It was one of the most volatile sibling relationships in music but scratch the surface of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim and William Reid and there is a closeness and trust that makes it work, the band’s biographer said yesterday.
Zoe Howe has written the biography of a cult Scottish band that she believes deserves far more praise and recognition than they get.
“People don’t really talk about Mary Chain in the way that they should,” she told an audience at the Edinburgh international book festival . “They don’t talk about them in the way they do The Clash or the Pistols. But when you scratch the surface you’ve got these really creative interesting people – really inventive with all these ideas and also really courageous.
At the heart of the band are two brothers from East Kilbride who fought and drank pretty much all the time.
Howe said it mattered a lot that she had their co-operation for the book Barbed Wire Kisses. Jim, who lives in Devon, said yes. William, who lives in Los Angeles, said no. “I think it was more a case that he couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t get the impression he was against it.”
It is Howe’s ninth rock biography and the reason for doing any of them, she said, was because she believed an artist had changed music or how we listen to music somehow – but had not received their due credit.
The Mary Chain were really shy people who were very determined, she said. “I just really admired how they broke through that paralysing shyness they had at times – it’s the frustration a lot of adolescents go through. They did what they wanted to do and stuck with it with great integrity.
“I couldn’t believe that anyone had written about them in earnest.”
Howe spent a long time interviewing the key players such as band members and Alan McGee whose label Creation Records signed the band. She also spent days and days spent in the British Library poring over back copies of Sounds, Melody Makers and NMEs.
They comes across as difficult people, but Howe said she was won over by Jim’s laconic humour, and by their insight into the band’s tumultuous past. “Not all of the brain cells were destroyed by alcohol.”
The book reveals the brothers shared a bedroom as teenagers. “There is a few years between them but they come over as twins. Very often They are incredibly close but with that closeness comes friction. They loved the same music, the same movies, they watched TV for hours and make collages on tape but there were tensions.
“People go why was there this tension but it’s obvious, they’re brothers, they’re on top of each other practically all of the time – too close for comfort maybe.
“It’s sibling rivalry and introduce large amounts of alcohol to that and it gets a bit sparky I suppose. At the base of that is a great deal of trust – they fight and probably always will fight but there’s trust that’s unbroken. That’s why it still works.”
Jesus and Mary Chain formed in 1983 and split up in 1999 but their recognisable psychedelic noise rock remains hugely influential. They have got back together periodically since then and the signs are that there will be an album of new material some time in the near future.
• This story was corrected on Sunday 10 August to correct the surname of the brothers.
