The Jesus and Mary Chain's Jim Reid: Our music is not tied to any time period

This year, legendary Scottish indie band The Jesus and Mary Chain have been touring again in support of the eighth studio album Glasgow Eyes. With the band set to play in Tallinn this August for the first time since 1989, Sander Varusk caught up with founding member Jim Reid.
Having started out making music a little over four decades ago, the fact that the Jesus and Mary Chain are still performing now might have surprised or even repulsed their younger selves, who used to say they would never be like The Rolling Stones.
This August, the band are set to return to Estonia for their first Tallinn dhow since 1989., when the Soviet Union was crumbling and festivals like Rock Summer provided Estonians glimpse of a Western future.
Does it surprise you, when I say 'welcome back to Tallinn'? Do you remember your first time here?
"I do remember, we were younger and more stupid in those days. I seem to remember I smashed up the gear on stage. I can't remember why, something was bothering me, maybe it was a terrible monitor mix or something. I smashed the monitors or something and I felt really bad about it afterwards. I think it was one of the guys out of (London-based Northern Ireland-emanating band – ed.) That Petrol Emotion, who said 'you know that probably represents about a year's wages to some of the people who just watched that show,' and I was like [puts hand to mouth], that was a dumb thing to do. You only get to be young and stupid once."
It was still the Soviet Union here in 1989. It must have been quite an incredulous experience watching a lot of these Estonian flags being waved while you were performing.
"I think that was by far the biggest audience we've ever played to, can't remember how much it was but I think it was like 250,000 or something like that. But the thing I remember was people just kind of frying sausages while we were playing. I was like 'This is weird! This is not your normal gig.' But it was good, except for the little tantrums. We had fun anyway."
It's all on video if you want to ever revisit...
"No, haha!"
...I did spot one huge solitary Jesus and Mary Chain flag...
"That was probably one of the roadies, going [waves flag]! No, I'm glad there was somebody out there who knew who we were."
How did you feel about Eastern Europe back then, was it still kind of new and exotic?
"It was, obviously you didn't get the opportunity to go to these places very often. People would go to Russia every now and again, but that would be people like Paul McCartney or Billy Joel. Getting to that part of the world was kind of a rarity. You know, it was interesting for us, it was interesting to see how things were in Soviet Estonia at that time."
By the way, your warm up act this August will be "Röövel Ööbik," who around that time were still a pretty young band and they were, without argument, the first Estonian indie band. Did you realize, coming here, that this place had never had these types of scenes or not much in the way of punk or indie etc.?
"You kind of got that impression that these people were seeing a lot of these things for the first time. There was some kind of pressure on your shoulders, because you're thinking how do you handle this? These people had no idea where this music comes from, so how do you connect with them? I was pretty nervous."
"To some degree, if you play in front of an audience, who've got no connections, who are not seeing just you for the first time, but that kind of music, you feel a bit stripped naked in a way. You don't have the layers and barriers, where people know 'this is cool or that's cool, you started then, this is the reason why you're doing it.' For the first time you have to put this across to people who've got nothing to hang it on. So I was nervous, thinking these people are going to think it's the emperor's new clothes or something."
For many youths here who saw you (in 1989 -ed.), it was an epiphany, which encouraged them to start their own band or work in the music business. Seeing your audiences these days, you don't have the issue of many of your contemporaries, whose crowds consist of mostly graying or balding heads, but a lot of young people are still coming to check you out.
"Luckily for us, a lot of younger bands coming up now seem to connect with The Mary Chain, mention us in interviews and then their fans will immediately go on YouTube and check out who are The Jesus and Mary Chain. I think the music still connects, still makes sense to people."
"Records that we made in the mid-eighties sound relevant to a lot of people these days – that's fantastic. That was always the idea with the Mary Chain – we strongly felt that when we made Psychocandy back in 1985, we weren't making that for just an audience then. We thought, that if people aren't listening to this record in 20, 30 years' time, then we've gone wrong, somehow. And thankfully we've been proven right, the music seems to jump decades, it's not anchored in the time period it was made in. I'm not putting anybody down here, but you get bands like Duran Duran, or whatever, and that's 80's music. It's tied to a time period, but with the Mary Chain, it was always our aim for it not to be the case."
Even from the outset?
"Yeah-yeah, people would go 'Do you think people will be listening to this music in five years?' [scoffs] We'd think – 25 years! Yeah, that's the point of it!"
Do you think some of that timelessness stems from the fact that, unlike a very eighties band like Duran Duran, you looked back to some of the sixties girl groups and Velvet Underground, something that already spans generations?
"Probably. Part of the fact was that we didn't buy into the eighties at all, musically or otherwise. The eighties were a horrible time to be given. At the time we'd be like 'why did the eighties have to be our time!?' Fucking horrible, you know. You got Margaret Thatcher, you've got terrible music, people making terrible films and writing terrible books – it seemed to be the wrong time period for us. In some ways, the Mary Chain were trying to fix that. We'd think, we'd make Psychocandy and everybody would go 'Yeah, we should be making music like this!' It was terribly naïve of us, but it made a difference to some people."
Do you think nowadays some young bands feel the same way about Brexit, Bo-Jo [Boris Johnson] and [Rishi] Sunak and a lot of manufactured pop music?
"I think in any decade you'll be getting a lot of people who don't get what's going on around them. There will be little malcontents that just don't like 21st century culture, 2024 doesn't suit them. They want to change their world, make it in their image basically. That's what we tried to do and I'm sure people are doing it now."
Let's go back to around the time you first visited Estonia. You then released Honey's Dead and in 1992 you had the Rollercoaster Tour. Looking back, a lot of fans of these bands would now go 'wow, that's a dream scenario' – you, My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr, Blur – back then, did you feel any kind of zeitgeist feel to it at all?
"We were aware that this was going to have a kind of big impact on the music scene. It was four bands that represented a time of music, if you know what I mean. Blur, at the time, seemed to be on the way down, I think that rescued their career. And then Valentines were shoegaze gods, Mary Chain indie rock, grunge was Dinosaur Jr – we knew it was going to have a big impact. We'd signed up to do (major U.S. Festival – ed.) Lollapalooza, and regretted that almost immediately. That was our little anti-Lollapalooza, that was our version if we were in charge of Lollapalooza. That was the idea behind it."
I remember, in an older interview, you mentioned that with Honey's Dead and the zeitgeist of British rock making it back to the charts with Oasis et al., you said it could have been you. Should this album have had more attention or accolades?
"I think that with every record we've made. It should have done better. Well, it didn't do badly. What happened with Mary Chain is we kind of plateaued out. With every album we seemed to be doing the same as the album before, until Munki and that's just when the bottom fell out and that was it. But the one record I always feel I should stand up for is Munki."
"Because by that time the Mary Chain was pretty well documented – what was going on with me and my brother [William Reid, guitarist]. At that time we couldn't stand the sight of each other. We were making this record and although we were bickering and arguing non-stop about anything, it didn't come across in the music and I think it's as good a record as any other – if not better – than any other Mary Chain record. But it came out to very little fanfare."
"Grunge was going on in America, Britpop was going on in the U.K., and we seemed to be excluded from both of these and we thought that was incredibly unfair. We thought a lot of those Britpop fans must have listened to the Mary Chain and got something from us. And the same with the grunge crowd, I thought Kurt Cobain and co. must have listened to the Mary Chain at some time. We thought, not only are we not included, we seemed to be the antithesis of what's going on. At that time we couldn't get arrested. We imploded. It went from bad to worse."
But coming back together, you felt you had some unfinished business?
"Well, coming back together is something I didn't think would ever happen. I mean everybody says this, you split up, we're not going down that road again. I remember at the time people said you're going to get back together and I said 'absolutely not!'"
"It's true [what] they say, time heals all wounds. Fast forward nine years later, it seemed kind of trivial, almost – 'why did we split up again?' There were some arguments, couldn't we have worked that out? We probably could. And I've said many times, if someone around the band, like management or something like that, would have been looking at what is going on, they would have said 'these guys, they need to get away from each other, maybe for six months, maybe a year,' and I'm sure that would have sorted these problems out.
"Now, what the management did do: they booked us on a fucking American tour that was supposed to last three months... we couldn't stand the sight of each other! And here we are, we're on a fucking tour bus, in America and we're just glaring at each other non-stop. The tour imploded days into the tour, he [William] left the band, left the tour. I finished the tour on my own, that was the end of the band."
Damage and Joy had a lot of new energy, did you set out for another album right after Damage and Joy or you'd just see how it goes?
"We were going to do an album right after Damage and Joy and we actually started recording Glasgow Eyes in 2019. We were in the studio, recorded about half a dozen songs and then Covid came and everything ground to a halt. And after Covid, we found that we have a backlog of touring that'd been postponed from the Covid period... this Darklands tour that was supposed to have happened, that was done in 2021 or something and we just kept touring and Fuzz Club [JAMC's current label] said 'you're supposed to be giving us an album, we made a deal, remember, [grinding teeth] where's our fucking album!?' We rushed back into the studio and started working on the record again. It would have been out sooner if it wasn't for Covid."
It's good you mentioned Munki in such a positive way, because when I first heard Glasgow Eyes, I immediately thought about Munki, because I think there's sort of a fun, erratic, free-flowing way to that album, unlike other albums, but similar to Munki. And there's a lot of self-referential irony. Is there an echo of Munki in Glasgow Eyes, the way you approached and recorded it?
"I never thought of it! But it could be. It sort of was made with a similar attitude, I suppose. By the time we got to Munki, there was a lot of 'fuck you' attitude about. Okay, nobody seems to regard us very highly anymore, so fuck it, we're just going to make this record, don't give a fuck. And we made the exact record that we felt was right at the time. Having said that, I think we thought this record is going to win people back on our side, but it didn't."
"So commercially it was a massive failure, but artistically it was a big win for us. If we'd have made a record trying to get back in everybody's good books, and it failed, you'd be standing there feeling like the biggest dicks on earth, selling yourselves out just to get an audience back on your side. If it doesn't work and you made a record you wanted to make, at least you're standing beside a great record, thinking, I can't help it if nobody likes it, we like it. With this record it was kind of similar, but it's always like that with the Mary Chain, we make records for ourselves. And with this one, we thought let's make an electronic record, let's get the Moogs out, that's what we said! And again, if people like it –who cares, as long as we like it."
Did you enjoy that slightly different electronic approach?
"Well, we've always loved that kind of music. We have used synths quite a lot in the past, just not so up front and usually they're on B-sides. It was great to try it from a different point of view this time."
You mentioned B-sides. Especially looking at [B-sides compilation] The Power Of Negative Thinking, your B-sides were always of great quality from Psychocandy to Munki – "Head" to "Rocket," tracks that very well, in my opinion, could have been on albums. Was there some quality control in the way that The Smiths had, where you cater to your fans and give them good B-sides, or did you just have that many tracks, you couldn't fit them all on an album?
"There were a couple of really early B-sides, where we didn't want to give songs away. There were one or two, I think there was a song called 'Cracked' and it was just one of the songs on Psychocandy called 'The Living End' just slowed down half speed with another vocal on top. And after we put it out we felt a bit guilty about it, you know this is shit really, you can't really do that. And we thought, let's not do that again."
"I used to love it when you used to get bands, you'd buy their records, turn the record over, play the song on the other side and you'd be thinking wow, that's as good as the A-side. I used to love that and I thought, let's be one of those bands. Let's be one of those bands that treats people with that kind of respect, where you're not just buying this good song and this piece of crap on the B-side. After that initial period, where we thought we don't want to give away good songs, we thought, fuck it, we can write good songs! Let's give them good quality songs no matter what side it's on. And that was the attitude we went into the future with."
Looking to the future, you had two great reunion albums and celebrated Psychocandy and Darklands. Are there any late anniversary plans for Automatic or Honey's Dead, or are you going straight onto new music?
"There's no plans to do any anniversary tours... we had looked at a 40th anniversary Mary Chain tour, to celebrate the fact that we'd been around 40 years, but we just never got around to it. We've got our eye on other projects, we want to do another album. There will be another album."
Well let's hope we don't have to wait another six years and then there's another Covid or other such calamity...
"Well, William's already talking about starting to record another album now – he's always more keen than I am. He writes more songs than I write and he wants to get them out there and to some degree he's waiting for me to catch up."
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The Jesus and Mary Chain will perform live at the Alexela Concert Hall in Tallinn on August 21.
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Editor: Neit-Eerik Nestor, Michael Cole