye. That’s when you realise it’s starting to get out of hand.’

  Bobby Gillespie remembers that very whisky bottle – it’s not the kind of thing you forget – although the person who forcibly delivered it, he insists, was a friend of his from Glasgow, who had travelled down on the Stagecoach and was now showing the advanced effects of a day’s worth of dedicated boozing. ‘He shouted, “Gillespie!” and threw a bottle at me . . . but, you know, as an act of love.’ Heart-warming indeed.

  ‘The security did face off the crowd,’ McGee continues. ‘But it was pretty unpleasant. And we were just kids. That’s the thing that people don’t talk about enough with the Mary Chain. With Oasis, they had a manager who’d managed Johnny Marr, Noel was 27, I was 33, 34. If we needed security it was a phone call away. The Mary Chain thing was ten years before. Yes, maybe I was out of my depth, but I’d got them to that point as well, so there was some degree of talent. But there was also a degree of complete inexperience.’

  Jim Reid says: ‘We just played fifteen minutes and left; you know, if you don’t want to hear it then we won’t play it. On a normal night we would just be locked into each other, it was almost as if the audience didn’t matter.’ The crowd became enraged when the band decided to leave the stage, but the way William saw it was that they were simply sticking to his quite sensible ethos: play until you get jeered by the crowd, that’s your cue to leave.

  Meanwhile, David Evans, the Mary Chain’s live sound technician, was desperately trying to protect the mixing and lighting desks from being destroyed but in doing so he could only watch as, post-gig, the ‘fans’ started to help themselves to equipment from the stage.

  By the end of the night the ex-SAS man-mountains hired by McGee had had enough, both of the violence (one bodyguard was knocked out with a scaffolding pole) and of the people they were meant to be looking after. Jim Reid says: ‘At first they were like, “Wait! I’ll check this door,” but by the end of it they were saying, “If I ever see you little fuckers again I’m going to rip your heads off. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t beat the shit out of you?” “Er . . . because it would hurt?” We were probably winding them up.’

  When the coast was clear, team Mary Chain decamped to recover at McGee’s flat in Tottenham. They’d managed to escape unscathed, but feeling grateful that they were still in one piece was not how they wanted to end every London show. It had become, as Alan McGee admits, ‘a circus’. The group’s surly attitude and explosive music was part theatre, part expression, part defence mechanism, but it was being taken too seriously by too many.

  ‘There was a lot of talk about this,’ says Douglas. ‘We were like, “Alan, we want to go down and play, we don’t want to witness fights, we don’t want people to get their heads smashed in.” I think he saw that, but it was out of control. Alan was a young guy as well.’

  Events like this, as Mary Chain press officer Mick Houghton observes, would ironically launch the Mary Chain into the public consciousness, but the fact people associated the band with riots would be a millstone for the band for years to come. ‘It overshadowed their career throughout,’ Mick admits. ‘It was very hard for them to escape that initial impression that people have of the Mary Chain.

  ‘I always felt that a lot of their attitude, which the press loved, was more born out of a lack of confidence. I never thought they had this intent to cause trouble – it was more like trouble followed them.’

  15

  Milestones/Millstones

  Our mum’s terribly proud. The black sheep of the family have become . . . hopeful.

  Jim Reid to Mat Snow, NME

  When Psychocandy was released in November 1985 a nation, or at least many of its hipper inhabitants, fell in love. The album went to number 31 in the otherwise Spandau Ballet and Elaine Paige-dominated charts and was loved, revered and included in best-of lists the world over. The element of surprise didn’t hurt; as Jim observed, the Mary Chain were previously suspected by some of being a one-trick pony, with little substance beneath the noise, image and stories to sustain their career. Psychocandy put paid to all that. This release cemented the Reid brothers’ position as serious craftsmen of delicate, beautiful pop songs. ‘It sounds big-headed,’ says Jim, ‘but we knew we had a record that wasn’t run-of-the-mill, and we knew that almost every track could have been an A-side in itself.’ They had peaked quickly, some might say too early. There would be no resting on laurels – the Reids now had to sustain their success and, as a result, ‘could never entirely enjoy it,’ as Jim recalls. The Reids’ sense of anxiety would at least mean they rarely took their privileged position for granted – for years they could never shake off the feeling that their success was ‘just temporary’.

  The other prevailing feeling, one that would ultimately become a source of pride, was the fact that, although Psychocandy was a hit, The Jesus and Mary Chain would always be outsiders in the pop world. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; as Jim put it: ‘if there was a place in the pop market for The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Jesus and Mary Chain wouldn’t exist. We’re the misfits of the pop music world.’

  This quality of never quite fitting in would ensure that other people were already starting bands because of the Mary Chain, just as punk had inspired likeminded outsiders to do the same less than a decade earlier. And as far as charting was concerned, they might have loved the idea of being ‘pop-stars’, but Jim Reid certainly deemed it a ‘sin’ to treat music as if the most important thing was who was highest in the chart. To someone with such a fierce, pure love of music, this kind of attitude didn’t exactly seem to be in the right spirit. ‘It shouldn’t be a competition,’ he chided at the time. This was not necessarily a feeling shared by Warner Brothers.

  After some promotional dates in the UK and Germany, the Mary Chain flew back to the US for their first full American tour that winter. What was strange for the Mary Chain was the fact that they’d travel to far-flung parts of the US and there would be people there who had not only heard of them, they were fans.

  The tour was a success, but the mood was fractured and low. The band were tired and road-weary and Christmas Day, which they spent together after flying back from New York, did not feel particularly festive. After New Year the band was back on the road, going back to America in March – and it was around this point, by all accounts, that the first real cracks started to appear. William now hated touring with a passion and the more he understood the machinations of the music industry, th
e unhappier he became. That year William would, as he recalled, suffer the ‘first of many breakdowns because of that’.

  ‘At that time,’ says Jim, ‘I don’t know what it was, but William was having a hard time with touring, which is weird because now it’s the opposite: I’m quite happy to be at home and he’s desperate to get out on the road. For whatever reason, around 1985, 1986, he’d just had enough. We had to stop for a time while he got his head together.’

  On the road William would avoid sight-seeing, preferring to stay in his hotel room. The booze was flowing, magnifying every problem, and the relationship between the brothers was strained. Success had not eased any of the old tensions, in fact it was creating new irritations for the Reids.

  Alan McGee says: ‘I don’t know if they could ever be happy in a band with each other but in a way they don’t make sense apart, musically. Then in the middle of this you had people like Geoff Travis, normal people, un-fucked-up. We didn’t even use drugs in these days to get fucked up, we were just all either depressed or drunk. Everyone in that band, and the manager, was a head-case. It was the most dysfunctional team of people ever to get success.’

  Douglas Hart remembers the exhaustion both Reids were suffering from. The drinking didn’t help, but the added pressure of having to write songs for the next album while on tour was, at times, hard for the brothers to bear. It’s the cliché of having your whole life up to that point to write your debut album and generally you’re writing in a space you feel comfortable with. But then you’re required to write the next one in a matter of months, in hotel rooms and dressing-rooms, on tour buses. Whenever William and Jim had the opportunity, they’d return to East Kilbride to try to write songs in the kitchen.

  ‘That was the creative space for them,’ says Douglas. ‘But both of them were stressed, they were having . . . not panic attacks, but you could see they were really struggling at that point between Psychocandy and Darklands. All I had to do was go on tour and have fun, which is probably why they resented me!’

  One person McGee remembers handling the often dark times and rising stress levels on tour with detachment and even amusement was Bobby Gillespie. ‘Maybe the Reids were having a good time, I don’t know,’ McGee concludes gloomily. ‘I was having a shit time. Douglas was having a shit time. Bobby was probably getting off on the madness. He was probably laughing at it.’

  Two things that kept Gillespie slightly removed from the Mary Chain gloom, no doubt, were the fact that he still lived in Glasgow, so there was a physical separation, and the fact that he was developing Primal Scream, who were gathering pace and already had a single out, ‘All Fall Down’, which boasted a soft naïveté reminiscent of The Pastels and the BMX Bandits. It was co-produced by Joe Foster and released as a 7-inch by Creation Records in May 1985. ‘All Fall Down’ was well received critically, and Primal Scream now had their eye on the future. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Bobby to commit to two bands in two different cities and make it work.

  What followed in the early weeks of 1986 has often been described as a dramatic ultimatum, but in truth the subject simply needed addressing so that everyone knew where they stood. Jim Reid says: ‘With Bobby we’d said, “You can be in the band if you want to, but we don’t think it’s going to work being in two bands.” We sort of knew he wasn’t going to join the band. Obviously it was lucky for him that he didn’t.’ Bobby was ‘pretty fucking upset’, however. He felt he ‘belonged’ to the Mary Chain and, at the same time, certainly felt closer to them than Primal Scream.

  Douglas, who was closest to Bobby in the band, was also hit hard by the decision. ‘It was a sad day. The whole atmosphere of the band changed after Bobby left.’

  The final Mary Chain release with Bobby on drums would be the ‘Some Candy Talking’ EP, due for release in July 1986. The group first recorded the title track on 29 October the previous year, one day after William’s 27th birthday, for John Peel’s Radio 1 show. The accompanying tracks on the forthcoming 12-inch would be ‘Taste Of Cindy’, ‘Hit’ and an acoustic version of the track ‘Psychocandy’, which, contrarily, didn’t appear on the initial release of Psychocandy.

  For their recording of ‘Some Candy Talking’, the Reids were keen to work with Flood, the engineer of choice for the likes of Nick Cave and Depeche Mode. Flood was based at Trident Studios in St Anne’s Court, a haunted Soho alleyway. Strange noises could be heard in Trident late at night, noises that couldn’t always be blamed on musicians, but that’s another story. Flood, real name Mark Ellis, earned his nickname during his days as a runner, as he always made countless cups of tea for those in the studio. (His fellow runner, on the other hand, was not so willing to get busy with the teabags. He was known as ‘Drought’.)

  When Alan Moulder, then a young studio engineer working with Flood, heard that the Mary Chain were coming to record at Trident, he ‘went straight to the studio manager and told them I had to be the assistant on the session. I had Psychocandy and loved the band.’

  The Jesus and Mary Chain were still a little dubious, as Moulder puts it, about unfamiliar engineers and studios. They hadn’t forgotten that their experience with John Loder was the exception rather than the rule. But with Flood and Alan Moulder being a similar age to themselves, and simpatico to their mindset, this was a good match.

  ‘There were a lot of engineers who thought there was a “correct” way of doing things,’ says Moulder. ‘It was the 1980s and every engineer wanted to make records that sounded like Trevor Horn, so Jim and William’s bright, reverby and violent guitars didn’t fit into their ideas of how to do things. I remember Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine had the same problems.’

  The Mary Chain were as serious as ever when working on ‘Some Candy Talking’, and if they struggled to get the sound they were looking for, the mood would plummet. ‘I just kept supplying cups of tea and chocolate biscuits, which seemed to cheer them up,’ Alan remembers. ‘They were picky about everything, be it music, sound or food. They were funny once they relaxed a bit.’

  One thing that did prove a problem was the bass part. No one could play it, even though, as Jim pointed out, ‘it was incredibly simple’.

  ‘Jim couldn’t play it, I couldn’t play it,’ William admitted in an interview with Select. ‘Douglas was the bass player and he couldn’t play it. We got in a session bassist, and he couldn’t play it. In the end Dick Green from Creation Records came down, and he could play it. So we were like, “Quick! Run the tape!”’

  The resulting record would be another classic Reid gem with ambiguous lyrics – it has long been assumed that ‘candy’ and ‘stuff’ were allusions to heroin, but William insists it is ‘more sexual’ than drug-related. ‘Some Candy Talking’ also has an unusual change in the middle. This is because William basically stuck two different songs together. It worked perfectly.

  *

  A clutch of tour dates was coming up, and this would mean one last trip to the US with the Mary Chain for Bobby Gillespie. By this time the band had an established following across the Atlantic, particularly in New York. It was no longer a case of playing to Anglophiles and roller-skating regulars who would have turned up anyway; this time The Jesus and Mary Chain would be playing to fans.

  ‘We played at the Ritz in New York City and it was like being in a pop band,’ says Jim. ‘We arrived at the venue and there were girls standing outside shouting, “Jim! I wanna have your babies!” I was like, “This is weird. This just doesn’t happen in the UK.”’

  The gig in New York was also the night that Jerry Jaffe, former head of A&R at PolyGram and a consultant for Warners, would see the group for the first time. Jerry Jaffe was later to become The Jesus and Mary Chain’s manager in the US, but if you had told him at this stage that any involvement with the band was on the cards, he would never have believed you. Jaffe was mildly impressed by Psychocandy, not to the extent that his Warners co-workers were, but he agreed to come to the Ritz to see them play. He found himself sharing a tabl
e with the then Village Voice writer Robert Christgau, and within minutes of the Mary Chain appearing on stage, both Jaffe and Christgau were united in their opinion of the group.

  ‘I thought this was the worst band I had ever seen in my life,’ growls Jaffe. ‘I thought they couldn’t play, they played maybe half an hour – apparently this was a long gig for them at that time – and I looked at Robert and he looked at me and we were basically saying, “What the heck?” I was just flabbergasted. Anyway, that was that. I didn’t think about them after that, they were out of my consciousness.’ Needless to say, Jerry would not take on the US management of the Mary Chain just yet. (Christ-gau would also change his tune about the band, giving Psychocandy a rave review on its release. ‘My favourite parts are the cheapest,’ he would later write. ‘When the feedback wells up over the chords in perfect pseudomelodic formation I feel as if I’ve been waiting to hear this music all my life.’)

  One thing Jerry noticed about the Mary Chain was that, after the gig, they were far friendlier than he’d been warned they would be. They had a forbidding reputation, and there was almost a romance about how rude they were expected to be. The reality was that they were shy, quite serious and didn’t suffer fools gladly. But, while Jaffe’s Warners colleagues ‘wanted their record-company version of S&M’, the Mary Chain were quietly accommodating. In fact, compared to artists such as Dead or Alive’s Pete Burns, whom Jaffe also managed, ‘The Jesus and Mary Chain came off like Graham Norton’.*

  ‘I guess some people who didn’t know us thought we were rude or up ourselves,’ muses Douglas. ‘But it was shyness. Even among ourselves we wouldn’t speak much. I remember people sitting in rooms with us, squirming in their seat and then leaving after about a minute because we weren’t talking.’