Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid Talks New Album, “Depressing” New Bands, and That Line About Killing Kurt Cobain

On March 24, the Jesus and Mary Chain will release their first new album since 1998’s Munki. It’s called Damage and Joy, and it was recorded with producer Youth (who also contributed bass). Along with core members Jim and William Reid, the album features the band’s touring drummer Brian Young and former Lush bassist Phil King. It’s now been confirmed that the album also features Sky Ferreira, Isobel Campbell (formerly of Belle & Sebastian), and the Reid brothers’ sister Linda.

So far, the band have shared two songs from the album: “Always Sad,” a duet with guest vocalist Bernadette Denning, and “Amputation,” which is a re-recording of Jim Reid’s solo track “Dead End Kids.” Another track, “All Things Pass,” appeared, in an earlier version (as “All Things Must Pass”) on the 2008 soundtrack to NBC’s “Heroes.” All told, seven of the album’s 14 songs have previously been released in other forms.

Jim Reid talked to Pitchfork over the phone earlier today about Ferreira’s role on the record, his relationship with his brother, a lyrical reference on the album to killing Kurt Cobain, why the album features so many re-recorded songs, and why the album’s artwork is a bowl of alphabet soup.

The first question on most people’s minds is, respectfully, what took so long?

Jim Reid: Several things, really. I suppose when the band got back together in 2007 I wasn’t totally sure that I wanted to get back in the studio again. Because my memories of the studio had been the recording of Munki. And that was a very painful record to make. I mean, I love the album. I think it didn’t suffer. But it was a low point for us in terms of our relationship—I think everybody’s aware of that—William and I.

I guess I just kept making excuses, reasons why not to, and I hadn’t realized how much time had passed. And then people kept just saying, “When’s this record ever gonna come out?” Suddenly I realized, “This is becoming a bit of a joke.” So I thought, let’s either make a record or tell people we’re not gonna make a record, one or the other. And I went to William and I said “I’m ready to do it now, so, let’s.” And that was a couple of years ago.

In 2015, you said you and William disagreed on things like where to record this and how to record it. How did you end up reconciling on that stuff?

There was a feeling of it’s kind of now or never. If we don’t do this record soon, I don’t think there’s gonna be a record. And I just thought, well, look, I want to have a record out. I don’t want to just go out and do the back catalog forever. And I thought, well, whatever it takes, let’s make it work. And I went into it with that attitude. I didn’t really sit down and talk to William about it but I think we both realized as well that if we were to go into the studio and screw it up over petty bickering that it would have been a massive opportunity that we’d blown. The kind of World War III in the studio that I had almost been having a nervous breakdown about didn’t materialize. Actually, we kind of bonded and got on quite well.

For Munki, I understand you and William recorded separately from each other. How did the process go this time? Where did you record it?

We recorded at various places but mostly at the producer Youth’s place in Spain. He has a studio in Spain. Well, it’s a house with a studio in it. We did a couple of tracks at his place in London just to see if the whole idea was gonna work. It did. So then we went to Spain to do most of it and that’s pretty much where it was recorded.

Were you and William both recording at the same time?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the exception of the fact that there was a producer involved it was pretty much the way it used to be in the early days. It was just me and Wiliam just getting on with it. And there was no arguing and it was all pretty productive. Like the old days. No matter whose song it was, anyone was free to pitch in any ideas or rearrange it. Basically it was all very open. If you had an idea, you didn’t feel you were stepping on anybody’s toes.

Photo by Steve Gullick

There were a number of female guest vocalists. Sky Ferreira, for example, appears on “Black and Blue.” How did you guys get in touch with her?

She came to see the band a couple of times in America a couple of years ago. It turns out she’s a fan. We were just getting the album together, and we realized there were a lot of duets. So we started asking our friends, ‘Well, who do you think we should get?’ And she had just done a vocal with Primal  Scream. So we had asked Bobby [Gillespie, once the Jesus and Mary Chain’s drummer in addition to singing with Primal Scream], who do you think we should get to sing on our record, and obviously he said Sky, so, of course, why not? So we asked, and she was keen, and she did a fine job.

Did she come out to Spain?

She was in Budapest doing a movie, and I just flew out there with the—well, not the tapes, because there are no tapes anymore—and had the files sent out there, so I just recorded her vocal and flew back with it.

The lyrics on that song are pretty intense: “I don’t have nothing to give, but if I could I’d give my heartbeat.”

It’s just one of those. It’s supposed to be kind of doomed lovers with nowhere to go. It’s a suicide pact kind of thing, we could die in the morning. I don’t really like to talk too much about lyrics because I like people to use a bit of their imagination. The reason I say that is that I’ve loved songs for years by other people and then I’ve read an interview where they told you what the song’s about and you think, ‘Oh god, that’s not what I thought it was about.’ There should be a bit of mystery about a song.

On the subject of guest vocalists, Isobel Campbell sings on two songs on the record.

We’d never met, we don’t know her, but we’re fans of her music and her voice, and we just thought she would be a perfect fit for the Mary Chain. All it takes is a phone call. We found out how to get in touch with her, called her up, and luckily she said she’d do it.

There’s also Bernadette Denning, and—

Bernadette Denning—most people say “who the hell is Bernadette Denning?” And the reason there’s no hits when you look on Google is that she’s not a professional singer. That’s William’s girlfriend. She’s never been in a band, she’s never sung on a record. So that’s why nobody knows who she is. But she has been touring with us the last couple of years, singing “Just Like Honey” with me at the end of the show.

How did it affect the process knowing that the Mary Chain is such a signpost to other bands nowadays, the way that maybe the Velvet Underground, the Stones, or the Beach Boys once were to you?

Sometimes people mention things like that to me, but it’s not all that apparent to me or William. And it doesn’t really matter to us. The way we make records now, or this record now, is for the same reason we’ve always made records. We just wanted to make a record that sounds great to us and if anybody else likes it, that’s fantastic, but if nobody else likes it then we’ll just have to deal with that. That’s how we make records. That’s how we made Psychocandy. We made a record that was the best possible record that we could think of at that time. And that’s how we’ve continued throughout our career, just make a record that sounds good to us, and hope for the best.

When you were starting to work on this, you said that maybe it was a “more mature” sound for the band. In what ways, do you think?

I’m not really sure. I mean, I’m not really sure that it is. [laughs] It’s just the Mary Chain, really. I mean, if it’s a more mature sound then it’s probably because we’re more mature people, I suppose. To me it just sounds like a continuation from where we left off. It’s not like we’ve come back sounding like a different band. It sounds unmistakably Mary Chain. It sounds as if Munki ended and this begins, it doesn’t sound that far removed, and that was intentional. We wanted to make it as close as we could make to a classic Mary Chain album. It’s up to the listener to decide whether we’ve succeeded.

Several of these songs you’ve put out either solo, with your sister’s project Sister Vanilla, or with your other project Freeheat. How did you make them make sense for the Mary Chain?

Well, those really should have been Mary Chain songs, and the Mary Chain really shouldn’t have broken up. Those songs were recorded at a time when I was rather the worse for wear. A lot of them came out sounding like demos, I think. I just didn’t want to waste those songs, and I wanted them to come out under the umbrella of the Mary Chain. I wanted those songs to be part of our set. They finally got the treatment they deserved as far as I’m concerned.

On the very first track, “Amputation,” you sing about feeling “like a rock’n’roll amputation.” What do you mean by that?

At the time the song was written, that’s the way it felt. It felt as if no one was interested in anything me or William had to say. It felt as though people seemed more interested in listening to bands that sounded like the Mary Chain, but nobody seemed to be more interested in the people [laughs] from the Mary Chain, you know? It felt like we were in exile. Rock’n’roll amputation, that’s exactly what I felt like. I was probably quite far into the bottle at that time. Maybe it was all in my head. I don’t know.

Do you have any favorites of the newer bands that sound like the Mary Chain?

I kind of don’t stay in tune with what’s going on. Any time I listen to what’s going on in the music scene, it kind of depresses me, to be honest with you. I don’t hear a lot that I like. And I figure that if the best band in the world is gonna come along, I will hear them eventually. I might get there after everybody else, but somebody will bring the best thing since sliced bread to my attention. But I can’t be bothered going to gigs or listening to radio or keeping up with what everybody’s up to at the moment. I’ve got thousands and thousands of albums, and I don’t need any more, to be honest.

Again, with lyrics, I think this is William’s song, but on “Simian Split,” I think people are going to notice: “I killed Kurt Cobain/I put the shot right through his brain.” Is that sort of calling back to “Reverence” from Honey’s Dead where you sing, “I wanna die just like JFK”?

It may sound silly, but it’s playful. It’s fiction. It’s total fiction. It’s not meant to be taken too seriously. It’s just a work of fiction, and people shouldn’t get too het up about it.

This feels like a callback too, to “Kill Surf City” [off 1987’s Darklands, where Reid sings, “I hate my honey and she hates me”], but on “Facing Up to the Facts”: “I hate my brother and he hates me.”

It’s just talking about one day thinking about how come it is that we’re still around after all these years. And that’s what it is. The friction between William and me is what’s kept the band going. In fact, it’s both been a blessing and a curse. Obviously it makes it difficult to have just a normal relationship with your brother. But it’s good for the band. There’s a lot of creative material that comes out of that fucked up relationship.

Truth be told, we love each other, but there are times that we actually hate each other. I guess that’s the same with all brothers. But what it is, if you chuck a couple of siblings in a band—a band can be a very claustrophobic environment, and if you’ve got two brothers, it can get brutal. Because brothers fight in a way that, if it’s just your friends, you’ll say a couple of things but you’ll back off. When it’s your brother, there’s no backing off. It was never particularly physically violent, but it was just the screaming and the things said were rather shocking to those that were around us that had to witness all that shit.

What’s the story behind the cover art for the album? The alphabet soup?

[Laughs] I just liked that alphabetic spaghetti as we call it in this country. I took that photo myself. That’s my bowl and my table and my house.

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