Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  ‘I was pretty scared as I had to learn all of their songs in a week,’ Pinker remembers. ‘It was daunting. Jim and William were like twins. Douglas was like a brother too. Lovely bloke. They carried a box of SM58s [microphones] with them as Jim smashed up a few at each gig.’

  Mary Chain gigs may have been chaotic, but it was an organised chaos. Much was deliberate and carefully decided, particularly the elements that were seemingly accidental or out of control. ‘They had it worked out perfectly,’ says John Moore. ‘On one occasion they’d forgotten their fuzz pedals and they didn’t have anything to make feedback with except a cassette recorder onto which they had already recorded feedback. They just held that up to the microphone. That’s preparation, isn’t it?’

  James Pinker’s tenure didn’t last beyond those two pre-Christmas gigs, but the Reids hadn’t yet decided for certain that they definitely wanted a more electronic sound. They actually wanted a drummer, but they couldn’t find anyone who was right.

  ‘We auditioned dozens of drummers,’ says Jim. ‘Purely on ability, we could have got one easily, but we wanted somebody we could spend ten weeks on a tour bus with. We kept getting these guys that started going on about what type of sticks they would use. We didn’t give a fuck what type of sticks they were going to use! It’s a bit of wood, you moron!’

  One contender was the now sadly departed Nick Sanderson, sometime drummer in The Gun Club, a group the Reids and Douglas had always loved. Nick would join the Mary Chain in later years, and all who knew him recall his boundless charm and energy, but his first audition for the band did not go well. To be fair, considering the perversity of the Mary Chain, this makes it hard to imagine why they didn’t instantly fall in love with him. He was more appropriate in terms of attitude, feel and humour than many drummers who would later work with the Reids.

  ‘We’re all a bunch of wasters, but Nick was the king of the wasters,’ Jim says. ‘He turned up to the audition hungover as hell. I said, “Right. Do you know “Never Understand?’” “No, how does it go?” “Er . . . do you know any of our songs?” “No.” So I said, “Well, just start playing a slow beat.” “I haven’t got any sticks.” He didn’t pass the audition.’

  Eventually the Reids decided to quit the search and opt for drum tapes instead. Drum machines don’t go on about their favoured brand of drumstick. They don’t drink the rider or throw in unnecessary drum fills. You can switch off a drum machine. But this change also reintroduced a cooler, mechanical sound to the Mary Chain’s music. Jim just wishes they’d made a better choice of drum machine.

  ‘I love tinny, biscuit-tin drum machines,’ Jim says. ‘But we made a mistake. We should have used one that sounded more like a drum machine. We used a 1980s drum machine that just sounded like a crap drummer.’

  In the studio it soon became clear that Darklands would be a Jim-and-William-only operation. The songs they chose for the album reflected a different kind of light and shade to that of Psychocandy, and there was a distinct lack of white noise – perhaps a sign that the Reids were becoming more assured in their voices and their playing. They no longer had to hide behind an opaque wall of protective distortion, like a roaring sea separating themselves and the listener. They also didn’t want to do what people expected of them, and they had no intention of making Psychocandy: The Sequel, which is, of course, what the label was hoping for.

  This very different sound and mood on their latest studio recordings would be a revelation to Douglas and John as well as to the fans, not least because the Reids’ bandmates were not involved in the proceedings. Douglas says: ‘When they were about halfway through, I realised, “I haven’t seen them for a while, what are they doing?” I’d started making films, I was always doing something. I’d visit them in the studio a couple of times, and it was very much the same sort of thing as with Psychocandy: tea and toast, not cocaine or anything. That came much later with the Mary Chain.’

  The Reids would concur; they were as fond of getting obliterated as the next man – in fact they were arguably quite a bit fonder – but when it came to writing songs, stimulants were wisely eschewed because, as William puts it, ‘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 fucking brilliant. Then I’ve woken up the following day and realised what shite they are.’

  The new album would feature ‘April Skies’, the song that would become their biggest hit in, naturally, April 1987; the slow, obsessive ‘Nine Million Rainy Days’; the lighter ‘Cherry Came Too’; ‘Happy When It Rains’, and one of their earliest songs, ‘On The Wall’.

  ‘On The Wall’ was originally to have appeared on Psychocandy; the Reids took their Portastudio demo of the track to Rob Dickins, who instantly loved it. And so, in true Mary Chain style, they forgot all about it. ‘Another classic Mary Chain shooting-themselves-in-the-foot situation,’ says Jim. ‘Rob raved about it, he was saying, “That’s a number one hit single!” We just went away and recorded the album without the track that the chairman of the company was raving about. I think at the time we thought we couldn’t do it justice.’

  The demo would be included on the 7-inch release of the single ‘Dark-lands’ in October 1987, and also in 1988 on the Mary Chain’s much-loved Barbed Wire Kisses – B-Sides And More collection. Even the demo version is a nugget of 1980s alt-pop perfection, a clear example of how the Reids were crafting pop gems years before they’d even left their shared bedroom. Echoing, sparse chords turn towards and away from each other like moving figurines on a Black Forest clock. William’s guitar drones shimmer and the track concludes with dripping rainwater and moaning guitar wails that rise and fade. For all the beauty of the Darklands version, there is a purity to the demo which sets it apart.

  For Darklands, the Reids were under pressure from the label to work with a producer. They had found a way of recording that worked for them, but it was clear they had to at least try to play the game to keep Warners happy. One suggestion from the Warners camp was that they team up with Chris Hughes, who had produced Tears For Fears. Hughes worked with Tears for Fears’ keyboard-player Ian Stanley as a production duo, and so the Reids duly travelled to Bath to stay at Stanley’s house to record some demos. It didn’t go well.

  ‘One of the demos we recorded with them was the song “Darklands”, says Jim. ‘We weren’t getting into this at all. They’d be getting super-enthusiastic about things we didn’t give a fuck about, and by the end of the week we’d just had it. They had some idea they wanted to try, so we said, “Oh, just help yourselves,” and went to bed. We got up in the morning, these idiots had been up all night, and they were going, “You’ve got to hear this! This is going to blow you away!”

  ‘They played us “Darklands” and they’d been up all night recording a double bass on it. William and I looked at each other, and we just burst out laughing. You know when you can’t control yourself? I was nearly wetting myself.’

  Word immediately got back to Warners about the Mary Chain’s dismissal of Hughes and Stanley’s best efforts, and the usually composed Rob Dickins lost his rag with the Reids, which set them off again. ‘Rob called us and went, “You fucking losers! You had a world-class producer, and what did you do? You laughed at him!” And then we started laughing again . . .’

  Fortunately, the suggestion of working with Bill Price on ‘April Skies’ was more successful. ‘They liked the association with the Sex Pistols,’ says Laurence. ‘I remember going with Jim to meet Bill at the studio in Highbury, Wessex Studios. He looked like a middle-aged geezer, but musically things worked out.’

  ‘I was there when they recorded “April Skies”, says John Moore. ‘Even contributed a line to it. Sun grows cold, sky turns black . . . In this day and age, you know, “change a word, get a third”. Ah well. I think I’d had enough from the Mary Chain without that.’

  Naturally, the whole process from the writing to the artwork was painstaking and considered. Lau
rence remembers being at home with Jim as he crouched in front of the TV with a video of cult 1971 movie The Jesus Trip in the VCR. ‘He was trying to find the perfect freeze-frame of the guy on his cross for the cover,’ she remembers. ‘How many times did I see that gesture of the hand coming out and the gun being pointed?’

  ‘April Skies’ reached number 8 in the UK, their highest singles chart position, and, despite the only musicians on the actual track having been the Reids, the video still featured the four Mary Chain members playing along with the song in an abandoned building, the sight of John thumping the snare and floor tom proving somewhat incongruous with the electronic drum track.

  Psychologically, a line had been drawn in the sand. The Mary Chain was, now, truly the Reid brothers. Darklands was solely their production, and, to be fair, much of the work on Psychocandy had been executed by Jim and William too. From this point forth the group, as it was, became more of a touring line-up. As William once admitted, it was only in the early days with Bobby that they were really ‘a band’.

  ‘It must have been hard for Douglas,’ says John. ‘It was hard for me, and I wasn’t an original member. Any involvement I had would have been a bonus. What can you say? We’re talking about a time in musical technology where, all of a sudden, using a drum machine becomes the favourite tool. Everything became very exact, very clinical.’

  That said, for many – even within the band itself – Darklands is the preferred LP. It is unusual for the ‘difficult second album’ to eclipse the first, but there was a maturity that shone through on this record. Something new and bewitching had burst out of the chrysalis. ‘My favourite album is Darklands,’ says Douglas. ‘The songs were better. But I wasn’t really involved in it. I don’t blame them, they were young and things were happening. It was just different.’

  The Reids played Darklands to their loved ones, who were impressed by the new sound, not to mention the songwriting, the clarity, the contrasts, the humour. ‘Nine Million Rainy Days’, an obsessive love song augmented by a wry reference to the Stones’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ with its ‘ooh-ooh’ backing vocals, was a particular favourite.

  ‘The Rolling Stones thing was to lighten it,’ William explained to Steve Sutherland at the time. ‘We thought “Nine Million Rainy Days” was brilliant but too heavy, [so] that last bit we thought was quite a good little joke. Nobody seemed to get it, though. I think everybody thought we’d done it with deep frowns. Oh well . . .’

  ‘I loved “Nine Million Rainy Days”,’ says Laurence. ‘But people were shocked. “Where’s the feedback?” Jim and William were like, “We are not performing monkeys. That’s what we wanted to do, that’s how it is.” Darklands really was the album they wanted to make.’

  The lack of feedback would prove a shock to the press and many of the band’s fans. More than one journalist would refer to the Reids ‘doing the unthinkable’ and creating an album that was, basically, not Psychocandy. Their debut album had, like the Mary Chain themselves, seemingly burst out of nowhere, a startling, fully formed force of nature and noise. However, as William suggested in an interview with Sky TV at the time, why should the Reids repeat themselves when they had simply been using feedback ‘the way other people use keyboards’? White noise was just another instrument at their disposal.

  ‘Simply Red used keyboards on their last single and they didn’t use them in this one, and it would be a weird situation for people to say, “Where’s the keyboards?”’ said William. ‘That’s how it sometimes feels to us.’

  The Reids were also more than aware that their greatest strength was their songwriting, and as their confidence continued to grow, they were less inclined to drown out their songs with distortion. But part of the thrill of releasing an album as unexpected as Darklands would be that, just as people were getting used to the Mary Chain’s penchant for cranking out the kind of metallic, industrial screams one might otherwise hear at an international welding convention (maybe William’s time working with sheet metal was not entirely wasted), they could then yank the rug unceremoniously from under their feet and present something that no one had predicted. The songs had always been there, and yet even in later years William would have to defend the Mary Chain’s more melodic output. They were hardly ‘going soft’, there were just two sides to the Reids’ songwriting and they wanted to express them both, even if the pop world would have preferred to tidy them into a narrow box labelled ‘noisy’ and be done with it.

  ‘Probably fifty per cent of our music is slow and very melodic and not at all noisy,’ William explained. ‘It wasn’t a conscious effort but we have the same kind of songwriting sensibilities as the Beatles, who could write “Helter Skelter” and “Penny Lane” and be the same band – it’s two different aspects. That’s something a lot of people don’t appreciate. Whenever we play something slow and melodic, people turn on us and say we’re soft. We’ve always done that, but there seems to be a side of us that we’re not allowed to be comfortable with.’

  19

  Do Not Smile

  ‘Pop star’ is just a byword for ‘pile of crap’.

  William Reid

  Thanks to the success of ‘April Skies’, the Mary Chain would finally have two dreams fulfilled in 1987: they would at last grace the cover of Smash Hits and they would also appear on Top of the Pops, admittedly for the first and last time. The music press might have loved the Mary Chain but, as former press officer Mick Houghton remembers, radio producers didn’t like them, and TV producers liked them even less.

  ‘I was never sure if even John Peel really got them,’ ponders Mick, ‘but they certainly were never playlisted on Radio 1. I also think they had a plugger in-house at the label who probably didn’t give a toss about them, so he didn’t fight their corner.’

  Even so, to BBC Television Centre they would go, to mime to ‘April Skies’ on Top of the Pops, and they were genuinely excited, although you might not have known it to look at them. ‘Do not smile’ was Jim’s solemn command to the rest of the group before they went on, as if they needed telling.

  ‘I couldn’t believe we were there,’ says Jim. ‘As it turns out, we completely put noses out of joint and we were never asked back. We got drunk. The usual. Stumbled around.’

  Tension was no doubt high from the minute the band arrived, such was their reputation. But the heat really began to rise when the Mary Chain were about to start their camera rehearsal. ‘The guy said, “Do exactly what you’re going to do,”’ Jim explains. ‘And I said, “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. I’m just going to sing the song, is that all right?” And he said, “No, we’ve got to get the camera angles.” I thought, You’re taking the piss.’

  After the rehearsal, the Mary Chain set off to the BBC canteen to kill time and do a bit of off-duty Dalek-spotting. However, they were to meet with further hostility before they’d even passed through the door.

  ‘Paul Weller was there with the Style Council,’ says Laurence. ‘We crossed paths because they were on the show, but of course, no exchange whatsoever. When I turned around, he was like that [sticks up middle finger] to us. No idea why.’

  By the time they returned to the studio, the now inebriated Mary Chain were getting increasingly uncomfortable, not least because the presenter, Peter Powell, ‘couldn’t pronounce the name of the band,’ Douglas remembers. ‘He had to do about twenty takes. He was wearing a home-knitted jumper made for him by someone in a mental hospital that had been sent in, you know, with a BBC Top of the Pops logo on it.’

  The time had come, and the camera swung around to the Mary Chain, a gaggle of cheering children at their feet. William was inscrutable in sunglasses, John straight-backed and on his feet at the drums, Douglas inclining his head to his three-stringed bass. Jim, like a big-haired beacon in leather strides and white shirt, confused the cameramen as he swayed, swooped and inadvertently drove the crew crazy. What he was doing was putting more energy into the performance of the song than he had at rehearsal, bu
t the producers were on a hair-trigger to hate the Mary Chain and this was all they needed.

  Mick Houghton says: ‘The producer just bawled them out afterwards. People thought they were trying to be difficult, trying to make a point on TOTP, but they weren’t. They were essentially banned from that point.’

  This wouldn’t be the last time The Jesus and Mary Chain would accidentally put television producers’ backs up. A year later, the group were about to perform ‘Darklands’ on the short-lived Tyne-Tees pop show The Roxy but, as Jim explains, ‘The stage manager meant to say “roll the track”, but he actually said “roll the crap”. We fell about laughing, and the producer was so pissed off that we were thrown off the show.’” The producer should have been relieved they were so good-humoured about it.

  On another occasion the crew from Channel 4’s The Tube turned up to see the Mary Chain play a gig in Liverpool. As associate producer Ken Scorfield later told music journalist Max Bell, ‘I quite honestly didn’t like them.’ Despite this, they would appear on the show in October 1985, a ‘highlight of an otherwise lacklustre show’, according to The Hit’s Richard Lowe, but the Mary Chain weren’t happy. ‘We weren’t very good,’ Jim sighed afterwards. ‘We phoned home afterwards because we couldn’t tell what it was like. Our little sister said we were a wee bit tame.’

  TV shows did, admittedly, offer up the opportunity for mischief in the presence of rock gods and uptight producers, when the Mary Chain were permitted to appear, anyway (the producers of the US version of Top of the Pops refused to allow them on the show on account of their name alone). The Mary Chain appeared in the same episode of The Tube as Pete Townshend, who at the time had Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour in his band. Just as these guitar greats were about to soundcheck, Gilmour caught William Reid doing something so awful, in his opinion, that the moment that followed was, in Jim’s words, ‘one of the highlights of our career’.