Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  An American tour was booked for October and November. The support act? Hope Sandoval’s group Mazzy Star. As a result, William and Hope wouldn’t have to be separated, which didn’t sit well with Jim. One concern was that this latest development made William hard to track down as the couple kept going off on their own. This was also the first time Steve Monti had toured with the Reids – he’d been part of the Rollercoaster tour with Curve, but beyond sneaking into the Mary Chain’s dressing-room to polish off some of their rider, he hadn’t really had the Mary Chain touring experience.

  ‘The tour didn’t get off to a great start,’ Monti admits. ‘It was a different vibe to what I was used to. They didn’t seem to get a buzz from performing, even when it was a great gig.’

  On 18 October, Monti was celebrating (as best he could) his birthday, and he had every intention of enjoying the gig that night. Dream on, birthday boy. ‘William got pissed off with something, kicked one of my cymbals and said something abusive,’ Monti says. ‘After the gig, they were all sitting around being morose and I did something I never do: I got really angry, I even punched a hole in the ceiling. I accused William of never enjoying gigs. It was the start of the tour and it already felt like a year. I was worried that the rest of the seven weeks was going to be hell.’

  Monti concluded his tirade by announcing that he would be leaving the band the following day, which apparently shocked William into trying to placate him and Monti completed the tour. There would be no dreaded drummer auditions mid-tour for the Reids.

  However, a Reid-Reid fight was on its way that would have the other members of the band concerned that it was over for good. On 27 November the Mary Chain and Mazzy Star were booked to play the Roxy in Los Angeles, Hope’s home city. Jim says: ‘The period after Stoned & Dethroned, that was when William and I started to not understand each other’s direction. He was going out with Hope and I didn’t hit it off with her. Maybe I was a bit hard on her. She could be a bit prima donna-ish, but a lot of it was naïve and innocent, although I didn’t see it at the time.

  ‘I remember in LA, after the sound-check William was going back to Hope’s and I said, “You’re not going to have time to go there and come back for the gig.” He said, “No, I’ll be all right.” He rolled up about five minutes after show-time and I was so pissed off, I screamed at them. Hope just kind of stamped her foot and marched out.’

  ‘William just said, “Fuck you. I’m not going on stage until I’m drunk,” Monti adds. ‘So we all had to sit there in the dressing-room watching him drink Jack Daniel’s while the clock ticked. Every now and then I dared to ask, “Are you drunk yet?” Finally he was ready so we could do the gig.’

  Seething, Jim marched on stage and growled into the microphone, ‘William’s had too much to drink.’ Not to be outdone, William retorted, ‘And Jim’s a fucking prick.’

  ‘They were the kings of stage banter,’ says Lincoln Fong, who was watching it all unfold just feet away from him on stage. ‘Sometimes it was hard not to laugh when it kicked off. The show went well though.’

  Looking back, Jim is philosophical, not to mention contrite. ‘I think I was the idiot there. I think back to what the Mary Chain was about – so what that he rolled up five minutes late? There was no harm done, I just wanted to make a point.

  ‘There were a lot of things like that with Hope, and I don’t think she meant any harm, but it ruffled my feathers, and I would make stands over things that, as I look back on them, I don’t think were important. I probably should have cut her some slack.’

  26

  Love, Hate, a Departure and a Homecoming

  By the time it got to [final album] Munki, we’d argue about anything. It was ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ ‘No, coffee.’ ‘Why do you want coffee?’ It just wasn’t going to work.

  Jim Reid to Thomas H Green of The Arts Desk, 2010

  The Mary Chain were soon ‘pregnant’, as Laurence Verfaillie put it, with their sixth studio album, and it would be the longest and most difficult birth yet, with neither Reid prepared to hold the other’s hand throughout the anguish. Still, there was an abundance of powerful songs to choose from for what would be the last Mary Chain studio album to date.

  The brothers were more divided than ever, and William’s seething dissatisfaction with the music industry was never more evident; he even wrote a song to prove it: ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’. Released in May 1995, it detailed starkly how William had increasingly been feeling over the past decade. The Reids were always honest in their lyrics, but while William’s words in particular were usually open to interpretation, this time the message was cold and literal.

  William doesn’t flinch from naming names either – MTV, BBC . . . (‘I love the BBC/I love it when they’re pissing on me/And I love MTV/I love it when they’re shitting on me.’) Euphemisms and thinly veiled references would have no place in this song. Some would feel he was biting the hand that had kept him in beer and weed for quite some time, but William wanted to reveal the other side of the music industry for all to see.

  ‘When you work for a living,’ he explained, ‘you get fucked with from nine to five. When you’re in a band, you get fucked with 24 hours a day on every continent in the world. Even when you’re sleeping you’re being fucked with somewhere. I wish I didn’t have to write this type of song.’

  It was of course the business of rock’n’roll, rather than rock’n’roll itself, that William was lambasting in this song, which poured out of him in five minutes flat. ‘I came into this industry as an idealist,’ he told Rolling Stone in 1995. ‘I thought I was going to make art, but I got that kicked out of my system after about ten minutes, when we did our first single for Warners and they asked us to turn down the feedback and turn up the voice and drums for a radio mix. That felt to me like somebody saying, “Hey, Picasso, could you redo this painting, because there’s a nipple in it, and we want to show it to schoolchildren.”’

  William felt resentment towards the music industry not just because he didn’t want to compromise his art, but because their success – and the Mary Chain really did want success – largely depended on how much money could (or would) be spent on promotion.

  ‘I have an acquaintance in an American record company who is in charge of Sheryl Crow,’ William said in an interview with Rockin’ On, ‘and I hear that, if you’re lucky, you can spend $1.5 million on promotion for one record. But we can only spend $180,000. If we had had that amount of money at first, we would have sold hundreds of times more records. I envy big bands like REM; sometimes I’m driven by envy and think, damn it, I want to sell twenty million copies too, but this is the way this business is.’

  ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’ would be the first single released from the Mary Chain’s third compilation album, Hate Rock’n’Roll, which included the tracks ‘Snakedriver’ and ‘I’m In With The Out Crowd’. This compilation, released in September 1995, would also, although they didn’t know it at the time, be the band’s final release on Blanco Y Negro.

  ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’ launched a new chapter for the Mary Chain in that it marked the inclusion of the band’s newest member – Nick Sanderson. Nick locked in with The Jesus and Mary Chain more than most despite a shaky start to their relationship, although that undoubtedly had more to do with the circumstances around the Reids at the time. ‘We were on a tour after Lollapalooza, and Nick was back in the picture,’ Jim explains. ‘Everybody was tense. For some reason we still didn’t hit it off with Nick, but Nick, I didn’t realise, was nervous and trying to impress us. We hardly said two words to him. He bore a grudge about that for years. Sorry, Nick . . .

  ‘But Nick was one of the greatest drummers I’ve ever met. He wasn’t a great technical drummer, but it came from somewhere in his gut. It always sounded just right for the Mary Chain.’

  ‘Monti was great, but Nick was the most exciting drummer I’ve ever worked with,’ adds Ben Lurie. ‘I mean, he’d speed up incredibly during a song. There was one song on Munk
i, “Degenerate”, and he did this fantastic take, but it just got so fast. The engineer sent off the tapes to have it duplicated with somebody slowing it down as it went. It just brought it back on track.’ Whatever works.

  By this time Nick’s own group Earl Brutus was well underway. Combining influences such as The Fall, Kraftwerk and glam-rock, their live shows were something to behold, always highly visual, high-octane and loud. They remain one of Jim’s all-time favourite bands, and their gigs had plenty in common with the Mary Chain in terms of the atmosphere – there was always an underlying sensation that, as Jim says, ‘something bad might happen’.

  ‘Nick said, “We’re playing at the Café de Paris on Saturday.” I said, “What’s your band like?” And he said, “We wear pastel-blue safari suits and have our names written in neon in front of us.” They spent a fortune on these neon signs, then they all got drunk and broke them; it was great! But when he said “safari suits”, I thought, That sounds awful. That sounds bloody awful.

  ‘They’d get these weird gigs. They played at the Austrian embassy one time and there were people coming up to the stage trying to punch them – it was surreal. They were brilliant, they should have been bigger.’

  By the time ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’ hit the charts, reaching number 61, the Mary Chain were on their latest tour, which did at least guarantee them some time in the sun. The band initially flew to New Zealand to play the first date of the tour in Auckland, only to discover the gig had been called off. This gave the Mary Chain a chance to relax in warm, idyllic surroundings; an unusual way to start a tour.

  ‘Auckland is a beautiful city on the water,’ Ben explains. ‘We thought it would be nice to rent a little boat, so we set off down the road and pulled in at this little marina.

  ‘When I think about it, three guys wearing black, wandering out of some hired car, and Jim and William asking in strong Scottish accents if they could hire someone’s boat . . . it’s no wonder no one let us have one.’ Ordinarily, the Mary Chain weren’t adept at making the most of the sometimes heavenly locations they found themselves in. Perhaps angst and exhaustion made it harder to enjoy the beauty around them, perhaps it was because they assumed they would probably return, or, perhaps, as Ben Lurie suggests, they were ‘just idiots’, we can’t know for sure. A perfect example of this would be their trip to Hawaii: on a day off, the crew rented a car and explored the island, however, Jim and Ben went to the cinema and sat in the dark, watching a movie about the island instead.

  *

  The summer of 1995 would also see the Mary Chain crossing paths with Paul Weller yet again, this time at the Dessel Graspop Festival in Belgium. The Jesus and Mary Chain were headlining, but, as Ben recalls, ‘We got word that Paul Weller was having a hissy fit because he wanted to headline. I remember sitting at a table in catering next to his dad, a big ex-boxer, saying if he got his hands on the Mary Chain he was going to . . . whatever. I was sitting there thinking, I’m right here, dude! That’s how well known our faces are.’

  After some considerable bristling of egos, Bennie Brongers, the Mary Chain’s tour manager at the time (now managing Suede), discovered that whoever did headline would be going on very late, by which time the public transport taking people away from the festival site would have finished for the night. ‘He was of the opinion that most people were going to leave after the second to last act anyway,’ says Ben Lurie.

  When Bennie explained the situation to the Mary Chain, it was agreed that this was a solution that would ensure everyone had their way, supposedly. By the time Weller realised going on last at Dessel wasn’t maybe such a great idea, the Mary Chain would already have left. And so Weller was informed that the Mary Chain were graciously giving up their headline slot for him.

  ‘So, we did our show and were about to leave, then it started raining,’ Ben Lurie says. ‘Some rain dripped into the desk, which blew, and they had to delay Weller for a couple more hours.’ Sure enough, thanks to the rain and lack of public transport, everyone had left by the time Weller hit the stage. Be careful what you wish for.

  *

  Work slowly continued on the new album once the Mary Chain returned home and reconvened with engineers Alan Moulder and Dick Meaney at the Drugstore. The Mary Chain’s sixth album would, like Stoned & Dethroned, feature guest appearances from other artists, including Hope Sandoval (on the track ‘Perfume’, with William), Gallon Drunk’s Terry Edwards on trumpet, and the Reids’ younger sister and official peacemaker Linda, who would sing the song ‘Moe Tucker’ on a later session. Linda, also known as Sister Vanilla (so named by William because of her ice-cream-pale skin) had been present at the recording of most of her brothers’ previous albums, but this time she would also provide the title of the LP, Munki. The Reids wanted something ‘un-Mary Chain-like’, which meant no honey, no candy and no guns. The idea was also to have something ‘less dark, miserable, rain-drenched, all the things we’re usually seen as,’ Jim explained. Linda was going through a phase of being ‘obsessed with monkeys’, as she puts it, and the phonetic spelling gave it an odd, ambiguous quality.

  Terry Edwards, a well-known multi-instrumentalist from East London who began his professional career playing with The Higsons, had long been a fan of the Mary Chain. He’d even made an EP of cover versions of Jesus and Mary Chain songs in 1991, titled Terry Edwards Plays The Music Of Jim And William Reid. The EP quickly reached the ears of the Reids themselves thanks to Laurence Verfaillie passing the cassette on after Edwards sent a copy to Creation. The band approved, ordering a boxful to give to people they knew. Terry was an obvious choice when it came to looking for a horn player.

  The tracks Terry would play on were ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’ and the eerie ballad ‘Man On The Moon’, a silvery paean to alienation, both written by Jim. ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’ was a direct answer to William’s ‘I Hate Rock’n’Roll’, and while William was convinced this response was a deliberate dig, Jim simply felt that, after years living as rock stars (which, at times, probably wasn’t too bad), it was ‘worth showing the other side of the coin’. William’s furious swipe at the music industry got Jim thinking.

  ‘I thought, I love rock’n’roll, and I do love rock’n’roll – so does William. But to this day William still thinks I only wrote that song to piss him off. At the time, though, I might have given him that impression. “Yeah, you’re right. I did . . .” But I didn’t. Rock’n’roll changed our life.’

  When Terry Edwards first arrived at the Drugstore, he was, he admits, ‘uncharacteristically five minutes late’. This prompted everyone immediately to head to the pub. ‘Five-minute grace period,’ laughs Terry. ‘I got there and the pints had just started. That was my memory of first getting in there to play.’

  Once it was finally time to return, lubricated, to the studio, Jim explained to Terry what he wanted for ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’. It was just three notes. ‘It was funny,’ Ben Lurie remembers, ‘because Terry was ready to score out a horn section, but we said, “No, just these three notes.” That worked out well, so we brought him back for another day, another three notes. Probably the same notes but in a different order.’

  ‘It’s a very simple line,’ Terry adds. ‘They just wanted it to be played on a trumpet rather than a guitar. Sound-wise we thought, instead of having an artificial reverb, we’d play it in this concrete stairwell and quadruple-track it, so there are four trumpets playing single notes. “Man On The Moon” was, again, a very simple line, and it just has that great feel to it.’

  Another memory Terry has of the Drugstore was that, even while they were mid-session, Jim and William were taking Polaroids for use on the album artwork. As always they were considering the whole, and the visual side was vitally important to the Mary Chain.

  ‘They took a picture of me with my trumpet and screwed with the colours,’ Terry remembers. ‘At the time it wasn’t usual to have your photo taken while sitting on the settee, not even posed, just “bang”, that was that. These days I ma
ke sure I wear suits . . .’

  The initial sessions for Munki went as well as could be expected, and the Mary Chain managed to record a lot of material relatively quickly, although the tracks they had weren’t quite ready to be revealed to Blanco Y Negro. But the fact that the band had been playing well live, and were musically as match-fit as they’d ever been, meant the process of laying down the tracks they had chosen was quite straight-forward, and the record had an immediate ‘live’ feel.

  However, in direct contrast to the early fluency of the Munki sessions, Jim and William’s relationship was grinding to a halt. They could barely be in the same room as each other, and soon Jim and Ben were coming in to record in the day, while William took over the studio at night to work on his parts with Dick Meaney. It was with Meaney that William made the track ‘Nineteen666’, a song that seems to collapse into an accidentally perfect slumped position of sensual, wasted nonchalance. On Munki, perhaps more than ever, we hear the distinct personalities of the brothers in bold relief, their individual expression more defined as a result of their increased segregation from each other in the studio. One morning, Jim and Ben came into the studio to find the ceiling had been burnt – William had spilt whisky on some of the channels on the desk, and the resulting fire shot up to the ceiling. ‘Fortunately we had lots of channels,’ says Ben dryly.

  ‘I know William had stuff going on with Hope, but William just stopped showing up when we would,’ Ben Lurie continues. ‘It was like we were making two records at the same time. I know William sometimes felt that Jim and I were ganging up on him, but he wasn’t around. He was bringing this on himself. There were lots of little incidents. Silly stuff. You look back and think, God, what a bunch of children.’

  *

  The Reids’ sister Linda’s role in the history of the Mary Chain is far greater than many realise, particularly at this point in the band’s fractious story. The brothers had reached a near-stalemate, but Linda was, in Jim’s words, ‘the Kofi Annan of the Mary Chain’, which was no easy feat. She could receive a phone-call from either brother at any time of the day or night, and frequently did. As their sister, Linda couldn’t take sides, but ‘she tried to steer us in the right direction,’ Jim says.