Forty years after forming The Jesus and Mary Chain, Scottish brothers Jim and William Reid have learned how to recover from the “horrendous arguments” that tore their band apart in the ’90s.
On their new album Glasgow Eyes, the alternative rockers – now in their 60s – prove they can still make powerful music together, too.
The Jesus and Mary Chain will perform at Auckland venue The Powerstation on 30 July.
Glasgow Eyes isn’t especially a tribute to the Scottish city the Reid brothers grew up in, Jim Reid tells Charlotte Ryan, but nostalgia does infuse the record.
As a kid, Glasgow felt like a “little outpost” where being in a real band seemed like an impossible achievement.
While he and William were music lovers, Reid said the brothers were not “natural musicians”.
Then in the 1970s when punk stormed in – “a bunch of snot-nosed kids who looked and sounded like us” – their fantasy of musical success became a possibility and then a reality.
suppose we kind of expected it, but at the same time when it actually happened we were like ‘Geez, we’re kind of famous. That’s weird.'”
These days, Reid enjoys an anonymous life in a little coastal town in Devon.
“I’m just some guy that lives in a house down the road a bit and nobody bothers me.”
Before making Glasgow Eyes, he and William questioned whether it was “undignified” for them to still be making and performing music: “Isn’t The Jesus and Mary Chain kind of a young person’s thing?”
Yet 39 years on from their explosive debut album Psychocandy (1985), Reid said heading into rehearsals and climbing on stage still feels great.
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