Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  ‘It was a great trip,’ says Jim. ‘It was special. We were in this little village, completely untouched by tourism. Of course, we were like aliens who had landed in this little town. Nobody knew what we were about. Everybody thought we were some kind of freakshow that had rolled into town. Which, of course, we were.’

  ‘You Trip Me Up’, released in May 1985, peaked at number 55, but the NME hailed it as a ‘brilliant two-minute-odd gobbet of pop’ and declared it their Single of the Week on 1 June, affectionately praising the Mary Chain’s ‘usual sound of civilisations collapsing, small Scotsmen falling over, rose bushes being stuffed into human ears . . .’

  *

  Laurence Verfaillie visited London for the Psychocandy sessions, either spending time in the studio or meeting up with Jim afterwards. At Jim’s encouragement, she also reluctantly provided backing vocals on the track ‘Cut Dead’, although they were never used. ‘I’m not the best singer on the planet,’ admits Laurence. ‘John Loder always threatened he would release the tapes of me singing as blackmail! But Karen Parker, Bobby’s girlfriend, did backing vocals on “Just Like Honey”, and she had such a beautiful voice. “Just Like Honey” has the dream backing vocal, as far as I’m concerned.’ Interestingly, the seductive ‘Just Like Honey’ was originally going to be a fast-paced song, hard as it may be to imagine – or it would have been had William had his way. ‘I’m thinking, “Yeah, it’s gonna be really fast,”’ William recalled in an interview with Goldmine magazine. ‘Jim’s like, “No, bring that down a bit,” and I was like, “No, Jim. No, Jim. You don’t know.” He was like, “Please, please, please, just bring it down a bit.” He was right. He was totally right.’

  Both Jim and William were keen to have their girlfriends present at the studio – having them around no doubt helped break up the inevitable tension – but if you were in attendance at the sessions, or even in the wings at a gig, you were likely to be invited to get involved at some point. While Laurence’s contribution was not used on the record, she (not Lawrence from Felt, as some sources state) is credited on Psychocandy for backing vocals on ‘Taste Of Cindy’, ‘which I never did,’ she corrects. William’s then girlfriend Rona McIntosh, an artistic young goth, also had her name included in the credits for photography. Various curious artists also visited the studio while the Mary Chain were recording, including Public Image Limited’s Keith Levene and Jah Wobble, the Mary Chain’s heroes and post-punk noise forefathers. ‘A good omen,’ says Douglas.

  The Reid brothers were generally getting on at this point, and most of the arguments that kicked off were constructive discussions that needed to be had. That said, Jim and William’s disagreements would still get physical from time to time, and the studio itself wouldn’t get away unscathed. ‘I threw William against a door and knocked it off its hinges,’ Jim recalls. ‘Can’t remember why. But back then it was all about the music. Ten minutes later we’d be fine with each other.’

  Staying with Jim in Fulham, Laurence was granted a unique insight into the workings of the group, and specifically how pressured the Reids felt when it came to recording. Making the record was – had to be – an obsession. However, rather perversely, there would be some elements that were left to the last minute – which, as Laurence observes, is testament to their skill as songwriters. ‘I saw how they wrote lyrics, and sometimes it felt like, Quick, I’ve got to go and record, what do you think we should say? But how good is that? Subconsciously you still come up with something that says who you are. But it cracked me up, it was like kids going to an exam.’

  ‘I don’t like recording,’ Jim admits. ‘You’re very aware of the fact that this is make or break. You know that if you just go on to autopilot for a moment, the whole thing could sink. You have to think, “I’m going to look back on this ten years from now, and I might think I fucked that up and I didn’t have to.” It’s stressful. It might not be for other people, but that’s the way I felt about it. I’m sure William did as well.’

  Was it more comfortable for the Reids to express themselves on stage than work on a new release in the studio? Apparently not. ‘Really they just wanted to be at home, surrounded by gadgets and playing music and having nothing to do with the outside world,’ explains Laurence. ‘They were completely asocial, not anti-social. If only it could have been just about music and none of the obligations around it, the guys would have been the happiest pop stars on the planet.’ William had already bought a flat with his girlfriend Rona, and there was nowhere he’d rather be than there, holed up with their cats (whose nicknames were, incidentally, ‘Jim’ and ‘William’).*

  Part of what piled extra stress onto the Reids’ shoulders from the point of view of recording was the level of expectation from the outside world, and the sense that critics felt there might be little beyond their initial impact, which had been considerable. The word ‘hype’ had been used too many times in connection with The Jesus and Mary Chain, and both brothers felt keenly that they had much to prove with their debut LP. Every track had to be as good as it could possibly be, and, as confident as the Reids were when it came to their output, they knew they were in a fickle industry. This was a chance they could not afford to blow.

  Jim Reid says: ‘If it had just been the singles surrounded by B-sides the Mary Chain would have gone down the toilet. Pressure is the name of the game. You always think, “This could end tomorrow.” You have this mental image of yourself wearing a McDonald’s hat, going “Would you like cheese with that? I used to be in a band, you know . . .” If someone could have told me in 1985 that I’d be talking about it now, and I’m doing all right, I would have relaxed a lot more.’

  Psychocandy would, in its initial form, consist of fourteen cuts, including ‘Never Understand’, ‘You Trip Me Up’, ‘Just Like Honey’, live favourites ‘In A Hole’ and ‘Taste The Floor’, and early songs such as ‘The Living End’. It came in at just over 38 minutes long. Brevity was still a significant element in the Mary Chain formula.

  While mixing is a key part of any record’s success, it’s a step in the process that many artists don’t involve themselves with directly. However, the Mary Chain knew it was vital that they all had a say, and their sound depended particularly upon William really getting to work on the desk, layering shroud upon shroud of feedback. The guitar sound on the record is metallic and spacious, slicing across Jim’s brooding whispers like razors, while the drums thud against the warmth of the bass, relatively low in the mix.

  The result was an intense, at times fantastical album that has the unfailing capability to ensnare the listener into a hypnotic state. You can get lost inside Psychocandy, and it bears the Mary Chain’s unique musical stamp, psychotic and sweet, at once powerfully anchored and oddly fragile. Yes, the layers of noise could be intense and disorientating, but, in William’s words, ‘it was also the most beautiful tenderness’. As Douglas describes it, the album is ‘psychedelic in the true sense of the word’, and that sound and feeling come very much from the Mary Chain’s experimentation with drugs back in East Kilbride during their formative years.

  ‘Nobody really talks about it, but it really is a psychedelic record,’ he explains. ‘There are no sharp sounds. It’s aggressive at times, but also ethereal. Those layers of guitars on Psychocandy where you don’t really know where you are, it’s like being in a kind of womb of reverb and noise.’

  And how did William and Jim feel about the album? ‘We were very happy with it,’ says Jim. ‘We could have tinkered with it until doomsday, but really it wasn’t going to get any better than this.’

  * William described his cats in an interview thus: ‘Jim’s a moaning bastard and William is the nice one. I chose the names after I’d had them a couple of days so I could work out which was the cutest. Jim is very, very unfriendly . . . I love to torment him the way I used to torment Jim when he was a kid. Jim makes a brilliant squealing noise. I’m thinking of making a tape loop of it.’

  14

  Rants, Reality and Troubl
e in the Ballroom

  An immaculate conception of love songs, and one of the finest debut albums ever . . . The kids from East Kilbride should now split up before they have a chance to ruin the bliss.

  Jack Barron reviews Psychocandy for Sounds, 2 November 1985

  The period spent making Psychocandy was productive, concentrated and exciting, and there was a genuine sense even as they worked that history was being made. Alan McGee loved the album, as did Geoff Travis, although when it was duly delivered to Warners, Geoff chuckles, ‘dear Rob Dickins, he thought there was something wrong with it.’

  The next release would be the dreamily erotic ‘Just Like Honey’ in September, a still of the group huddled on the beach from the ‘You Trip Me Up’ video on the cover. This was a motif the Mary Chain would regularly repeat: the cover of Psychocandy would be an image of Jim and William Reid on the white, box-like set of the ‘Just Like Honey’ video, the word ‘CANDY’ emblazoned twice behind the group in black and red. This was the single that many new fans would really fall in love with, and it would reach number 45 in the UK singles charts. The album itself was due for release in November.

  In the meantime, there was still a pervading feeling amid the press and public that the Mary Chain’s time was already over. Jim explains: ‘We had the singles, but I think everybody thought that that was all we had in us.’ The critics would be in for a surprise just a few months down the line.

  The Mary Chain were booked to play a handful of live dates over the summer, and this included the group’s first visit to Scandinavia – a memorable if not especially enjoyable stint, largely because William had already started to dislike touring considerably. He was disillusioned with the music business – ‘business’ being the operative word – and, after entering it with hopes of a magical future, the scales were falling from his eyes, revealing to him the grubby reality. It wouldn’t take long before he started to view much of his life as a pop star through a glass darkly.

  ‘It must have been really hard,’ muses Alan McGee. ‘To suddenly be told, not just by me but by the NME, that “You’re fucking amazing and Warners have given you a publishing deal, and loads of girls now fancy you,” when you might not have had a girlfriend in five years . . . they just rolled up like a hedgehog, they didn’t trust anybody. They were the most unready people for that experience.’

  At times much of what was spewing out of William onstage would be simple drunken ire. The crowd in Denmark would be subjected to one of William’s now famous onstage tirades, and this one was culturally customised to the Mary Chain’s Copenhagen fans. Douglas Hart remembers: ‘He went into this mad rant and he was going, “You baconeating bastards!” Where did that come from? Kind of great. Yeah, there’ve been a few of those.’

  The band’s visit to Finland also ended in a well-lubricated sulk. Laurence, who was backstage at the gig, relates her memories of Helsinki: ‘William was paralytic even before the gig. He was almost falling off his chair. I could see out of the corner of my eye that William was starting to go. When he actually fell off the chair, everyone was like, “What the hell are we going to do?” At the time they had two guitars on stage, and the sound engineer was given instructions, if William was completely losing the plot on the guitar, to put him down in the mix and the other guy would have to pick up.

  ‘They managed to salvage the gig. William was all over the place, but we couldn’t hear him too much. At the end, there were these flowerpots on the edge of the stage and William went and kicked them all over into the mosh pit. Bless him!’

  ‘He’s a complicated guy,’ says Douglas with a shrug. ‘He’s one of the funniest people, but you just have to look at the lyrics, there’s a darkness to him – which we all have to some degree, but maybe he’s just more honest about it. It’s like that with the both of them. Maybe it sometimes comes out the wrong way, but you know what? Fuck it.’

  After returning home, a trail of offended Danes and broken flowerpots in their wake, the Mary Chain played Manchester’s now iconic Hacienda club with Meat Whiplash, The Pastels and Primal Scream, taking the stage at around two o’clock in the morning. This, incidentally, was when Karen Parker famously joined the band onstage, not just to sing backing vocals on ‘Just Like Honey’ but to play drums. According to Jim, the story that Bobby had hurt his hand and thus couldn’t play is not true. It was just typically mischievous Mary Chain spontaneity at work.

  ‘Our attitude was punk in its purest form,’ says Jim. ‘We just said, “Karen, do you want to play drums tonight?” She was like, “I cannae play!” We were like, “Oh, it sounds all right.” She knew all the songs. So she played Bobby’s set, and she was bloody good. And I still got the Bobby grin that I was always looking for. He was standing at the side of the stage going “Yeah!”’

  While for some members of the Mary Chain touring was a necessary evil, Douglas generally loved the experience. ‘It was always a thrill to go somewhere new. Even later on I enjoyed touring,’ he reflects. ‘Some people thrive on every part of touring, staying up all night every night. We, being slightly more sensitive, would get comedowns. But I’m not going to moan, we loved it.

  ‘McGee would come on a lot of those tours as a tour manager – he wasn’t just our manager. Especially on the early ones he would be with us, so it really was like a gang, in the best way.’

  ‘There were camps within camps,’ McGee remembers. ‘Obviously there were the Reid brothers, who confided in each other. Bobby and Douglas were close, but then you had other twists in it: Bobby and I were close, we went way back. Jim and I were close, and I got on well with Douglas. William and I never really connected. I thought he was an incredible talent; we just didn’t connect as human beings.’

  What would often make the touring experience more enjoyable was travelling with people they liked, such as Felt and of course The Pastels, who would reconvene with the Mary Chain in early September for a gig at Preston’s Clouds venue.

  ‘We did OK,’ Stephen Pastel recalls. ‘My main memory is that William was quite drunk and he told me he loved our music. He was really unguarded and it was a sweet moment.’

  Douglas Hart says: ‘I loved playing places like that because they were a bit like the places we grew up in. I remember in Preston this kid came up to me, really young, strange-looking guy, and he said, “I’d like to start a band.” I was like, “You should, you should!” And he said, “But I’ve got no friends.” God, what a thing to say. Kind of beautiful. It haunted me. I always wondered what happened to him.’ This poignant exchange must have accessed a part of Douglas that would surely have felt similarly isolated – another outsider from an outsider town – had he and the Reids not found each other in East Kilbride when they did.

  Violence at Mary Chain gigs was not such a problem in the regions, although if you weren’t keen on spitting, that rarely welcomed hangover from the punk years, a Mary Chain gig was probably not the place for you. ‘Those first few tours we did of Britain, people would spit all the way through,’ Douglas recalls. ‘Someone’s mum came to see us and she said, “What were those bits of paper people were throwing at you?” We were like, “Those were not bits of paper . . .”’

  The general feeling was that, even after a hiatus, London was still the main problem in audience terms. It was where the most dangerous scenes had been sparked, and care would be needed when the band played there again. It might have seemed over the top, but Alan McGee was nervous enough to employ two Scottish ex-SAS bodyguards. Even they wouldn’t last the course; the last straw for them was the Mary Chain’s show at Camden’s Electric Ballroom on 9 September 1985.

  A good proportion of the crowd that piled into the venue that night was keyed up and ready to fight. They weren’t ‘smashing up pop’, they were kicking the living daylights out of each other. Unlike North London Poly, McGee ‘expected it to be heavy, and it was. Very heavy.’

  ‘It happened straight away,’ adds Douglas. ‘There were big, thuggish guys there, throwing bottles from
the back, like at the football – that used to make me sick – so that people down the front would get hit.’

  Jim Reid, who felt largely immune to what was happening thanks to being utterly plastered, admits the Mary Chain didn’t help matters by coming on to play a good 90 minutes later than they were expected. ‘I know why the riots happened at the North London Poly, and I know why it happened at the Electric Ballroom,’ he says. ‘They kept coming into the dressing-room and saying, “It’s time to go on,” and we were going, “No, we’re just chilling out, playing some music, we’ll be on in fifteen minutes.” That went on for about an hour and a half.

  ‘Looking back on it, it was idiotic, but at the time I thought, We’re the band, we should go on whenever we feel like it. Was that a smart thing to do? Probably not, but there you go.’

  They didn’t want to just listen to music and relax, of course – they wanted to knock the edges off their nerves by getting as obliterated as possible while still being able to function. ‘The drinking was always there,’ Jim admits. ‘Me and William, we’re not really at ease socially, to say the very least. It’s a social lubricant. At the beginning we’d go on tour and we’d get shit-faced every night for ten weeks, and then you’d get back home and be kind of glad not to drink any more. I never used to drink at home, though, and couldn’t understand why anybody would. That changed. I can’t remember when or why.’

  Laurence Verfaillie was backstage that night and she knew from experience there was no way they’d be going on stage until they had reached a satisfactory level of drunkenness. That, plus adrenaline and the jolt of hearing the menacing shouts of the crowd, would create a combustible chemical reaction in terms of their own stage presence. ‘They had to have a serious amount of alcohol before going on stage. But the gigs would be fabulous. It wasn’t like Amy Winehouse slurring her words, it was getting them into the mood.’