William & Jim Reid – Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain

William & Jim Reid – Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain

“The actual sound of the band was something me and William didn’t even need to talk about very much. We were both very much into sixties garage rock but also sixties pop, and we wondered why no one had ever previously tried to put the most offensive, loud, screeching guitars over the bittersweet melodies of The Shangri-Las. We couldn’t understand why no one had done that before, but it gave us our opportunity – the thought was there between us that this was a gap in the market, but we’d need the right technology to deliver on our vision.”

In the mid-eighties, The Jesus and Mary Chain were indie music’s ultimate rebels. Dressed all in black, the Mary Chain were the brainchild of two truculent working class Scottish kids from East Kilbride. With their unique vision of rock and roll, they were here to disrupt the stranglehold of manufactured 80s pop on the charts by combining 60s pop melodies with screeching guitar feedback. Their shows had a reputation for descending into violence, they had a contrary punk attitude in interviews, and their manager saw himself as a Malcolm McLaren-style Svengali. Somehow William and Jim Reid, the introverted misfits at the heart of the band, managed to reshape the landscape of alternative and indie music, releasing classic albums such as Psychocandy (1985), Automatic (1989), Honey’s Dead (1992) and Stoned & Dethroned (1994) before the notoriously fractious brothers acrimoniously split up the band in 1999.

The band unexpectedly reformed in 2007, William and Jim seemingly having buried the hatchet, and have since played multiple tours and released two great new albums.

Now, William and Jim Reid have written the autobiography of their beloved band. Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain (2007) follows the Reid brothers through their childhoods in Glasgow and East Kilbride, their joined love of music, the rise and fall of the Mary Chain against their personal disputes and struggles with drugs and alcohol, all the way through to their triumphant reunion. It’s a brilliant and entertaining book that chronicles one of the key bands of the 80s and 90s and allows the Reid brothers to bring their own perspective to their much-mythologised history.

Longtime fans may well wonder how indie rock’s original feuding brothers would manage to write a book together.

The answer, rather brilliantly, is to give both William and Jim their own voices, interspersing the two brothers’ perspective throughout the book to allow both of them to balance out each other, to give contrasting views when they need to. It also makes the whole book feel like an extended conversation between the two of them, which makes it very readable.

From the beginning we get a sense of both William, the older brother and the Mary Chain’s guitar genius, and Jim Reid , the younger brother and the band’s unlikely vocalist, as two people who are very close to each other even when they are fighting. The book captures their distinct voices and personalities beautifully. At its heart, this is the story of two introverted weirdo brothers growing up in poverty, being transformed by the power of music, escaping, growing apart and eventually growing back together again. William and Jim’s stories of growing up in working class Scotland during the 70s and 80s are perhaps the most moving and vividly drawn sequences of the book, it gives you a real sense of where they came from and how it felt to live during that time. 

The career of the Mary Chain has been much covered and mythologized,

Not least in David Cavanagh’s wonderful book on Creation Records, My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize (2001), and in Alan McGee’s two books Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label (2013) and How To Run An Indie Label (2023). But it was a fascinating time for indie music, and is worth revisiting here to hear it from William and Jim’s perspective.

We learn that much of their legendary confrontational attitude stemmed from their shyness and reluctance at having to speak to strangers. The Reid brothers are quick to point out how much of their bad reputation was manufactured by McGee who, on his McLaren trip, was fanning the flames of controversy wherever he could, whereas the band themselves soon got tired of having to fight their way out of their own gigs and having their reputation for violence overshadow their music. 

Many have portrayed the Reid brothers as kind of pop idiot-savants

who almost accidentally stumbled across the sound that would make them famous. But William and Jim reveal the incredible amount of care and thought that went into their music making. From their early days scheming in their bedroom, they always had a really strong idea of what they wanted to do with their music, and while coming across their guitars and pedals involved a fair bit of luck, they realized very quickly when they had the necessary tools to achieve their vision.

And listening to their records, their remarkable debut single ‘Upside Down’ (1984) which propelled Creation into the big league shows their aesthetic fully formed, as does their debut album Psychocandy, still a perfect mesh of 60s rebel pop tunes and earsplitting guitar feedback almost forty years later. If the Reid brothers’ business decisions occasionally seem naïve – leaving Creation for Warners and spending their most productive years battling big record company expectations when they would probably have been better nurtured by indie label Rough Trade – it’s worth remembering these were the early days of indie labels competing with major labels, and the rules hadn’t quite been written yet. 

The seeds of the band’s messy dissolution are sown early –

Jim feels the need to drink in order to combat his crippling shyness so that he can be the band’s frontman, leading him down the route of alcohol addiction and cocaine dependency, whilst William seeks solace in weed. Ongoing conflict with the record company and a general feeling of being underappreciated bring tensions to a head. By the time the band collapses in acrimony in 1999, neither brother is speaking to each other. It would be easy for the story to simply have ended in tragedy right there, but thanks to Linda Reid, William and Jim’s beloved younger sister, the brothers are able to eventually overcome their differences and forgive each other, reforming and playing to appreciative crowds, making music together again, and getting to see their legacy appreciated by new generations of fans.

Throughout it all, both William and Jim show an impressively mature attitude – both brothers are able to admit when they were wrong and where they made mistakes. They both talk about embarrassing situations they wish they had played differently, reflect on the things they regret, and display a genuine sense of having moved on and grown up about a lot of things. Thus we get to enjoy the Mary Chain’s youthful chaos through the prism of their newfound maturity, making the book entertaining and redemptive in equal measure. It’s hard to imagine any fan of the band not wanting to read this delightful autobiography, and it’s lovely to see both William and Jim coming to terms with their own relationship with each other and to their eventual legacy in alternative music. 

William & Jim Reid – Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain

For 5 years after they’d swapped sought-after apprenticeships for life on the dole, brothers William and Jim Reid sat up till the early hours in the front room of their parents’ East Kilbride council house, plotting their path to world domination over endless cups of tea, with the music turned down low so as not to wake their sleeping sister.

They knew they couldn’t play in the same band because they’d argue too much, so they’d describe their dream ensembles to each other until finally they realised that these two perfect bands were actually the same band, and the name of that band was The Jesus and Mary Chain.

The rest was not silence, and picking up those conversations again more than 40 years later, William and Jim tell the full story of one of Britain’s greatest guitar bands for the very first time – a wildly funny and improbably moving chronicle of brotherly strife, feedback, riots, drug and alcohol addiction, eternal outsiders and extreme shyness, that also somehow manages to be a love letter to the Scottish working-class family.