The Jesus & Mary Chain have announced new album ‘Glasgow Eyes’ and shared new single ‘jamcod’. Check out the video first on NME below, along with details of their 2024 UK and European tour and our interview with Jim Reid.
Marking 40 years since the release of their debut single ‘Upside Down’, 2024 will see the hugely influential band – whose debut album ‘Psychocandy’ is considered a pivotal work in the development of alt-rock, noise pop and shoegaze – release their eighth studio album, an autobiography and a documentary, and also begin a world tour.
The 12-track new album was recorded at Mogwai’s Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow, and finds the band working with electronics and textures that seem to play on the band’s place in a lineage taking in The Velvet Underground and Suicide. However, Reid told NME that this wasn’t an intentional move.
“You go into the studio and you just feel your way around,” he said. “I guess what you’ve been listening to most lately has some sort of impact on the production values – writing, it’s always the same old deal really. I suppose that we were thinking it would be quite good to muck around with some synths and maybe just tweak the sound a bit.”
The album comes previewed by launch single ‘jamcod’, which Reid said came from “remembering painful past issues”.
“It was about the break-up of the band,” he explained. “It was actually about the night in the House of Blues when the band broke up [in 1999]. There’s another song, ‘Chemical Animal’, which is similar but different in as much as I was thinking back to the drug days and what it was like.
“When you get that deep into that whole shit, it’s like everything’s acting on instinct and you become like an animal and it’s all about drugs. It’s your driving force, the thing that gets you from a to b is whether you can score. It was a horrible way to live and I’m glad I don’t do that anymore.”
Check out our interview with Reid below as he tells us about the making of ‘Glasgow Eyes’, their 40th anniversary, and the drug, alcohol and interpersonal issues which dogged the band before their nine-year hiatus of the early 2000s.
NME: Hello, Jim. Listening to the album, the song ‘American Born’ suggests you feel an affinity to US culture. Why is that?
Reid: “William [Reid, brother and bandmate] lives in America so that’s probably got a lot to do with that. When the band started we liked a lot of 20th Century American culture, but by the time that we were talking about it, those very things had gone. When we first went to America it was both wonderfully exciting and hugely disappointing all at once. Just because you were retracing footsteps and going to places where great things had once taken place, but now it was all little guys with backwards baseball caps and shorts on and all that, ‘whooo! Hey man!’. It was like, ‘Fuck, this is not the kind of America that we that we were into’.”
How does it feel for The Jesus & Mary Chain to hit 40?
“It’s a bit surreal really. When you think back to when the band started, just the idea that we would still be making records still be touring the world 40 years later, would have just been unthinkable. But it’s happened and, shit, I’m enjoying it. There’s been a lot of highs and there’s been a lot of lows so it’s good to still be here.”
Considering your legendarily fractious relationship with William, have you learned to live with each other over that time?
“We’ve kinda had to. We’re brothers, and family brings you back together. Also, if we want to be in a band we have to learn how to not wind each other up. In the ‘90s, when the band broke up for that period, we would go out of our way to annoy the fuck out of each other and it isn’t healthy. It wasn’t that simple. It’s not like that’s why the band broke up. There was a lot more to it than that. But we had nine years in the wilderness, broke up for nine years, we got back together and by that time, we’d kinda patched up our relationship.
“But I knew the claustrophobic environment of being in the band together again, it would have to be different from the way it was back in the ‘90s. There are certain things, like he’d say something and if I respond in this way it will cause an explosion and I’m sure that he kind of addressed those issues in a similar way to me. If you want the train to keep on rolling you know what to do what not to do, and that’s where we’re at.”
It’s been six years since the last record ‘Damage & Joy‘, and that was the first one in 17 years – how do you decide it’s time to make a new record now?
“When it kinda feels right. The big gap between ‘Munki’ [1998] and ‘Damage & Joy’ was probably largely to do with me. When the band got back together I thought, ‘Well, this is OK, it’s working’ – but everybody kept saying, ‘Make a record’. I wasn’t totally against it, but I just kept thinking about how horrific it was, the studio environment for the making of ‘Munki’. I kinda thought, ‘We’re getting on OK now but what happens when we go back into a studio?’ You’re right up against each other then and there are actually things to argue about. It’s not a normal situation.
“I was worried that we were going to go back to that, and it was going to be the breakdown again. Then eventually, years went by and I thought, ‘Well, we’re in this band, do we want to be travelling around just playing old tunes?’ What do bands do? They go out on the road, but they also make records. I thought fuck it, let’s find out. We went and made ‘Damage & Joy’ and as it turns out there were no screaming rows. There were no hatchets being buried in the backs of heads. We got on with making our record and it made us realise that that can be done now.
“As to why it took so long to make another one, I mean, we’re lazy. These days, everything’s on our terms. We tour when we want to ,we make records when we want to, so unfortunately somebody has to get a cattle prod to get us into action.”
Do you look around and see your influence everywhere in music?
“I like to hear other people say it really. It’s not like I sit there checking out new bands going, ‘They’ve been listening to us’. It’s nice when you get name-checked, it’s always nice, it always has been. That was the point of the Mary Chain at the beginning. OK, ‘Psychocandy’, 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. 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’.”
Beyond ‘Psychocandy’, are there moments along the way you’re particularly proud of?
“All of the records, I think, speak for themselves. ‘Psychocandy’ gets talked about a lot so we tend to do it. I don’t mind that people want to talk about ‘Psychcocandy’, I’m still very proud of that record. But I think ‘Munki’ was as good a record as ‘Psychocandy’ but people don’t talk about ‘Munki’ so much. All of the records, to me, still stand up. They still say what they said at the time. They’re still doing it.”
You have an autobiography on the way – what can we expect from that?
“It’s just us talking to Ben Thompson. We just told him our story and he’s editing it all together. It’s just us jabbering on about us as usual. There are a few amusing anecdotes, I guess. If you’re interested in the Mary Chain I’m sure it’ll make good reading.”
And there’s a documentary coming as well?
“That’s very early stages. I’m not really sure how that’s gonna go. We’ve not really filmed anything too much. But again that’s us just working with Ben Unwin who made some of our videos back in the ‘90s. He’s pulling that thing together.”
You’re planning a tour in March and April 2024. Do you enjoy the experience now?
“I do more now, strangely enough, than I ever did. Just because everything seems easier now. Everything’s decided by us, we only tour if we want to, there’s nobody really putting any pressure on us. That makes it much more enjoyable. It’s weird – I’ve been doing it for nearly 40 years and I still get utterly terrified before every gig. That ruins it a bit for me because I tend to get more and more nervous the closer it gets to the show. It doesn’t matter what size the venue is – in fact, I almost get more nervous in smaller clubs than I do in bigger venues. But now the shows seem a lot more in control.
“In the ‘80s and ‘90s I didn’t do a single sober gig, and never had done, because I found the whole experience utterly terrifying. I’m a naturally shy person so the idea of being the frontman in a rock’n’roll band, looking at an audience, I just couldn’t deal with it. The only way I could cope was to get fucked up and I never did a sober gig. The first sober gig I did with the Mary Chain was at Coachella in 2007, and that was terrifying, but once I realised that I could do it sober I started to think, ‘Well, not only can I, but I prefer it’. If you go out there and you’re sober and something goes wrong, instantly you know what it is and you know how to fix it.
“In the old days, you’d be standing there in the middle of the stage totally fucking wasted, you’d hear that something wasn’t right, then you’d be going ‘I don’t know what it is, I don’t know how to fix that, oh fuck’, and then you’d just start smashing things up to cover up for someone’s mistake. Sometimes you can do these things better when you’re thinking clearly.”
‘Glasgow Eyes’ is out March 8, 2024, via Fuzz Club and can be pre-ordered here. Check out the tracklist below.
‘Venal Joy’
‘American Born’
‘Mediterranean X Film’
‘jamcod’
‘Discotheque’
‘Pure Poor’
‘The Eagles and The Beatles’
‘Silver Strings’
‘Chemical Animal
‘Second of June’
‘Girl 71’
‘Hey Lou Reid’
The band will also be hitting the road from March 2024. Fans who pre-order the album before 10am on Friday 1 December will receive priority access to tour tickets. Tickets will be available here.
MARCH
22 – UK, Manchester, Albert Hall
25 – Ireland, Dublin, Olympia
26 – UK, Belfast, Limelight 1
27 – UK, Edinburgh, Usher Hall
30 – UK, London, Roundhouse
APRIL
2 – Denmark, Copenhagen, Amager Bio
3 – Sweden, Gothenburg, Pustervik
5 – Norway, Oslo, Rockefeller
6 – Sweden, Stockholm, Munich Brewery
7 – Sweden, Malmo, Plan B
9 – Germany, Hamburg, Markthalle
11 – Germany, Berlin, Huxleys
12 – Germany, Cologne, Live Music Hall
13 – France, Paris, Elysée Montmartre
15 – Switzerland, Geneva, L’Usine
16 – Switzerland, Winterthur, Salzhaus
17 – Italy, Milan, Alcatraz
19 – Austria, Krems, Donaufestival
20 – Germany, Heidelberg, Halle O2
21 – Netherlands, Tilburg, Roadburn Festival
23 – Belgium, Brussels, AB
24 – Netherlands, The Hague, Paard