Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  ‘The band would have split up a long time before if it wasn’t for Linda’s UN peacemaking deals,’ continues Jim. ‘Poor Linda, she was always getting calls from me or William saying, “Do you know what the fucker’s done now?” I stopped doing that after a while because I realised it must be fucking hard for her. But when you’re wasted and you’re in this situation, it seems like life or death.’

  The music press would merrily grab on to the idea that ‘Jim nearly killed William’ during the making of Munki. It went perfectly with the ‘Brothers Grim’ tag the Reids had earned, and perhaps it wasn’t far from the truth. But ‘brothers are supposed to love and hate each other at the same time,’ as Jim said in an interview with Option in 1998. ‘We’re cooped up together in this space called The Jesus and Mary Chain. There’s about enough room for a midget, but there happens to be two non-midgets fighting for the same little piece of territory.’

  The two non-midgets were avoiding each other completely while still managing to record Munki at this point, and, although the tracks weren’t quite finished, Jeannette Lee was eager to hear how things were going. The Reids reluctantly agreed to let Jeannette hear the tracks at the studio. What happened next would sadly mark the end of the Mary Chain’s association with Blanco Y Negro.

  ‘This was awkward for me for many years,’ says Jeannette. ‘They played me some songs which I thought sounded great. Not radically different, but good. I came back and told Geoff, and then they sent us the tracks. But then Geoff told them that we didn’t like the songs, because collectively we decided we weren’t going to do it.’

  ‘William seemed to be in not that good a state,’ recalls Geoff. ‘Speaking personally, I don’t think Munki was a very good record, and so we said, “No, thank you.”’

  The news was a bombshell. Jeannette had enthused, genuinely, about the songs she’d heard in the studio, but when Geoff took a dislike to the album and the collective decision was made not to pick up the option, the Mary Chain felt they’d received something of a mixed message. ‘They felt betrayed,’ Jeannette recalls.

  Jim says: ‘Nobody [at the record company] seemed to be into Munki, and for the first time neither was Geoff Travis. Geoff was like, “I don’t get it, I don’t hear any singles.” I said, “What do you mean in particular?” He said, “The lyrics don’t make sense, for a start.” I was like, “What are you on about?” It shook us.’

  Rob Dickins, to his credit, stepped in and suggested the Mary Chain should go back to the studio and record some singles. William duly recorded the menacing ‘Cracking Up’, which, appropriately, detailed ‘relationships that were once there and then not’, Jim explained at the time, referring no doubt to the label’s sudden rug-pull and also William’s volatile romance with Hope Sandoval. ‘Mentally it’s been like Vietnam for William over the last couple of years,’ Jim added.

  The song, imbued with sinister confidence, casts a glowering eye back on what ‘they’ said of him (They said I was weak . . . One said I was a priest . . .) overriding all claims, good or bad, with the spectral but defiant affirmation I am a freak.

  For Jim’s part he decided to record the track that would become the energetic ‘Moe Tucker’, introducing his sister Linda as a singer for the first time, a typically spontaneous development that injects an insouciant freshness into the Mary Chain sound. Linda was still living at home in East Kilbride while studying English in Glasgow, but she came down to the studio when they were about to record the track. Originally titled ‘Suck My Coke’, Jim felt it was probably a good idea to choose a different title if he was going to hand it over to his kid sister to sing.

  Jim says: ‘I was supposed to sing it, but she was just there, so I said, “Do you want a go?” Then I thought the title was rather inappropriate, so she made up the title. “Maureen Tucker”. Perfect.’ Linda came up with the name when it became apparent that her no-frills, slightly childlike vocal was not dissimilar to that of Tucker’s own voice, as heard on Velvet Underground songs such as ‘I’m Sticking With You’.

  Although the brothers were recording separately, William wanted to watch Linda sing, but it wasn’t to be. ‘William called and asked if he and Hope could come,’ Linda says. ‘I was too nervous to sing in front of Hope, so I asked them not to.’

  Later that year, however, the Reids invited Linda to sing ‘Moe Tucker’ during their show at Benicassim in Spain. Not only did she agree, she felt totally at ease, even in front of 20,000 fans, and with her favourite band The Stone Roses watching from the wings.

  ‘I’d been watching William and Jim downing their whisky to take away their nerves,’ remembers Linda, ‘and I was sitting sipping my water, being so calm. They’d just laugh at me.’

  Munki was completed in the summer of 1997, but the label was still not happy. Rob Dickins told the Reids he would release it if they wanted him to, but warned Jim that ‘nobody’s into it in this building’. He followed this up by gently suggesting the Reids find someone else to put it out.

  It was a cruel blow after over a decade with the same label, but after years of feeling Warners were never 100 per cent behind them, they were ready to find someone passionate and likeminded; someone who would put as much energy into promoting Munki as they had making it. Someone like Alan McGee, perhaps.

  After a difficult period in the early 1990s, which saw Creation in debt and McGee on drugs, the label’s fortunes had turned around. After selling half of the company to Sony, Alan signed Oasis, and in 1995 he was hailed by NME as a ‘Godlike Genius’. Creation was now seen as one of the best independent labels of its time.

  The Mary Chain at this point were kicking their heels. William was using the downtime to record tracks of his own for his EP ‘Tired Of Fucking’, credited on release simply to ‘William’, before working on further songs for his side project, Lazycame. Jim and Ben continued jamming in the Drugstore, recording a handful of demos under the name TV69. But the Mary Chain/Creation story was about to come full circle.

  Jim, who had long since patched up his differences with McGee, didn’t approach Creation directly, perhaps concerned that McGee would feel obliged to take them on, but Munki reached his ears via mutual associates. Jim admits that, while he strongly believes Munki is ‘one of our best’, he wasn’t sure whether McGee had just stepped in to do the Mary Chain a favour. McGee’s recollection of what happened confirms otherwise.

  ‘Simon Esplen – the husband of Oasis’s marketing manager Emma Greengrass – gave me the Mary Chain record,’ McGee explains. ‘“Cracking Up” was on it. It was fucking great. Me and Bobby Gillespie were listening to it, and we looked at each other and Bobby said, “You’ve got to do it.” We phoned up the lawyer and signed them.’ The Mary Chain had come home.

  27

  Cracking Up

  We were like a weird married couple who had a baby called The Jesus and Mary Chain. By Munki, it was obvious we were going to be divorced.

  William Reid to Nick Hasted in Uncut

  It had been some time since the Mary Chain had emerged blinking into the live arena, so a run of promotional dates was arranged in the early months of 1998 to create a buzz around Munki in the US. The band’s New York date proved eventful from the off: the night before the show at The Fez, William was arrested for ‘abusing a policeman’, according to the NME. As the gig was about to start the following day (4 March) William merrily told the assembled crowd of journalists and record executives: ‘If anyone wants to suck my cock, come backstage afterwards.’ ‘That’ll be the shortest queue in living memory,’ muttered Jim. After briefly tearing a strip off the invited audience for probably never buying a record, William thundered into the opening riff of ‘Cracking Up’ and they were off.

  The following day, after a handful of interviews that William managed to avoid (Q magazine was informed that speaking to the press ‘fucked with his head’), the Mary Chain boarded the plane home.

  It was time for the Reids to consider bringing in some new blood for the forthcoming UK
tour – Ben Lurie had taken care of bass duties in the studio, but a new bass player was needed for the upcoming dates as Ben would be moving back to guitar. One name that lingered in the Mary Chain’s mental Rolodex was Lush’s Philip King, who had auditioned to play guitar with the group years earlier.

  Lush had recently split after the tragic suicide of their drummer Chris Acland in 1996, leaving the remaining band members in a state of shock and grief. Philip wasn’t sure he even wanted to play at all when the call from the Reids came. ‘It was awful,’ he says. ‘Initially I thought I didn’t want to do it, but then I thought, Come on, it’s the Mary Chain.’

  The first gig they played together was at Reading’s Alleycat as a warm-up before an industry gig at the Water Rats in King’s Cross. Philip recalls being unsettled by the occasional false starts during the shows. ‘There were, and still are today, quite a few songs where you get into it and someone makes a mistake, Jim goes, “Stop!” and you have to start again. I’m used to it now.’

  The Jesus and Mary Chain were plunged straight back into life on the road for the promotional tour for Munki in June 1998 to coincide with the album’s release that month. Touring was something William still hated, and considering that the previous two years had been spent recording and tinkering about in the Drugstore or at home, this would most likely have been something of a shock to the collective system. It is impressive that they managed to tour as much as they did that year, considering how fraught things were behind the scenes.

  It was soon time to go back to the US to play Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles’ Garage venue. This final date in LA would be marked by another William-insults-police-officer incident and a night in the cells. It was also notable because the Mary Chain played a bizarre gig at the Garage’s Club Sucker, hosted by Dr Vaginal Davis – a large, black, pre-op transgender woman who enhanced the Mary Chain’s set by mounting the stage in a tiny dress and announcing her intention to give them all blow-jobs. The show reportedly ended when the DJ played the 12-inch of the Ashford And Simpson pop hit ‘Solid (As A Rock)’, with the audience happily bellowing the words ‘Solid as my cock’ along with it. The Reids and co. didn’t stay to sign autographs that night.

  After returning to Europe and playing a selection of summer festivals including Roskilde and Glastonbury, the Mary Chain headed back to London to appear at the South Bank’s Meltdown festival alongside New York proto-punk duo Suicide. This Meltdown was curated by John Peel, an early supporter of the Mary Chain, and there were guest appearances from Bobby Gillespie (singing Hope Sandoval’s part on ‘Sometimes Always’), My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, Primal Scream’s Andrew Innes and Emma Anderson of Lush.

  Terry Edwards also joined the band for this live performance, but it was, as he recalls, ‘a bit of a splitting-up gig’, which concluded with William venting his spleen into the microphone long after the rest of the group had left the stage. Philip King says: ‘He started ranting about how John Peel never played them on the radio or something. It was kind of par for the course though.’

  By this point, Jim admits, the Reids’ relationship had completely disintegrated after several years of dwindling communication between the pair. If there was any hope of a reconciliation in the near future, the brothers would need to have some space from each other – not in the studio, not on the road, just living their own lives and trying to find their own equilibrium. The last thing they needed was to pack their suitcases, grab their passports and hit the road again, least of all for six weeks in America. But that, unfortunately, is exactly what they had committed to.

  ‘If someone had looked at it who gave a shit,’ says Jim, ‘they’d have said, “They need to not see each other for a year, then the band might be able to continue.” But no, we were booked on this tour. It started with a festival in San Diego, and we were driving to Los Angeles when we had a big row.’

  Ben Lurie remembers: ‘There’d been all sorts of fraught moments on the Munki tour. Everything had become magnified. You’ve only got certain ways to flex your muscles, so if that’s always turning up half an hour late when everyone’s waiting to leave the hotel, that’s one of the things you can do, and that irritates the shit out of everybody. Things like that develop.’

  The San Diego show had not gone well, and, in Ben Lurie’s opinion, it was William who had ‘screwed up’. The journey to LA was tense even by Mary Chain standards, but the atmosphere took a nose-dive when a very stoned William started insisting that he wanted to drive the van. ‘I thought, Maybe if I punched him he’d just shut the fuck up,’ Ben remembers. ‘I’m not really a punching kind of person, but I thought, Maybe it will just startle him.’

  Jim was sitting between Ben and William when the argument kicked off. He’d threatened to punch William himself, but then decided it wasn’t worth it and lay back down for a nap. ‘The next thing I know, Ben hit William and both of them started fighting on top of me,’ Jim says. ‘I was getting trampled.’

  At one point the tour manager pulled the van over to try to break up the scrap. ‘It was like a schoolteacher with naughty children,’ says Philip King. ‘I remember the lighting guy was actually on the phone after it all went off, trying to get another job.’

  This was the point at which, after so many years and so many fights, Jim knew it really was the end of the Mary Chain. This was at least something he and William weren’t going to argue about. William declared that the LA show at the House of Blues would be his final gig. ‘It was rather distressing,’ says Jim. ‘What I should have done then was have a good night’s sleep and then review the situation in the morning, but what I actually did was stay up all night snorting cocaine with Ben.’

  Jim and Ben lounged in the hotel’s hot tub downing champagne in a bid to numb their shock and anger and, to be fair, they didn’t believe they were actually going to play the gig the next day at all. By the time they realised it would be going ahead, they were ‘obliterated’ and, as a result, saw no point in stopping. When the band were due on stage, Jim admits, ‘I was not in any fit state to be in public. I remember going on and screaming at William and then thinking, Oh fuck. I’m on stage.’

  What happened next would go down in rock ’n’roll history. Philip King remembers: ‘We’d start a song, and then Jim would just start going, “Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby . . .” You’re playing and thinking, OK, so . . . when do we change for the chorus? William just had his head down. Every song we started collapsed.’

  William remembers yelling at Jim to ‘get his shit together’, feeling that, while he too was relatively wasted, he had the upper hand because at least he was playing the same song as the rest of the band.

  ‘William used to annoy Jim all the time onstage by tinkering with his guitar between songs,’ says Ben, ‘and I think Jim thought, I’m going to teach him a lesson, I’m going to annoy him. Anyway, it worked. Everyone just got so annoyed . . . I was looking down, and when I looked up everyone had just walked off stage.’

  ‘Jim was trying to pull the amp over,’ Philip adds. ‘He was swearing at Nick, and Nick was like, “Fuck off!” It was Nick and I who walked off first . . . When the fifth or sixth song collapsed, we just looked at each other . . . we’d had enough and walked off. Then everyone else left.’

  After severally storming into the dressing room, the band had never needed a drink more, but the fridge had been locked. Meanwhile, they watched the backstage CCTV screens in horror; ugly scenes were erupting in the audience. ‘There were people trying to pull down the curtains, throwing stuff,’ says Philip. ‘The worst bit was that we couldn’t get a drink, though.’

  The promoter was furious, and it was, as Jim recalls, the only Mary Chain show that ended with the audience having their money refunded. ‘And quite rightly so,’ he says. ‘It was totally non-musical. I’m just glad it was before the days when everything went on YouTube. That would have been fairly humiliating.’

  The Mary Chain were no more, but the reality was that they still
had tour dates to honour and stood to lose a fortune if they pulled out. They had no choice but to fulfil their commitments without William, although beyond that point, that was it. ‘There was never any thought of the band continuing,’ says Jim. ‘The band is me and my brother. It’s not me, it’s not my brother, it’s me and my brother.’

  William was understandably in shock and not wanting to be alone, he decided to travel to Seattle to be with his girlfriend (and future wife) Dawn. At William’s request, tour manager Laurie Small booked a plane ticket for the next day and, when he went to deliver the ticket to William’s hotel room, he asked him one last time whether he really wanted to leave. After a moment’s hesitation, William grabbed the ticket. No more Mary Chain.

  *

  William was so traumatised by the split that he could barely speak for days. He had obviously known the writing was on the wall – they all had – but he thought the band would complete the tour and then dwindle away, rather than having to make an announcement to the media. ‘It was a violent end, like somebody took a gun and shot the Mary Chain,’ he said. The brothers didn’t speak again for ‘a year, maybe more’, says Jim. ‘We completely went our separate ways.’

  The night after William left, the Mary Chain played their first date without him in a supper club in San Juan Capistrano. Poignantly, they had set up William’s amp just in case he turned up after all. The band’s set was cut short, as William sang “Cracking Up” and “I Hate Rock’n’Roll”, but, as the promoter readily reminded them the moment they left the stage, they were under contract to play for a certain amount of time. They had to go back on and play ‘Reverence’, extending it for fifteen minutes to fulfil their obligation.