The Reid brothers, Jim and William, founders of influential Scottish band The Jesus And Mary Chain, were in conversation with Nicola Meighan about their new memoir, Never Understood, which they said they hadn’t seen in its final form until half an hour earlier.
Jim said they were never receptive to the idea of a book, even though it had been suggested to them before, but Ben Thompson put this book together from interviews with each of them separately—a lot of interviews, they think enough for another book. William said it was hard for him to look back, even calling it “unnatural”, but he was talked into it—or as he put it, “everybody bullied me.”
Their family moved from a Glasgow tenement to East Kilbride when they were children. Jim, the younger of the brothers by three years, spoke nostalgically about how he was affected by their former home being pulled down, so even the street isn’t there any more, even though it was “a shit-hole”. William spoke less fondly of it, remembering having to share a toilet with three other families, whereas in East Kilbride, they had an indoor toilet to themselves. As they left Glasgow, the neighbours were out on the street shouting “you snobby bastards!”
They had no way of playing music at home until they got a Dansette. Jim remembered it as the family record player, but William was insistent that it was given to him as a birthday present but he was persuaded to put it in the living room for everyone to use. When it arrived, they went around the neighbours to borrow a record to play on it, and came back with “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” by Middle of the Road, for which Jim still has a soft spot.
There was a boy at school who was very badly bullied but who always bought the coolest records: Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Frank Zappa. Glam rock was the first thing that really engaged them, then punk came along, which seemed accessible and easy to make, though it wasn’t. This is when they both talked about starting a band, but at the time they meant two different bands as they thought they wouldn’t have been able to agree on anything.
Finally, they realised that they had been talking about the same band, but they still hadn’t decided who would do what. They tossed a coin to decide who would sing; Jim lost, and so became the singer. William said he wrote his first song in 1982, but then they bought the fuzz pedal that gave them their distinctive early sound—he said he plugged it in and it started playing “Psychocandy”.
Their father was made redundant and gave them his £300 redundancy money, expecting them to spend it on something useful like driving lessons, but instead they bought a Portastudio. At the time he went mad at them, but he later said he understood that they had had a plan all along.
It was Bobby Gillespie, who became their drummer for a while before later founding and fronting Primal Scream, who first made them think they were onto something, and it was through him that they got a gig in London when they couldn’t get one anywhere in Glasgow. They also bombarded Billy Sloan at Radio Clyde with letters, supposedly from different people, some praising them and some condemning them, fooling him into giving them airplay.
When the band split, their mother was upset that the brothers weren’t talking to one another and tried to find excuses to get them in the same room together, while their sister Linda was stuck in the middle, hearing from both of them the terrible things that the other had done.
In the 1980s, they hated what they heard coming out of the radio and so they started a band to try to fix it. The same applies now, so they are still touring and releasing new music.
Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain is officially released on 29 August 2024, but available now from the Book Festival shop.