Jim Reid has said that it’s largely only a matter of geography that is preventing the Jesus & Mary Chain from cracking on with new material. "The Mary Chain will do more stuff whether that will be records or whether that will be tours," he says. "We still have a few fences to climb before that happens."
He went on: "The idea of doing another Mary Chain album is always around, but it’s sort of difficult with me and my brother; we still have a difficult relationship. And he lives in Los Angeles and I live in the South West of England. So it’s kind of difficult to get it together. We will probably do another record at some point and we do talk about tours and stuff like that. It’s just so difficult to agree with each other. I mean I’m not saying it’s all his fault but we have problems basically."
It sounds like the relationship is better now than it once was. "Well it has to be better than it was," Reid says. "We went through a year or two where we didn’t actually speak to each other when the band was breaking up in 1998. So it can’t be worse than that. It’s not ideal but it’s not terrible. We can talk now whereas at one point we couldn’t even do that."
While the band had become, in Reid’s words, "terminally unfashionable" when they went their separate ways in 1998, he believes there’s a resurgence of interest in the Mary Chain sound, especially with the current series of deluxe reissues of their back catalogue. "I think it still stands up; any Mary Chain album I think still makes sense. And that’s what we always wanted to do. We used to listen to bands from the 60s when we were making records and that was all we wanted to do, we wanted to make records that people all over the world would go to record shops and buy 25 or 30 years later."
The Mary Chain did of course come together for some gigs in 2008, as well as at Nick Sanderson’s wake. Sanderson was the mainman in Earl Brutus, as well as drummer in Reid’s post-Mary Chain outfit Freeheat. Reid is, as ever, full of praise for Earl Brutus, describing them as "the Sex Pistols of the 1990s". "Oh God, Earl Brutus were one of my favourite bands," he says. "I say that and I say it so often and people just assume I say it because he was my pal, but it’s nothing to do with that. Earl Brutus were one of the best bands that I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of really great bands. I’ve seen the Clash in the 70s, I’ve seen Joy Division, and I don’t think that anybody I’ve ever seen has topped Earl Brutus. And I think they were one of the most magnificent bands ever, and I think, and I’m so bored of saying this now, that they were robbed. They should have been so huge in the 90s.
"There was something really dangerous about Earl Brutus, I mean they used to play gigs and anything could happen. And there was always a feeling that something’s going to kick off at any second. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t, but you were always guaranteed a really good show. And Nick was like Iggy Pop or something, he was unbelievable. You couldn’t take your eyes off Nick Sanderson, he was like a rock & roll star. And he was screwed out of that, maybe they were a bit too old at the time I don’t know, but they should have been the Sex Pistols of the 1990s, I really believe that."
The full set out Jesus & Mary Chain deluxe album reissues are out now.
