KulBritania - The Jesus and Mary Chain on why it took them so long to record their new album

In an interview with The Scotsman, Jim Reid revealed why it took the band so long to record their new album.

The Jesus & Mary Chain finally called it a day in 1999, shortly after the release of their sixth album, Munki. But they reformed, not without trepidation, eight years later to headline California’s Coachella festival. Not long after, Jim Reid first mentioned that the group were working on a new album, but a cocktail of parenthood and paranoia were to delay its appearance for the next decade. Reid quite readily shoulders the blame for the group’s inability to deliver. He was reluctant to spend much time away from his young family, and his unhappy recollections of making Munki cast a long shadow. “It just about killed me,” he recalls.

“It was a very, very painful record to make and that was my last memory of making an album and I wasn’t really in any rush to get back into that situation. I had no reason to suppose it wouldn’t be that way again. We were prepared for World War 3. We went into the studio wearing flak jackets.”

But on this occasion, there was one key addition to their armoury. The brothers chose to work with a producer for the first time in their career, recruiting the redoubtable Youth – ace bassist, studio guru and “a big cuddly hippy,” according to Reid. “We thought if the shit hits the fan Youth can be the judge. We thought he would be the peacekeeper, the United Nations in this situation. As it turns out, we got on alright. There was no big bust-ups, there was one or two arguments but there was bound to be. It was pretty civilized all in all, for the Mary Chain anyway.”

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