Jesus and Mary Chain: 'A junkyard having a nervous breakdown."

Thrillingly raw and compelling, driven by Gillespie's floor tom and insistent squalls of feedback from William's guitar, In a Hole was confrontational, and quite unlike anything else that was on mainstream offer at the time. "Makes the Sex Pistols sound like Yes", reads one reaction posted on YouTube. 

The footage also gives an idea of how the band came over in concert. Many of their early gigs were brief and chaotic, and ended in violence and disorder. A London concert in March 1985 made the headlines in the music press as well as the mainstream press.

 "Last Friday night", the NME reported, "amid a battlefield of destroyed equipment, missiles and mass fighting at North London Poly, what should have been a premier concert by The Jesus and Mary Chain turned into an ugly display of violence".

The NME coverage of the band's North London Poly gig in March 1985 (Image: Newsquest)The band later issued a statement in which they denied responsibility for the disorder. "Friday night proved that people ae crying out for the first -division excitement that The Jesus and Mary Chain provide", it said. "In an abstract way the audience were not smashing up the hall, they were smashing pop music". The band were "putting excitement back into rock and roll and promoters will have to bear the consequences. This is truly art as terrorism".

The NME journalist, Neil Taylor, had recently described JAMC as the most exciting group he had seen since Joy Division. As he later told Q magazine: "I'd spent the last three years writing about English pop groups who were influenced by ideas that had this cuddly DIY outlook -... and then along came this band who had a real **** You attitude. You could tell the potential was larger".

Music review: The Jesus and Mary Chain

Bobby Gillespie, who prior to joining JAMC had formed his own band, Primal Scream, with his friend Jim Beattie, did much to bring the Mary Chain to the attention of another of his friends, Alan McGee, who had established Creation Records. Before becoming their drummer Gillespie also secured JAMC their first Glasgow gig, as a support act at Night Moves, in Sauchiehall Street, on June 19, 1884.

Gillespie brilliantly captures the atmosphere of that gig in his book, Tenement Kid. "They were banging into each other", he writes. "They were bouncing off the amps. It was just noise, carnage, like a junkyard having a nervous breakdown."

Bobby Gillespie (far left) with the Jesus and Mary Chain (Image: Unknown)"It was so sexual, as well", Gillespie adds. "The sight of these young, skinny guys dressed in rags banging into each other, all of them charged up with high-voltage electrical energy and nervous adrenaline. It was very homoerotic. Other Scottish bands ... did not possess this malevolent sexuality. [JAMC] gave off an unhinged aura of violent threat and sexual confusion".

He played with JAMC on a Creation package tour of Germany, and at numerous gigs in Britain. Live, he records, the band "were an unfriendly white-noise wall of sound that brought to mind images of broken glass and barbed wire".

His book recounts his involvement with the Jesus and Mary Chain- the Whistle Test appearance; the violence at such gigs as Camden's Electric Ballroom in the summer of 1985; a brief tour of Europe; the recording of the debut album; the anger in British society during that long decade of Thatcherism; the band's secret enjoyment of being so confrontational.

Jesus and Mary Chain, The Arches, Glasgow

Gillespie's last tour with the Mary Chain was in February 1986. Thereafter, his future lay with Primal Scream.

Psychocandy received admiring reviews. David Belcher, in the Glasgow Herald, described it as a "spitting, snarling, hissing, crackling vinyl assault" and, even if what JAMC did wasn't especially new to anyone who remembered the Velvet Underground, they were "a welcome emetic, a necessary purge for the body of pop, an organism grown smugly bloated on self-congratulation".

Belcher noted that there had been a series of "deliberately shambolic live gigs, some barely 20 minutes long, at which the main aim has seemed to be the provocation of the audience, with consequent mini-riots". A Glasgow gig in October "had them on stage behind a wall of bouncers, it was unclear whether for the protection of the band or of the crowd".

JAMC went on to release other albums - Darklands (which peaked at number five in the UK in 1987), Automatic (1989), Honey's Dead (1992), Stoned & Dethroned (1994), and Munki (1998). The Reid brothers went their own way in 1999 after getting into a much-publicised  shouting match at a curtailed gig in the House of Blues in Los Angeles the previous September.

JAMC reformed in 2007; an album, Damage and Joy, came out in 2017. A Live at Barrowland CD, recorded at the Glasgow venue in November 2014, was released in 2015. Another live album, Sunset 666, recorded at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018, came out last year.

Now comes a new studio album, Glasgow Eyes, which is released on March 8. A '40 Years 2024' tour, marking 40 years since the release of their debut single Upside Down, sees them play Edinburgh's Usher Hall on Wednesday, March 27. Jim Reid's memoir will be on sale in August.

In an interview in the newly-published March edition of Mojo, Jim, who now lives in Devon, says: "We love doing what we do. But we're so f****** lazy. We were back in the 80s, and we were in the 90s. It gets to a point where you just think, you have to get up off your a*** and do something".

Music review: The Jesus and Mary Chain, O2 ABC, Glasgow

Various parts of songs were recorded by Jim and, in his Arizona home, by William. As Mojo reports, a breakthrough came when the brothers began using Mogwai's Castle of Doom studio, in Finnieston, early last year.

"From about February onwards 'til about May", Jim tells the magazine's Ian Harrison, "it was pretty intensive. It had been a bit bitty, just sketches and stuff, and it wasn't until we hit Glasgow that it really started to feel like a record - like, Hey, it's the Mary Chain!"

The lead single, Jamcod (JAMC-O.D.) touches on the brothers' frequently stormy relationship and addresses the 15-minute-long show at LA's House of Blues, after which William had departed. 

"So many people ask about that night that the **** hit the fan and it all blew up that I just thought, Let's put it in a song and maybe they'll stop asking", Jim said.

Later in the interview, he observed: "If someone had told the twentysomething Reid brothers that they'd still be doing this in our sixties, I think they would have been ****** themselves laughing - actually, they might have jumped off a bridge.

"Now, it's much more acceptable to be an old dude in a rock 'n' roll band. And you know, I always had a thing that I would stop doing it if it felt undignified. I still enjoy it, people still come, and it still feels right to me.

Jesus and Mary Chain recording first album in 17 years

"Our mindset's still, what do we want to hear? What is it that nobody else is doing that we can do? That's what we did with Psychocandy and that's what we're still doing."

That debut album still gets discussed so often, and with good reason. As Jim told NME last November, " it’s a 1985 record, but we didn’t see it that way at all. At that time, we were listening to things like The Stooges and Suicide and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if like 10, 15, 20 years later, people are still listening to ‘Psychocandy’. That was the idea.

“It wasn’t a record for the time it was made in, it was kind of a blueprint for what was achievable, really", he added. "We kinda thought it’d be great if little malcontents were sitting in their bedrooms in 30 years with that as their starting point and thinking ‘let’s shake things up a bit’".

* The new edition of Mojo is now on sale. Bobby Gillespie's book Tenement Kid is available in paperback (White Rabbit Books, £9.99). Pre-orders are being taken at https://themarychain.com/ for the new JAMC album, which will be released on Fuzz Club.