The history of rock ’n’ roll is littered with warnings: resist the urge to try cocaine; don’t eat peanut-butter, banana and bacon sandwiches (just look at Elvis); and, perhaps most importantly, don’t start a band with your brother. From Oasis and the Bee Gees to the Kinks, time has shown us, over and over again, that topping the charts isn’t conducive to sibling harmony. Spare your parents the headache and find a friend with a guitar instead.
The Jesus and Mary Chain’s William and Jim Reid managed to escape their humdrum existence in the Glaswegian overspill town of East Kilbride to make it big as shoegaze heroes in the 1980s. Following the release of their debut album, Psychocandy, in 1985, the Mary Chain were being touted as one of the most exciting bands in Britain by the music press. But their internal grievances threatened to destroy any semblance of success – now, the decades of fights that plagued their career have been collated in Never Understood, an autobiography penned by the Reid brothers with the ghostwriter Ben Thompson.
The book charts their journey from the dilapidated Glasgow tenement of their early childhood down to London in the mid-1980s. In the capital, they formed a fruitful but tempestuous working relationship with the “frizzy red-headed lunatic character” Alan McGee, of Creation Records, introduced to them by Bobby Gillespie (who played drums on Psychocandy before leaving to focus on Primal Scream). After severing ties with Creation because of creative differences (“as much as we loved the Ramones, we didn’t want to be like them and make the same record over and over”), the Mary Chain signed to Warner, releasing the majority of their albums on the major label until they returned to Creation in 1998 (with Munki).
Never Understood hits that rare sweet spot for a music memoir that dives deep into the songs while also managing to make the people and places involved come vividly to life. We learn about the tunes (“offensive, loud, screeching guitars” set against “bittersweet melodies”), the gigs (the NME reviewed their first because Jim told journalist David Quantick, “If you don’t, you’ll be pretending you were there in five years’ time”) and the influences (Bowie, Bolan, the Pistols), as well as the working-class upbringing that shaped them.
The Parkhead tenement where they lived before joining the hordes of aspirational families shifting off to East Kilbride was a teeming mass of communal toilets – the users cursed with a “nasty situation going on digestively” caused by eating the same old “chips every night” – and drunken men, set against the sounds (and sectarian violence) of the Ibrox stadium round the corner. It’s a portrait of Scottish struggle straight from the pages of Shuggie Bain; William describes being poor as “like a real cold bath – nobody wants it, but in some ways it’s good for you. It brings all your senses together.”
In other words, the Mary Chain couldn’t really afford to fail. Throughout the book, both brothers seem terrified – even now, with what one imagines to be a degree of financial security – of being forced to return to East Kilbride to accept their destinies as workers on the sort of monotonous factory lines once occupied by their father, uncles or grandparents. The underlying threat that, one day, all of this – rock ’n’ roll, money, fame – could be ripped away forms the basis of the book, and goes some way to explaining why both men still come across on the page like shy, spotty teenage boys trying to figure out who they really are.
The book’s greatest strength is the brothers’ unflinching discussion of their background and tireless fight to “make it” – a fight that has, depressingly, become even more difficult for today’s artists.
In the 1980s, a working-class band such as the Mary Chain could sign on the dole and spend their days messing around making music – their paltry income more than enough to cover cheap rent until they made it onto Top of the Pops or the cover of the NME. Could that really happen now?
Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain is published by White Rabbit at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
2024-07-27T10:02:02Z dg43tfdfdgfd