Sibling relationships can be difficult to navigate in bands, as evinced by numerous bands, including your own. How do you balance your relationship as brothers and bandmates? somecandytalking
Jim Reid (vocals, guitar): If I’ve learned anything, it’s how to deal with my brother, and he’s the same. We used to have invisible lines we didn’t cross, but in the 90s we couldn’t stand each other. I’m eternally grateful that most of the incidents were before smartphones, so they’re not on YouTube. One night when we were DJing, we ended up rolling around on the floor, fighting, looking up to people’s horrified expressions.
William Reid (vocals, guitar): At the [Los Angeles] House of Blues gig in 1998, Jim got so drunk he couldn’t remember the songs. I kicked him off stage, tried to be the singer, but didn’t know the words. It finished the band for nine years, but we haven’t had a fight for a long time. It goes smoothly if there’s no alcohol involved. We’re mature now. You don’t want to be arguing all the time.
Jim: Through not having the band, the relationship healed. The song Jamcod on the new album [Glasgow Eyes] is about that night, but now we both know what not to say.
Jim once said: “After each tour, we wanted to kill each other, and after the final tour, we tried.” Who’d have killed who? Zaropans
William: I’d have killed Jim, because I’m bigger.
Jim: I’ve got to say I’d have killed William. Like Goldfinger was going to kill James Bond, strapped to a table, with lasers.
At 15, I took my vinyl copy of Psychocandy back to the record shop because I thought there was something wrong with it. How would you describe the sound of that record? TopTramp
Jim: Psychocandy was us trying to fix everything that was wrong with the music scene, so if it sounded the opposite of the diarrhoea that was pumping out of the radio at the time, job done.
I remember a song you did with Shane MacGowan, God Help Me. Did you guys get on? stevelittlefingers
William: I used to see Shane around town. He was always steaming drunk and would always say: “Jim! Jim! You’re a fucking genius!” I’d go: “I’m William,” but it happened so often that I let him call me Jim. We were big Pogues fans. I’d written the song about myself, but thought it would sound good with Shane singing. It wasn’t easy getting that man in the studio. He was doing heroin as well, then, but eventually we did and it was fantastic.
Jim: In a fair world, Shane would have put the bottle down in his 40s and lived into his 90s, but he was great – everything you would have wanted him to be. He once sang that song with us at Madame JoJo’s in Soho. We were really nervous and got slaughtered, then he showed up stone-cold sober and looked at us like we were degenerates. The gig was brilliant; he sang like he was back in the Nipple Erectors. Pure punk rock.
Did you agree with Alan McGee [the boss of the band’s label, Creation Records] in the 1980s when he said you were the best thing since the Sex Pistols? Galdove19
William: It’s kinda easy to believe when someone’s telling you you’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened, but then you’d hear him say the same thing to [early Creation act] the Legend. Alan called everything “genius”. A chocolate bar could be genius. The hyperbole got us positive attention and then a lot of negative. Jim was beaten up twice and people came to gigs just to throw bottles at us. So we told McGee to tone it down.
Jim: I think it was NME or Sounds that started it, but McGee – and I’m sure he’d admit this – was going through his Malcolm McLaren phase. As soon as I read that, I thought: “That’s dangerous stuff.” I got the shit kicked out of me at a Nick Cave gig. The word “hype” used to get on my nerves, so I’m not sure that all publicity is good publicity. In the end, we went away for six months. We thought all the riots and violence at our gigs would die down and, by the time we came back, it had.
The lyrics to the Shins’Mildenhall by the Shins recount James Mercer’s introduction to alternative music: “A kid in class passed me a tape, a band called the Jesus and the Mary Chain.” How were you turned on to music and which band or artist was your first love? VerulamiumParkRanger
Jim: William got a Dansette for his birthday and all these Beatles and Bob Dylan records. The Beatles got me into music. Then it was a voyage of discovery from glam rock to punk. It transported us out of East Kilbride into a make-believe world. With bands like Roxy Music, you’d think: “Never in a million years could we do that,” but then I spent all night trying to play the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop and thought: “Fuck, I’m a musician!”
William: I had a dirty and dangerous job at a sheet-metal factory in Glasgow. An interview with Johnny Rotten in the Daily Record, where he was talking about not working in a dead-end job, really affected me. Within a year, I quit my job. Before I heard the Ramones, I was playing Coming Round the Mountain from Bert Weedon “play in a day” [guitar tutorial] books.
The sound of Just Like Honey during the end scene of 2003’s Lost in Translation is one of the greatest uses of music in film. How much involvement did you have in its inclusion and were you pleased with the end result? VerulamiumParkRanger
William: The only involvement we had was saying “yes”. We were going to say no, because the offer was so low, but then someone I knew who was working on the film told me that [writer/director] Sofia Coppola had no money, but had set her heart on it and would be devastated if we said no.
Jim: So many times our songs would be used in films and they’d be playing for, like, eight seconds coming out of a radio. So to have the climactic scene in such a great film was brilliant. It earned us a lot of new fans.
What’s the best heckle you’ve ever had? Area3AAM
William: Heckles don’t tend to be witty. It tends to be: “Fuck you.”
Jim: Once, in New York, there was this guy in combat fatigues, dressed like Travis Bickle, staring right at me and making cut-throat gestures. I thought: “If he gets up, I’m done for.” Then he tried to climb on stage. It took four security guys to hold him down and throw him out.
Did the East Kilbride discotheque Centre Point rival the Haçienda in Manchester? slum-pop
William: When we lived there, the discotheque was the Olympia. I must say the Haçienda was a lot less violent. I still have a click in my jaw from where some bloke kicked me in the Olympia in 1975.
Is it true that you provided the shouts of “Guilty!” on the Erasure song Drama? YorksJambo
William: It is. We were in the same studios and their producer wanted a bunch of people to shout: “Guilty!” It was funny, because their singer, Andy Bell, had given our latest record a pasting in a music paper, so when we walked in he turned as white as a sheet. But he had no reason to fear us. Despite our reputation, we’re gentle people – tea and toast guys.
The first gig I ever went to was on the Psychocandy tour at the Royal Court in Liverpool. You played for 29 minutes. Do you play for longer now – and can I have my money back? butchoaks
William: No refunds, sorry! Nowadays, we play for about an hour and a half, which is about right. We’ve got a lot more songs.
Jim: I get bored watching bands for more than half an hour. Even if they dug the Beatles up or whatever. In that golden period, where we could do what we wanted, we even did 20-minute shows. You realise people want to hear the songs they’ve paid to hear, but I’d still do 29 minutes if we could get away with it!
What would the nihilistic, riot-inducing JAMC make of you still doing it now? MoreSheepThanHumans
William: I think we’d be proud, because when we started interviewers would ask: “What will you be doing in five years?” Everyone thought we’d be a flash in the pan. After 40 years, I think we realise that it will only stop when we stop it.
Jim: The people that we were then, we still are. I think we’d be pretty comfortable with what we’ve become, but astonished to find we’re still doing it. But if you’re doing it because you love it and you’ve made a new record you think is as good as any that you’ve made, then why the fuck not?
• Glasgow Eyes is released on 22 March. The band’s UK tour starts on the same day at Albert Hall, Manchester
