MY ENCOUNTER with Jim Reid, the lead singer with The Jesus And Mary Chain, was not exactly the most enjoyable 15 minutes I have ever experienced during my 22 years on earth. There is a certain something about the man's conversational style that makes one yearn for the disarming pleasantries of Van Morrison or the silver-tongued charm of Duncan Ferguson, by way of alternative. He seems like the kind of bloke who feels vindicated when the toast lands butter side down.
Perhaps it's merely something about the way he enunciates his sentences in his harsh, sandpapered Glaswegian accent, or maybe he's just on his sixth interview of the day, but whatever it is, Jim Reid radiates an undeniable undercurrent of surly dourness all the way through our conversation, without ever quite crossing over the line into outright rudeness.
Then again, Reid and his band are supposed to be perennially scowling renegades, the unsmiling outsiders at the rock 'n' roll party, the denim-wearing malcontents who have diesel oil for blood and Marshall amplifiers where their hearts should be. They've made a whole career out of it, for Christ's sake, and they've also recorded some marvellously scuzzy albums along the way - have a listen to 1985's Psychocandy to discover who My Bloody Valentine (deceased) stole half their ideas from, or buy 1989's Automatic and hear what a near-perfect fusion of The Beach Boys and The Velvet Underground sounds like.
Reid and his brother William have spent the past year or so making that difficult seventh album, which is titled Munki (no, me neither). Although reasonably impressive, it's more of the same, which is not going to do The Jesus And Mary Chain any favours at this stage of their career.
"The record is pretty hefty going," says Reid when asked for his thoughts on it. "There are 17 tracks, so it's kinda difficult to run through it. I think anybody who's into the Mary Chain in any kind of a way whatsoever, this album will make sense to them."
According to their record company, the studio sessions were marred by a considerable amount of filial arguments and argy-bargy in the studio. Reid, though, is rather more taciturn on that subject.
"We were cooped up in a studio, we're brothers, blah-de-blah-de-blah . . . I mean, there's nothing new in that. Whenever we make a record it's the same old rigmarole, the old routine, y'know. Sometimes it's hard going. But I think also, that tension makes the record what it is, too."
The new record finds them back on the Creation label, where they spent the embryonic stage of their career in the early 1980s before disembarking for a 13-year stint at Warner Brothers. "We started off making this record," explains Reid, "and then we kinda had some troubles with Warners, who basically just said, 'No. Leave. We don't want you around'."
Was it as blunt as that?
"Pretty much. I mean, I'm being a bit unfair. They did say that if we wanted them to, they would release the record, but they made it pretty clear that nobody there was really into the band any more - and that basically it would be a mistake for us to insist that they release it. If you're gonna bring out a record, you need a whole team of people that are enthusiastic about it.
"So we took it (the record) around, and we realised it wasn't such an easy thing to go out and get another record deal. We'd also parted company with our manager, Chris Morris. It was a relationship that had gone on and on for years. He just had less and less time for us. We felt we knew what we were doing with the Mary Chain; it just felt as if a lot of people were tailing off and not keeping up with us."
This is par for the course in almost any Jesus And Mary Chain interview from down through the ages: laudable-yet-laughable conceitedness and arrogance, or "attitude", depending on how you choose to look at these things. That they are one of the few bands who have enough musical calibre to back such claims up is purely incidental.
drugs and booze
"I want the record to do as well as it possibly can," continues Reid. "I think it's a damn good record and I want people to hear it, and appreciate it. I'd be lying if I said I don't care, because I do."
Creation Records in 1984 and Creation Records in 1998 are two very different propositions, however. Jim Reid believes that the underlying ethos of Creation has remained the same throughout the years, and that the success of Oasis and Primal Scream, far from turning it into a soulless corporation, has merely given it the financial clout it was always in dire need of throughout the 1980s.
"It was 1984 when we left Creation, and there was no Creation Records back then," he avers. "It was just Alan (McGee) and Dick (McGee's right-hand man) and a whole load of enthusiasm, but no financial backing. They've still retained that enthusiasm against all the odds, and now they've got the money to back it up. The success of Oasis has given them the muscle that they always needed - even if the money is coming in from elsewhere, like Sony or what have you. The very fact that it was Creation who actually found Oasis and Primal Scream and all those bands, it's given them an awful lot of control over what actually happens."
Has McGee himself changed much as a person in the intervening time period?
"I think Alan's . . . matured a lot. He's handled the whole thing pretty well, whereas a lot of people might have just gone to pieces. And he went through his bad patch a few years ago, getting really into drugs and booze. But he's come out the other side, and that's the trick. It's one thing getting a huge fuckload of success, it's another thing to come out the other side intact. A lot of people just can't pull that one off."
When I attempt to ask Reid about his own attitudes to narcotics, though, he pulls down the shutters. "What I do is what I do, and it's my business," he says irritatedly. "I don't really wanna go on about it, because people give you shit about you influencing other people to do whatever. The only thing I would say is, if people take drugs simply because somebody else does, then they're a fool. Don't listen to me, man, just do what you wanna do. I don't have any of the answers."
As the interview progresses, Reid's demeanour remains resolutely downcast. A query about the current high media profile of other Scottish bands such as Mogwai and Arab Strap results in the riposte "I don't see music in those kind of regional terms. I don't see Scottish music, I see music as good and bad." And when I ask him what his current listening habits are, his answer is obviously intended as an allegory for the current status of his own band.
"At the moment I'm listening to The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Beck, Spiritualized. Those kinds of bands last, y'know what I mean? They're not flash-in-the-pans. They've been around for a while and they'll be around for some more time. That's what I'm into. Bands who've got enough backbone and substance to be more than just a fashion."
The heavily implied insinuation in that last sentence is unmissable. Whether Munki can restore The Jesus And Mary Chain to the critical and commercial heights of even six years ago, though, is less clear-cut. n