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Dec 04, 2024 Web Exclusive By Dom Gourlay

2024 has been a busy, productive and rewarding year for The Jesus and Mary Chain. Having released their eighth LP Glasgow Eyes in March to a wealth of plaudits from both critics and fans alike, they’ve spent the ensuing nine months playing live either at festivals or touring around the world.

The band’s final leg of the tour starts this weekend in their native city of Glasgow (Friday 6th December), where they’ll play the first of eight UK shows before wrapping up in Liverpool on Monday 15th.

So, it seems an ideal time to catch up with founder member and vocalist Jim Reid to talk about the past twelve months, particularly off the back of Glasgow Eyes. While also looking ahead to the future for a band that’s as relevant now as they were forty years ago when debut single “Upside Down” landed unsuspectingly at the tail end of 1984 and with it, changed the musical landscape forever.

Dom Gourlay (Under the Radar): Its been another incredible year for The Jesus and Mary Chain with Glasgow Eyes coming out to a very positive reception from both fans and critics alike. Did you expect people to still be excited by a new Jesus and Mary Chain album in 2024?

Jim Reid: It’s always what you hope for when you do a record. The point of making a record is that you feel it is with us anyway. You’re not satisfied with what you’re hearing around you so make what you believe to be the ideal record. Obviously, every time you make a record you hope other people see it that way too. Everybody’s got different points of view and different tastes so we were quietly confident with this one. We’ve been disappointed over the years so you just get on with it and make the best record you can then hope for the best. That’s what we do.

It took seven years since its predecessor Damage and Joy for Glasgow Eyes to come out. Had a lot of the songs on the new record been hibernating in the background in between times?

To be honest, it would have come out sooner but Covid scuttled things a little bit. We actually started recording it before Covid kicked in. But it wasn’t just Covid – that should have only taken 6 months out of it. What ended up happening is we’d actually booked a Darklands tour that got rescheduled because of Covid. At the end of that Darklands tour, we just seemed to add on a lot of live shows. That took up two years, but we had intended to do this record which we’d started before Covid. The songs were just there, as now we’re looking at another record. We’ve got a whole bunch of songs written already.

Is there a projected timescale as to when the next record might come out?

I don’t like to do that as I remember telling people after Damage and Joy in 2017 there would be another new record next year, which as you say took seven years to see the light of day. So you know, we’ve got the songs there. William (Reid is talking about going into the studio at some point next year. Hopefully that will happen. Let’s just wait and see.

It’s probably fair to say some of the sounds on Glasgow Eyes were a marked departure from previous Jesus and Mary Chain records in that it was a lot more electronics based. Was that something you were conscious of at the time and is it a route the Jesus and Mary Chain will be looking to take in the future?

Generally, we don’t plan the sound of an album but with this we did say let’s get the Moogs out at the beginning of the recording. We usually just let a record take its own course but this one we decided would be a bit more electronically based. So, the drum machines and synthesizers were dusted down. The thing is, we’ve done that before. We’ve just never recorded an album like that. There’s been b-sides where we’ve actually recorded songs with no guitars on them and just synths instead. Because they were b-sides of singles they weren’t very high profile, so this might be the first album we’ve done like that but it’s not the first record we’ve made with that kind of attitude and these kinds of instruments.

Were there any other songs written and recorded around the same period as Glasgow Eyes that didn’t make it onto the album and if so, will they be revisited again in the future? Maybe even for the ninth album?

There were some. They got recorded but not mixed. We recorded more songs than we needed. It became a pattern right away with the songs that made the album so there’s another 2,3,4 maybe – I can’t remember the exact number – songs that are completely recorded but just unmixed. The one song that got recorded and mixed but not included was “Pop Seeds”, which came out as a single after the album. I can’t remember why that didn’t make the album but for whatever reason, it didn’t. “Pop Seeds” is more or less about the formation of the band, so we released that when the book came out. It’s about the six months before, then six months after the band first started so we thought it would be perfect to release it to coincide with the book.

Glasgow Eyes was your first release on Fuzz Club apart from last year’s Sunset 666 live LP. How did you first become involved with the label and what are they like to work with in comparison with a major label?

We just put the word out that we were looking for somebody to do it and our manager spoke to a bunch of people and Fuzz Club seemed to get it. They came back and said the right things. Having done Warners for decades and even with Damage and Joy, we’ve been down that street. The relationship we had with Warners for Damage and Joy was different from what it was in the 80s and 90s with the rest of the stuff. But it was still Warner Brothers, so we thought it might be better to get other people involved that were like music fans really rather than business men and women. We could tell that immediately. We’d go into Warner Brothers marketing meetings and start mentioning our reference points like the Fire Engines, Subway Sect and Velvet Underground to a room full of blank stares! Whereas Fuzz Club are definitely more like our kind of people. People with record collections for a start.

The current line-up of the band featuring Mark Crozier, Scott Van Ryper and Justin Welch alongside yourself and William seems to be one of the most stable Mary Chain line ups in recent years. Do you see yourselves working together well into the future?

Well to be honest, in the studio its just me and William then those guys come out with us live. In the future, who knows? But we find that’s the way it works best. Often there’s too many people in the studio. The fewer the better to be honest, because what ends up happening is you telling the bass player to “play this, play that!” so you end up thinking why don’t I just do it? That’s the way we did it in the 80s and 90s. It was just me and William, with the exception of Psychocandy and some of the stuff Ben Lurie played on in the 90s. The one consistent studio presence is me and William. For us it just works that way but who knows whether in the future we might need some help from someone on the outside. Whether that’s someone from the live set up or even someone not in the band. There’s no rules to these things,

Next year marks the 40th anniversary of your debut album Psychocandy. Will there be anything to commemorate it?

There isn’t. I think there should have been, but its too late to do it now because it would’ve had to be already booked. I was probably more keen. William just hates the idea so it’s not happening because of that really. We’re getting old now with these decade anniversaries so I don’t know if we’ll still be around for the next one! I think it would have been a good thing to do but it hasn’t happened. To be fair, we’ve been busy this year. Too busy to even get it together to do that. I hated the idea the last time around because I just didn’t think it would work. People kept badgering us saying we’ve got to do it because it’s a big deal. So we booked a studio and if it felt good and felt right – if we could put those songs across the way they ought to be heard then we’ll do it which is exactly how the 30th anniversary tour happened. It sounded great and we knew from our time in the studio it was going to work. So, I was converted then. William not so much although I think he enjoyed the tour. But I think he saw it as a one-time kind of thing.

Some of the songs from that era have featured in the live sets recently – “In A Hole”, “Taste Of Cindy” and “Just Like Honey” being three. With such an extensive body of work to choose from, how do you go about selecting what to play live? Are the setlists tailored to specific audiences or places?

There’s a core of songs that are always in there. Then there’s a few others we might throw in – the odd b-side like “Something I Can’t Have” for example. It’s just whatever we feel like playing at the time. Usually it’s the rest of the band who’ll say I’m sick of playing “April Skies”, let’s do one of these b-sides instead! That’s how it works. There are certain songs that just work live and others that don’t. That’s a simple fact. There’s some songs that are upbeat so you’ll play it thinking everyone’s going to love it and then they don’t. They end up just staring at you. It’s a tricky thing putting a good set together. Also it varies from territory to territory. Some things that may make sense in Leeds may not make sense in Taipei.

You’ve just come back from the US and the UK tour starts next week. Will the sets change much between those territories? How was it in the US? Are there audiences more receptive?

This is going to contradict what I said a few seconds ago but actually, the responses are pretty similar. All over the world even. Maybe slightly different in some places. The set we were playing in the US was more or less the same one we played in Europe. We booted out a couple of songs because we thought they weren’t getting the right response. Only one or two songs varied from gig to gig really. So, I think it will be pretty much the same as we’ve been doing with maybe one or two different ones along the way depending how the shows go.

Looking back through your entire career, is there anything that stands out as being your most memorable, enjoyable or even definitive moment of being in The Jesus and Mary Chain?

I tend to remember the things that are horrible! Things like Munki. That was like a nervous breakdown, but at the same time it was also one of our best records. Nobody bought it. It probably still is our least successful record to this day but I think unfairly, it came out at exactly the wrong time. We hated each other yet it doesn’t come across on the record that there were all these bad vibes. The Mary Chain were seen to be obsolete at that point in terms of pop culture. It sounds like a record made by people that were firing on all cylinders and all pulling in the same direction strangely enough because that’s not the way it was. That was an artistic high but also a low point in terms of the band’s ultimate progress because it ended the band at that time. That record doesn’t sound like the mood we were in at the time. A different record ought to have come out of that backdrop than the one that actually did. It does sound as if we still loved each other and had an audience. When the fact of the matter is, we hated each other at the time and had very few Mary Chain fans out there waiting for it to come out. That was all across the board. Even Geoff Travis, who had been our number one supporter in the music business right from the start. Even he got rid of us. We had no supporters at the time. It was the most dismally depressing point in our careers so far.

I guess the whole zeitgeist had changed at that point with the advent of Britpop and everything that surrounded it.

That was it. In the UK it was Britpop mania, and in the US it was mainly still grunge mania. For some reason the Mary Chain seemed to fall through the cracks of both those musical movements which we thought was totally unfair. We got those movements. We felt as if we’d contributed to the very existence of grunge and Britpop. But it wasn’t seen that way at the time.

I’d agree with that, particularly when reading or hearing how many artists from those eras cited The Jesus and Mary Chain as an influence. The band has a long lasting legacy that stretches back four decades and continues to grow.

That’s great to hear and that is what it was all about. We didn’t want to make music that was just purely entertainment. It wasn’t supposed to be played in the background as people were eating burgers and McDonalds. That’s not why we make music. We make music because we want people to be listening to it fifty years on from when we were making those records. We wanted other people to start bands because they heard what we did. Just like when we heard The Velvet Underground then we wanted to do it. We wanted to be part of that. It wasn’t just entertainment. It truly was art for art’s sake. As cliched as it sounds that’s what it was all about.

What advice would you give to a new band that’s just starting out?

I would tell them to not listen to old fucks like us! Do exactly what you think. Follow your instincts. Don’t listen to other people that tell you what you should be doing. Do what you know you should be doing. If you don’t feel that then you shouldn’t be in a band. We always felt as if we were the best band in the world. It sounds silly and it sounds naïve, but I think you have to feel that way. What is the point if you don’t think you’re better than everybody? We still feel like that. It depends on how you view music and what you think is valuable about music. Is it about how many records are sold? Because that’s not how we see it. We see it as the records we’ve made, we can stand by them now. There’s nothing embarrassing. It was just music that we made, purely for the sake of making better music than anybody else. At least from our point of view. If it’s all about units shifted, that’s hamburgers not music.

I think the whole ethos of music from how it’s made to how its consumed has changed dramatically over the four decades since The Jesus and Mary Chain started and now, and not necessarily for the better. Particularly with the advent of streaming and Spotify.

Yeah, although that’s a whole different can of worms. Spotify and all of that. I don’t understand how the music business can continue if people don’t get paid for what they do. You could spend hours talking about that.

Are there any new artists you’d recommend to Under the Radar and its readers?

I’ve become what I used to despise. When we started I used to hear older guys in bands say things like The Smiths, who’s that? And I’d think you’re a useless, old, irrelevant relic. I’ll never be like you, and here I am. You could probably name a dozen bands making great music at the moment and I probably won’t have heard any of them. In my defence, I would say that music is a cycle and if you’ve listened to it long enough you come back round to where it started. So, when I do listen to new bands – unfairly to the new bands – I tend to pick apart their influences. That bit’s like Joy Division, that bit’s like the Bunnymen, that bit’s like the Cocteau Twins but then I think people were probably doing that with the Mary Chain when we first started. That bit’s like the Stooges, the Velvets, and so on. But the fact of the matter is, I’d rather listen to Joy Division than some young kids who’ve just discovered Joy Division.

It goes back to what I was saying earlier about bands that have a long lasting legacy, including the Mary Chain, where kids are still being influenced to pick up instruments and form bands because of theirs and your music.

I hope there’s enough of them to keep this scene going, because rock music, guitar music, call it what you will, is dying on its arse. It needs new kids to come up that don’t give a fuck. That want to shake things up. I’d love to see that.

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