Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain on New Music and Playing With His Brother

Jim Reid admittedly doesn’t spend a lot of time listening to his own music, but thankfully there’s not much from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s catalogue that makes him cringe when he does hear it. The singer of the legendary Scottish alternative band says he can listen to anything from the band’s seven albums, eight compilations, six EPs and nearly two dozen singles and remember the exact reasoning that went into each song.

“They all sound good to me now,” Reid says. “The idea when you make a record is you hope it’s still going to make sense in ten, twenty, thirty years' time. … There’s nothing I listen to now that I think, ‘Ooh, what the fuck were we thinking?’”

The Jesus and Mary Chain — its core members are Reid and his brother William — play the Paramount Theatre on Sunday, October 23, with Mary Chain member and solo artist Scott Von Ryper opening. Reid expects the Jesus and Mary Chain will play a selection of songs spanning the band’s discography.



“We're making a new record, but it’s too soon to play those live,” Reid says. “Personally, I hate it when I go see bands and they play songs I’ve never heard before. When I go see my favorite bands, I want to hear my favorite songs.”

Reid, who now lives in Devon, in southwest England, says his favorite Mary Chain song can change over time, but he considers some songs that were released as b-sides in the 1990s and never made it onto albums to be at the top of his list.

“I think in the ’90s, a lot of the b-sides we were recording were better than b-sides,” Reid says. “Me and William weren’t communicating really well. I think had we been, we would have been saying these songs were too good to be b-sides, that it should be an album itself.”

The band’s first two albums, Psychocandy and Darklands, often receive the most critical and fan attention — both are hailed as classics of 1980s alternative music — but Reid has always thought that 1998’s Munki, the band’s sixth full-length, qualifies as some of the Mary Chain’s strongest work, even if no one bought it when it came out.

“Nobody gave a fuck at the time,” he recalls. “It seems like the Mary Chain were yesterday’s news. I think that was one of best albums we made, if not the best. But that’s the way the cookie crumbled.”

The record had a troubled production. The Reid brothers were barely on speaking terms at the time, and Jim Reid remembers the era as being more like two bands — the Jim Mary Chain and the William Mary Chain.

“We started making the record together, but that didn’t last long,” he says. “What happened was, he went in to record his songs with the band and then left, and then I went in and recorded my songs with the band.”

He says that the album was recorded quickly, but the finished product doesn’t sound that way to him. The odd production technique of separated brothers also didn’t seem to affect the final results.

“It was a very depressing time to be in the band,” he recalls. “But the music didn’t suffer at all. The music sounds as good as any other record. And I don’t know why that would be, because it was fucking depressing, and we couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”

The band called it quits shortly after the release of the album.

“We broke up rather messily on the American tour,” Reid says. “We had a massive bust-up, me and my brother, and we went our separate ways.”

The brothers reunited around 2007 to play the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and have since released another full-length album, 2017’s Damage and Joy. They are currently working on an eighth full-length that will see a release sometime next year. The band has “loads” of songs written, but recording has proved difficult, in part because of the pandemic. (Reid says the band is also working on a biography, which should also see release next year, if good fortune prevails.)

As for what the new songs sound like and how they might play out compared to the Mary Chain’s most recent output, Reid says it’s difficult to say until everything is mixed and mastered.

“There’s a lot of synths on it, so it will sound a bit different, I think,” he says.

The Mary Chain has influenced many bands — in particular, the first round of artists making music that would eventually be called “shoegazing” a few years later, such as My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Slowdive. Musicians continue to cite the band as an influence, and although Reid says it’s not his place to discuss the group’s legacy, he adds that the fact that bands continue to name-check the Mary Chain seems to be evidence that they're doing something right.

“That was always the idea with the Mary Chain,” Reid says. “It was never supposed to be just entertainment for the year those records were released. The idea was that those records would last.”

He adds that members of a nascent Mary Chain haunted Glascow record shops to dig up dusty copies of records by then lesser-known garage/psychedelic bands such as 13th Floor Elevators. (Many people coincidentally get their first taste of both 13th Floor Elevators and the Mary Chain from the movie High Fidelity. The former’s song appears in the opening credits, and the latter receives an angry, full-throated defense from Barry, Jack Black’s classic jerky record shop employee.) Reid remembers wanting to emulate that experience some day when he and his bandmates heard these then-obscure bands (Velvet Underground is another important influence).

“We wanted other little weird misfits in twenty, thirty years' time digging Mary Chain records out of dusty record shops going, ‘Fuck, this is it. This is the message,’” Reid says. “It’s great to hear bands now say, ‘Oh, Mary Chain. I get it,’ because that was the idea.”

The Jesus and Mary Chain, 8 p.m. Saturday, October 23, Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Place, Tickets are $39.95-$85.