Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  For Douglas and the Reids, punk was not just about the music, it was about the DIY culture, dissolving notions of artistic perfectionism and encouraging people to just try things out. You could pick up an instrument, create a fanzine, use a camera or customise your wardrobe – it didn’t matter what you chose to do, it didn’t matter if you made a mistake, and it wasn’t important where you came from, what your gender or social standing was, or what you’d been exposed to (or not) so far. What was crucial was that you were being authentic, autonomous and artistically curious, and expressing your individuality.

  This could manifest itself in a joyous way or in a nihilistic way, but the most important thing was that you were being true to yourself. Not a new concept, granted, but one that had for many become buried under concrete layers of conditioning passed down through the generations, particularly if you were working-class or female. For some at least, punk blasted that conditioning into oblivion. It would have been hard for a kid in East Kilbride to take advantage of punk in its live form, and the music might have been boycotted by the mainstream media, with John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show and The Old Grey Whistle Test being the most feted exceptions, but when glimmers of this liberating movement shone through the cracks, they didn’t go unnoticed.

  Douglas Hart says: ‘Everyone was starting fanzines. You’d make your own clothes, because you couldn’t buy them anywhere, and start bands. That’s when I got my first bass. I was in a band called Teenage Vice, but I was only twelve! A lot of people dropped out after a couple of years, but a few of us were totally lit up by punk and that gave us the fuel that drove us creatively up until now.’ Douglas also had the benefit of his older brother’s record collection, which introduced him to David Bowie, the Velvet Underground and the Stooges. ‘So even when I heard punk rock, it was familiar to me from hearing those records,’ he explains. ‘I guess I was a bit advanced for my age in that sense. I didn’t know anyone who had that love and was trying to trace things back.’

  It was at this point that Douglas first met the Reids, thanks to his school friend Ivor Wilson. Ivor went to karate classes with the teenage Jim Reid, and on noticing the band names scrawled on Douglas’s exercise books, Ivor realised he knew a potential ally for Douglas who would share his musical tastes. Douglas, and subsequently Jim, finally realised they were not alone. This discovery was a lifeline.

  ‘It was, God, there’s someone else like that!’ says Douglas. ‘It was a goldmine for me because both Jim and William had great records, so for a kid like me that was so hungry for things musically, it was incredible.’

  Ivor Wilson was a nascent guitarist himself, and shared Douglas and Jim’s love of the Sex Pistols, The Slits, The Stooges, Subway Sect and other punk bands not necessarily beginning with ‘S’. In fact, the three boys would unite briefly as a band, with a young Edward Connelly (later of the early Creation Records signing Meat Whiplash – another group from East Kilbride) on drums, to play at a local party. It would be Jim and Douglas’s first gig together.

  ‘We played to an audience of six in some kid’s front room,’ Douglas remembers. ‘A proper garage band. Me on vocals, Jim on bass, Ivor on guitar, and Eddy on drums. We did “Pretty Vacant” and “Anarchy in the UK” by the Pistols, “New Rose” by The Damned and “Art School” by The Jam.’ It would be Ivor Wilson who also sold William his first guitar – a Gretsch Tennessee that, unbeknownst to Ivor, was a prized possession of his dad’s and was also worth rather more than the £20 he sold it to William Reid for. ‘I think his dad kicked the shit out of him when he found out,’ says Jim. ‘But that was how we had at least one decent guitar.’ Most of their instruments would come from junk shops or from Woolworths.

  Jim was then seventeen to Douglas’s fourteen, and William was already twenty. Quite an age gap, admittedly, and Douglas looked young for his age as it was. Not that it bothered Jim, but his dad was more than a little concerned.

  ‘We called him Todd, short for toddler,’ says Jim. ‘He looked about nine years old. My dad was really worried. I think he thought there was a touch of the Jimmy Saviles or something. He was saying, “Who’s that wee boy who keeps coming down to the house?” “It’s just my mate!”’

  Playing records and getting lost in endless discussions about music and films – Billy Liar and the Lindsay Anderson movie If.... being enduring favourites – provided some respite from the drudgery of everyday life, which for Jim meant working in the local Rolls-Royce Aerospace factory, where Boeing aeroplane engines were being manufactured. William, meanwhile, was a sheet-metal worker. ‘A terrible job,’ he remembers. ‘I was always worried about losing my fingers.’

  William, apparently, also worked in a cheese warehouse. This is worth mentioning if only to share this cautionary tale with any lovers of parmesan out there. ‘My main task,’ William explained to journalist Max Bell, ‘was to inspect the parmesans, because cockroaches thrive on them. I had to go through the cheeses, find the cockroaches burrowing inside, pull ’em out and stomp them.’ Buon appetito.

  Each brother hated his job with a passion. The money at least allowed them to buy records, and would go towards Jim’s first guitar, but, as Douglas recalls, ‘They were stuck in a rut and maybe got depressed stuck in that small room together, you could tell there were stresses there. Obviously they loved each other and had a lot in common, but they weren’t so young any more.’

  After a series of dead-end jobs, William finally jacked it in and started signing on, while Jim gritted his teeth at the factory. All of this, coupled with a serious case of stifled creativity, led to a less than comfortable atmosphere at home, and it wouldn’t take long for the pressure to become unbearable. By the time he reached the end of his teens, Jim could take no more. However, the idea that Jim was going to just walk out on gainful employment was anathema to his stalwart working-class parents.

  ‘Things were tense with my dad,’ Jim remembers. ‘I said I was going to chuck my job, and he said, “Well, you’re not living in this house . . .” So I went to London. It didn’t work out. I stayed there for about six months.’

  Jim took the long bus journey from Glasgow and stayed at downbeat Earls Court hotels, trying to find work. He stayed in touch with Douglas by writing messages on the back of customer-comments cards from Burger King, sticking a stamp on the back and sending them off like postcards, but when the prodigal son returned to East Kilbride, the person who had changed most was not Jim but Douglas, who was unrecognisable. Within a matter of months the curly-haired punk-rock ‘toddler’ had grown up.

  Jim recalls: ‘When I got back there was this bloke at the door [deep voice], “All right, Jim . . .” “Who the fuck are you?” “It’s Douglas!” “What?” I went away for six months and this nine-year-old has turned into a man, stubble and all that. “Do you want to come out?” “Are you sure? You’re really Douglas?”’

  ‘I’d literally grown six inches over one summer,’ says Douglas. ‘It was like in An American Werewolf in London. I was racked with agony. It was unbelievable.’

  ‘We kept calling him Todd though,’ adds Jim. ‘We still call him Todd.’

  2

  Acid, Paint Factory, Portastudio

  Listening to The Velvet Underground And Nico was like hearing the word of God. The fact that somebody could do ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Heroin’ on the same album was exciting. That is, in essence, Psychocandy. That’s what we were trying to say.

  Jim Reid

  Once Jim and Douglas were reunited, their mission to transcend the boredom of their everyday existence intensified. One obvious way to escape at least mentally would be to experiment with mind-altering substances, which wasn’t hard to do in East Kilbride. Magic mushrooms were everywhere, dotting the more rural areas that surrounded the town and growing in people’s front gardens.

  Jim and Douglas would walk for miles into the countryside, or stroll through town in the small hours once the neds had lumbered home for the night. They’d even pitch a tent in Douglas’s bac
k garden and stay awake for hours, talking about forming the perfect band and concocting plans for the future. Both Jim and Douglas shared rooms with their brothers, so any sleepovers had to be al-fresco affairs.

  ‘Taking mushrooms was an important part of it, it influenced the music in terms of experimentation,’ Douglas remembers. ‘It was like a rite of passage. East Kilbride, as much as it marred us, it made us. We were outsiders from an outsider town, so it was good in a way, coming from somewhere with so little to do.’

  Another rite of passage, and a vital part of the Mary Chain story, was the discovery of a derelict paint factory languishing on the outskirts of town. It was the perfect place to take pictures, smash things up and let off steam, graffiti the walls and play music as loud as possible. It would be the site of many an interesting scene once Messrs Reid and Hart happened upon it, not least because it was the ideal place to hide out and take acid. Not all of their trips were quite so private, however, and on one occasion the pair had something of an audience.

  ‘One time we got some acid and we planned to take a trip to the seaside, which involved taking a couple of trains,” says Douglas. ‘Of course we were too greedy to wait, so as soon as I got to Jim’s house at about 7.30 a.m. we took it. The station was only twenty minutes away, but it was the most overpowering acid we’d ever had.’

  The two teenagers took, it’s fair to say, the scenic route to the station, but by the time they’d reached the park across the street from the platform, they could walk no further and collapsed on the grass in full view of the commuters making their outward journey to work.

  ‘We had this utterly out-of-body experience,’ Douglas remembers. ‘I remember leaving my body and having a transcendental experience. It was like being on this rolling hillside looking towards a city of pure energy.’

  As Douglas and Jim slowly came back to reality, however, they realised they had been lying on the grass for eight hours – and they could be seen by the very same bemused commuters, now homeward-bound, who had seen them in the morning. What’s more, while they had initially crashed out under the shade of a tree, the glare of the sun had moved throughout the day. Both boys were sunburnt, but only down one half of their bodies, Ziggy Stardust-style. ‘It was amazing though,’ Douglas says. ‘Nothing’s ever happened to me like that before or since on acid.’

  When not tripping his way around East Kilbride with the not-sotoddleresque Todd, or forming schemes for the future, Jim’s nocturnal conversations at home with William would be just as stimulating. The brothers might not have wanted to form a band with each other at this point, feeling, perhaps, that they already spent more than enough time in each other’s company, but they were still psychologically inseparable whether they liked it or not. They shared the same ideas, the same mind-set, and the same dissatisfaction with the rest of the world.

  ‘We’d sit up all night, jabbering on,’ says Jim. ‘When I think back now, our ideas seemed rather naïve, but we seemed to think we could subvert things, like . . . if somebody made a film called Fuck My Dog or something, and it got a major release, the world would be altered overnight. Now I think, “You idiot. All that would have happened is that people would have laughed at you.”’

  Musically the brothers had a voracious appetite, listening to bands such as the German industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten, The Beatles, The Birthday Party, The Doors, Dr Mix and the Remix, and 1960s girl groups like the Shangri-Las. But if they had to pick one single group who had the most impact on them, it would have been the Velvet Underground. When they brought home the The Velvet Underground And Nico album (famously bearing Andy Warhol’s image of a banana on the cover), what ensued was tantamount to a religious experience. It was sweet and bitter, ‘psycho and candy’, all on one record.

  ‘The Velvet Underground And Nico, well, I think I cried when I heard it,’ Jim says. ‘That record made me feel like I was on drugs. It made me feel happy, warm inside. If I could buy that feeling, I’d pay a fortune for it.’

  Einstürzende Neubauten also remained an enduring inspiration to the Reids, who dreamed of creating a band ‘exactly as they were, but with a bubblegum song on top of it,’ muses Jim. ‘Shangri-Las crossed with Neubauten.’

  This was the blueprint of what they wanted to set out and achieve. Apart from The Ramones, with their sugar-pop-turned-thrashy-punk schtick, this alchemy of extremes had rarely been managed with great success before. It was a clash of musical cultures, soft and hard, mellifluous but metallic. Noise pop. Jim and William knew the results could be powerful, and they didn’t want to take the sting or the sweetness out of either influence. They wanted to just crash them into each other. The music of the early 1980s said nothing to them, so, like many, they looked back to see what they could draw on to light their own fire. ‘Pop’ might not be a term that the uninitiated would immediately associate with the Mary Chain – a new term probably should have been invented for them, or maybe we should just dispense with terms altogether and just take them as they were – but to the band themselves, pop not only represented the music they loved and had grown up with, but it was inclusive and would give them the potential to reach as many people as possible. Pop music might not have been in a particularly pleasing state at that time, but that didn’t mean the Mary Chain weren’t prepared to a) proclaim their own music ‘pop’ and b) try to improve the current state of affairs by razing it to the ground and starting again. They were gradually sketching out a sound for themselves, writing songs, creating an image and formulating a plan that would still take several years to come to fruition.

  When Jim and William weren’t conspiring in their room, they would be downstairs in front of the TV, sometimes for more than twelve hours a day. Their family might have looked on with slight concern as the two brothers sat avidly staring, taping adverts and making video collages from random documentaries and the news, but nothing was wasted from this period, and everything would inform what was to come, no matter how frankly odd it might have seemed at the time. ‘[Our parents] often used to ask us what was wrong with us,’ William told NME’s Mat Snow in 1986. ‘Whether we needed any help . . .’

  ‘William and I probably started writing songs around 1982, 1983,’ reflects Jim. ‘Everyone thinks we do nothing but fight, and that is largely true nowadays, but then it wasn’t so much like that. We totally trusted each other, as we do now.’

  Their parents tried to be understanding of their sons’ often insular behaviour – their mother once bought William a key-ring with the inscription ‘I’m not weird, I’m gifted’ written on it, which cheered him immeasurably. However, a major turning point for the brothers was when their father generously gave them a cut of his ‘Mickey Mouse’ redundancy pay-out to buy whatever they wanted.

  Jim says: ‘My dad worked in a factory as a heavy-machinery operator and my mum worked in a chip shop. When my dad got made redundant, he got a couple of grand. He gave me and William £500 and we bought one of the first Portastudios. We made the demos that ended up getting us signed to Creation. Money well spent.’

  Jim and William’s father was hoping they’d use the cash to buy themselves a car, no doubt to encourage them to chisel themselves out of the family home once in a while. But no, they knew what they needed and it had to be part of their ongoing mission. The Portastudio, a four-track recorder that used a standard cassette to record on, was a new and revolutionary invention at the time, and was perfect for the Reids to lay down their musical ideas and experiments without leaving their bedroom.

  Eventually, these hothouse flowers were ready to form a band – just not with each other. The now famous brotherly tensions were clearly surfacing, and although their relationship was still relatively harmonious at this point, they knew that if they were in a band together, there would be sparks. However, as Jim explains: ‘The idea of doing two bands just became ridiculous. He was making demos and I was making demos and they just sounded like the same bloody band. We were totally into the same things.’

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p; Jim and Douglas had been talking about the ‘perfect band’ for months, and it initially seemed to make more sense to Jim to form a group with Douglas. But far from wanting to take the lead and sing his own songs, even though he’d sung them on the demos, Jim would do his damnedest to persuade Douglas to take care of the vocals instead. Jim Reid was clearly immune to the fabled ‘lead-singeritis’ disease (symptoms include over-weening self-confidence and a God complex) that has afflicted so many.

  ‘Jim played me “Never Understand”, those demos,’ Douglas remembers. ‘I was blown away. But then he said, “You sing and I’ll play bass or something,” and I was like, “That is fucking crazy!” He’d made these demos, he’s got an amazing voice and he’s a great-looking guy, but he was genuinely shy. He had the same conversation with William later on – “You sing . . .”’

  Jim and Douglas decided to head to the local scout hall to rehearse and work up the beginnings of a live set from Jim’s songs. Good intentions, but they mainly just used the opportunity to take their favourite cassettes and play the music through their amp at top volume without being disturbed.

  Rehearsals (or not) aside, there was also the issue of a band name. One name that was briefly toyed with was The Poppy Seeds, a thinly veiled opiate reference with psychedelic overtones. Then there was The Daisy Chain, which would stick a little longer, gracing the recycled cassette tapes of their demos that were given to indifferent promoters around Glasgow in the hope of getting a gig.

  There might have been a thriving music scene in the city, but it was impossible for the Daisy Chain to break into it; Altered Images, Aztec Camera and Josef K seemed to have it sewn up. Groups such as sometime Postcard Records act Orange Juice, with Edwyn Collins on vocals, were gradually relocating to London, but still it appeared these ‘hayseeds from East Kilbride’, as Douglas puts it, were apparently not needed to fill the vacuum. Just a couple of years down the line they would be referred to by some as a ‘Glasgow’ band, but the truth was that there was quite a gulf.