As fraternal band combos go, the Reid brothers are up there with the Gibbs, Gallaghers and Greenwoods: their group the Jesus and Mary Chain have been going on and off for 40 years, still riding a wave of gorgeous fuzz. As they release new album Glasgow Eyes, they’ll be answering your questions.
Living on the dole and recording demos on a four-track bought with their father’s redundancy money, Jim and William Reid emerged from dim prospects in East Kilbride, Scotland, to record a body of rock music that blended the sweetness of 60s girl-group pop with the noise and clamour of punk and the Velvet Underground.
From 1984 they built a formidable live reputation, playing short but deafeningly intense gigs, even prompting the Sun to report worriedly on them. Members came and went, including Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie as drummer, but they vaulted from Alan McGee’s nascent Creation Records to a subsidiary of major label WEA, which released debut album Psychocandy in 1985, topped with what has become their signature song, Just Like Honey. Their commercial success grew and they even hit the Top 10 of the singles chart in 1987 with April Skies, but they didn’t dilute their irreverent and often splenetic songwriting for a mainstream audience – the BBC twice banned their singles due to confrontational or drug-referencing lyrics.
In the 90s they undertook legendary tours such as the quadruple-headliner Rollercoaster with Blur, Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine and a stint in the US travelling festival Lollapalooza (“thousands of Beavises and Buttheads”, William complained of crowds at the latter), and by the end of the decade they had released six albums in all. They were also at the end of their tether – “after each tour we wanted to kill each other, and after the final tour we tried,” Jim later said. The band split up in 1999.
They re-formed in 2007 – Scarlett Johansson was a guest performer at their Coachella comeback gig – and began touring and gradually writing again, resulting in 2017’s Damage and Joy. They’re now following it up with Glasgow Eyes, informed by jazz – “but don’t expect ‘the Mary Chain goes jazz’”, Jim has said – as well as the pulses of Suicide and Kraftwerk.
Ahead of its release on 8 March, a European tour later that month and a memoir published by White Rabbit Books later in the year, the brothers will look back at their career through Guardian readers’ questions – post them in the comments below, and their answers will be published on 26 January.
