Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  It took a single afternoon in the studio to develop ‘Sidewalking’, extemporising over beats and a riff, and the Reids were proud of the result. The only problem was that they felt it was too different to the sound their fans were used to. They considered releasing it under a different name, or inviting a female hip-hop star to sing on it instead.

  ‘But then we spoke to Geoff Travis,’ Jim says, ‘and he said, “You’re nuts. It’s just a great record. Just put it out as the Mary Chain.” So we did.’

  The Reids released ‘Sidewalking’ as a stand-alone single in March 1988 and it reached number 30 in the charts. ‘Live, “Sidewalking” became such a phenomenon,’ Laurence says. ‘They’d expand on it and do it as an encore with white noise on it and beats. It was stunning.’

  Another release that had been in the works was the now classic collection Barbed Wire Kisses (B-Sides And More), released just one month after ‘Sidewalking’. Barbed Wire Kisses is a box of shady delights, it contains the ones that (almost) got away: the obscure songs, the flip-sides, stand-alones and sketches. The entire compilation boasts an experimental spontaneity due to the tracks, in many cases, having been belted out quickly rather than agonised over. Of course, as fans will testify, a B-side courtesy of the Reids is often stronger and more arresting than your average A-side, and Jim and William, especially in years to come, would compete with each other when it came to their B-sides, ratcheting up the quality even higher.

  Jim says: ‘We thought the B-sides shouldn’t disappear because we thought they were good – although, to be honest, the early B-sides we didn’t give a toss about. One was called “Cracked”, and it was literally a track from Psychocandy, “The Living End”, I think, slowed to half-speed with another vocal on it at the right speed. It got us out of jail. But later, and not much later, we started to take B-sides seriously.’

  The Jesus and Mary Chain wear their influences proudly on their sleeve; most obviously the Velvets, The Stooges, Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’, surf pop and dance music. But here the band also display their reverence for Bo Diddley with the track ‘Bo Diddley Is Jesus’, and the oft-covered ‘Who Do You Love?’ Lyrically, this song couldn’t be more Mary Chain, with its cobra-snake neckties and miles of barbed wire.

  ‘Bo Diddley wrote “Who Do You Love?” in 1955, and I don’t know if you can make out the words on our version, but they’re like pure evil,’ William enthused. ‘These days they would be considered offensive, too evil for mass consumption. And this was released in the day of Doris Day and Perry Como.’

  Also featured on Barbed Wire Kisses is a dark cover of ‘Surfin’ USA’, The Beach Boys’ rip-off of/homage to Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. ‘Kill Surf City’ (the B-side of ‘April Skies’) also subverts the surf, the devilish vocal seemingly unfurling upwards from the depths of hell. While the Mary Chain’s take on ‘Surfin’ USA’ gives a nod to The Beach Boys, ‘Kill Surf City’, as the title may hint, kicks sunshine well and truly up the arse and brings on a total eclipse. ‘Just Out Of Reach’, the B-side of ‘You Trip Me Up’, meanwhile, is a thick fog of troubling sound, pierced by what sounds like a guitar being attacked by a gleeful maniac. When the record was released, there was a question mark over whether ‘Kill Surf City’ was ‘anti-American’, but William Reid insisted it wasn’t. ‘It was basically our weird twist on a surf song,’ he explained. ‘We sang about a guy fucking his girl to death while being fucked to death by another guy, and we were singing about nuclear bombs and wanting to shoot someone in the face . . . we just thought it was kind of funny in the midst of a surf song. Not what you usually get. We loved surf music but couldn’t handle most of the lyrics or the sensibilities.’

  Barbed Wire Kisses (B-Sides And More) rocketed to number 8 in the UK charts, giving the Reids another gold disc for their collection alongside those for Psychocandy and Darklands. Meanwhile the marathon Darklands tour was coming to an end, and the Mary Chain played Glasgow’s Barrowland venue, linking up with their families in East Kilbride, who proudly attended the show.

  John Moore, the self-confessed ‘lone Sassenach’ in the group, remembers spending time with the Reid and Hart families very fondly: ‘All the relatives were in the dressing-room having a wonderful time,’ he remembers. ‘Imagine your sons being the toast of the nation.’

  The Reid family invited everyone to a party at their house after the show – an unusual occurrence after a Mary Chain gig – and John scoured the living room for photographs of the Reid brothers. He didn’t find a single one. Jim had taken them all down. ‘I said to their mum, “No photographs of Jim and William?”, and she was complaining that they were so conscious of protecting their image,’ says John.

  ‘But she said, “I’ve got some here, come and have a look at these.” She got me this photograph of Jim with the Celtic football manager, Jim as a kid with curly hair. Jim came in and said, “Mother! What are you doing? Don’t give him a photograph, he’ll sell it to the newspapers!” I would have, as well.’

  This unusually warm experience on tour with the Mary Chain was all the more poignant because, as it happened, John was preparing to bow out. He’d been working on his own demos – which, he jokingly admits, ‘probably sounded rather like The Jesus and Mary Chain’ – and had started to get major-label interest. ‘With my matinee-idol good looks and complete lack of morals, I was probably quite attractive to record companies, because I’d do anything.’ The Mary Chain had an extensive tour of Australia and the Far East coming up, and John had to make a decision.

  ‘I had these deals on the table that I couldn’t walk away from, so I had to leave at the end of the Darklands tour,’ says John. ‘I didn’t go to the after-show party because I was really sad, and Jim was upset. I don’t think it was because he thought he’d lost a friend, but because he had to audition a new bloody person.’

  John wanted an opportunity to write and record, which, other than the occasional contribution, wasn’t going to happen with the Mary Chain, very much a Reid/Reid operation by now. But he’d observed how it was done, and in his own time had worked out that he could do it rather well. There was nothing to stop him going solo and heading up his own group, The Expressway. He signed with Polydor.

  With hindsight, however, John feels that perhaps he left the Mary Chain too soon; he was young, and going it alone was quite different to being in a band that was already a going concern. ‘I don’t think I was ready,’ admits John. ‘I hadn’t lived enough to write songs . . . so I should either never have joined the Mary Chain and just waited, or stayed longer and learned more, because they were as good as it gets.’

  21

  Acid House, Sugarcubes and a Trip behind the Iron Curtain

  If the public don’t like ‘Sidewalking’, I’ll be utterly pissed off and my view of the public taste will go even lower.

  William Reid to Steve Sutherland, 1988

  The Reids had to find a replacement guitarist, but they were reluctant to advertise, didn’t want to have to go through the audition process, and didn’t have anyone in mind. ‘Perfect example of their sociopathic tendencies,’ says John Moore. ‘They got Dave Evans, their former roadie.’

  Dave Evans, an erstwhile member of Biff Bang Pow! and the Mary Chain’s sometime sound man, had taken a year out with the Shop Assistants as a backline/guitar technician but had returned to the Mary Chain fold for the upcoming tour. The Reids now had just two weeks before the tour started, but, as Evans recalls, ‘they spent the first week in the studio and there didn’t seem to be any enthusiasm on anyone’s part to find someone. I offered my services and they said “Yes”. We didn’t have any rehearsals whatsoever.’

  It was a solution, but the decision to include Evans in the line-up was not universally popular. He was well liked and could play guitar, but, as Douglas observed, it was strange that the Reids spent so much time perfecting their song-craft but would put little or no effort into finding just the right people to play it live. Whether it was a lack of confidence t
hat prevented the Reids from being more outward-looking when it came to line-up changes, or just sheer indolence, their fellow founding member found it hard to reconcile.

  ‘It’s weird,’ says Douglas. ‘They cared so much about everything else. Dave Evans, lovely guy, but it’s just because he was there. That’s something that would occasionally confound me. Mary Chain laziness . . . “He’ll do!”’

  The cloistered process of making Darklands, the advent of a more businesslike manager, and some ostensibly lackadaisical decision-making had all caused Douglas and the Reids to grow apart. But while the brothers worked together on new music, Douglas had been developing new ways of expressing himself, particularly through film-making and making music videos for artists such as My Bloody Valentine and the Cramps/Gun Club sideman Kid Congo.

  Douglas was also inspired by acid house in its formative years, which led to some musical experimentation of his own. He made his first record away from the Mary Chain, under the name of Acid Angels, with Peter ‘Pinko’ Fowler, an associate of the late John Loder and an instrumental part of the alternative music television series Snub TV. The result of their collaboration was a sprawling dance record called ‘Speed Speed Ecstasy’, which featured a sample of Donna Summer’s iconic disco hit ‘I Feel Love’.

  ‘In 1988, way before Screamadelica, I went to some gig at the Astoria,’ Douglas recalls. ‘My girlfriend at the time said, “Let’s stay here, there’s a club coming after, they play dance music.” And I’m going, “What, a fucking disco?” But it was an acid house night.

  ‘It was an important moment. Andy Weatherall was DJ’ing, and he was like, “What are you doing here?” He was surprised to see one of the Mary Chain, I was still in that indie world. So I made a dance record really early on, just a one-off, came out on Mute. Of course, two years later everyone was doing it.’

  William too had been making solo dance tracks in his bedroom, but as Jim observed, he didn’t have the confidence to release them. But the Reids were both influenced by acid house, and the next Mary Chain album, Automatic, would be their most dance-orientated record yet.

  *

  The summer of 1988 also saw the rise of music festivals across Europe, and this ensured that the Mary Chain would cross paths with other groups of a similar mind-set, such as the Cocteau Twins and Iceland’s Björk-fronted indie band The Sugarcubes.

  Laurence remembers: ‘At Roskilde, not far from Copenhagen; we were booked in the same hotel and they all went out. I think the Icelanders are pretty good at holding their drink, they beat the Scots flat out.’

  This experience clearly bonded the two bands; eccentric Sugarcube maverick Einar Örn (now dividing his time between his group Ghostigital and his day job on the Reykjavik city council) was especially friendly to the Mary Chain, and this connection would lead to The Sugarcubes inviting the Reids to remix their hit ‘Birthday’. The result is compelling and mysterious, interweaving Björk’s yelps and wails with some trademark Jim Reid ‘Hey, Hey, Heys’. It was, as Laurence recalls, ‘really the first time the Mary Chain had done anything like this’.

  Another memorable music festival the Mary Chain played that June was Tallinn Summer Rock in Estonia, still firmly behind the Iron Curtain at this point. The Mary Chain were put up in the now infamous Hotel Viru, a high-rise hotel where it was compulsory for all foreign visitors to stay, and where they were monitored closely by the KGB. Agents recorded guests and listened to every conversation in every room from their secret hub on the wind-blown top floor, which is now open to the public as a KGB museum. The door that leads to the old secret recording rooms in Hotel Viru bears the ominous and highly unconvincing sentence: ‘There is nothing behind this door’ in Russian.

  ‘Every floor had a concierge who reported back to the KGB on what you were doing,’ says then Mary Chain manager Chris Morrison. ‘You were noted every time you went in and out of your room. So I went in and out of my room about six times. Give them something to do.’

  ‘I imagine we were followed everywhere on our trip,’ Douglas adds. ‘Wouldn’t it be a blast to have a look at the KGB’s Mary Chain files?’

  It sure would. Although, as Jim observes, ‘they probably got rid of them for being too fucking obscene’. The conversations crackling up the line from the Mary Chain’s rooms to the top floor of the Hotel Viru would certainly have made for interesting listening. ‘I remember a bizarre fetishistic conversation I had with Douglas and Richie (drummer Richard Thomas) in the hotel room,’ recalls Lincoln Fong, who was working with the Mary Chain as a technician. ‘It’s probably best not repeated.’ There’s a good chance that the KGB wouldn’t have been able to decipher their accents, of course.

  ‘Tallinn was a pretty weird trip,’ says Jim. ‘There were all these dodgy high-rise constructions that looked like they would have fallen down if you sneezed near them, and it was totally run on bribery and corruption. You’d go to a restaurant and they’d say, “It’s fully booked,” and you’d look and there’d be loads of empty tables. The promoter would bung this guy a load of roubles and a table would appear.’

  On one occasion, on his way downstairs from his room, Chris Morrison was approached in the lift by two young women who suggested he take them to dinner. He politely declined. When the lift reached the ground floor and the doors slid open, he was met by Jim and William and their Estonian guide, who was extremely perturbed. She warned Chris that some American tourists had also recently been propositioned by the same women. Their ‘dinner date’ culminated in the women spiking their drinks with drugs and, the following morning, the hapless Americans woke up naked in an alleyway not remembering anything of the night before.

  Chris remembers, ‘I said, “My God, all of my life I’ve wanted to wake up naked in an alleyway not remembering where I was the night before. Where are they?” Jim said, “Forget the women, how do we get the drugs?”’

  *

  Tallinn Summer Rock took place in a vast football stadium, and the Mary Chain walked on stage to see about 200,000 Estonians staring back at them – one of the biggest crowds the band have ever played to. The bill was somewhat incongruous in terms of style: blues singer Robert Cray was also appearing, as were ‘a bunch of Finnish heavy metal bands,’ says Douglas. ‘The strangest Mary Chain show ever. Such gigs were rare, so everyone from Tallinn under the age of 40 came along. We played to thousands of bemused Estonians, many with mullets and bum-fluff moustaches.’

  ‘They were just standing there like frying sausages,’ says Jim. ‘All these bands they’d never heard of doing what they do. It was quite bizarre.’

  The Jesus and Mary Chain performed, as they always did, with maximum noise, concentrated energy, and, in Jim’s case, the usual attack on the equipment. But when he looked up, mid-frenzy, Jim noticed that the crowd appeared to be in a collective state of shock. Their reaction, as Douglas recalls, ‘was similar to that of the audience in The Producers, at the premiere of Springtime for Hitler’. You get the idea.

  ‘I was as off my tits as it was possible to get in Tallinn,’ Jim explains, ‘and I did my standard smashing-the-monitor thing that I used to do. These people had no reference points as to what it was I was doing. They were just standing there thinking, What the fuck is that guy doing? Looking back on it, I was smashing up their gear that would have taken them about eight lifetimes to buy. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea.’

  In the not too distant future, Jim Reid would increasingly leave the gear unscathed during a live show. His initial feeling was that the destruction was theatre; ‘you have to put on a show,’ he said in later years. ‘It’s something to do besides playing the songs.’ Sometimes the violence was borne of nerves, desperation or genuine frustration, other times it was ‘unnecessary, or sometimes you go on speeding out of your head and there’s a guitar and a floor to smash it on.’ The point at which it had to stop was when audiences started to expect it. There was no point in being predictably unpredictable, and the Mary Chain didn’t need a gimmick. ‘It dawned
on us that what’s good about the Mary Chain is it’s not about glitzy showbiz stuff,’ said Jim. ‘Now we push the music to the front.’

  As summer waned, it was time for the Mary Chain to set off to Australia to continue the ‘Sidewalking’ tour; two more gruelling months on the road. But there was a light at the end of this particular touring tunnel, an Iggy Pop-shaped light, to be specific. Once they had completed their dates in Australia, they would travel to the US for a run of shows with one of their lifelong heroes. Meanwhile, to accompany the Australian tour, Blanco Y Negro released a 7-inch of the Mary Chain’s jagged cover of ‘Surfin’ USA’.

  *

  There were difficulties on the tour from the off: an argument erupted between Lincoln Fong and a drunken Jeffrey Lee Pierce from The Gun Club; a riot broke out on an early Australian date when Perth’s finest The Triffids set the stage alight (literally); and the Mary Chain’s gigs were the subject of a public protest in New Zealand when two goths died in an unrelated suicide pact the week before. Protesters tried to have the Mary Chain shows cancelled, but they didn’t succeed and the band escaped New Zealand unscathed. More trouble, however, lay ahead in the US.

  The Jesus and Mary Chain were trepidatiously excited about whom they were soon to share a bill with. They had revered Iggy Pop since they were teenagers, listened to his records, waged joyous trails of destruction in the abandoned paint factory to the sound of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, and now they were about to meet the sinewy dark lord of proto-punk himself. Unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, disaster ensued.

  ‘Oh God,’ Jim sighs, cringing at the memory of it. ‘One of the main reasons the Mary Chain exists is because of Iggy and The Stooges. We were asked if we wanted to “co-headline with Iggy”, which basically meant we were the support band. Anyway, we’re big Iggy fans, so we do it.’