Brothers back to join the (Jesus and Mary) Chain gang

Thankfully, one of the most revolutionary acts of all time return to the fray later this month.

"Britain in 1984 was f***ing boring," opines music mogul Alan McGee, the man who founded Creation Records and discovered Oasis. "I liked ABC but that was as exciting as it got: Martin Fry and his gold lamé suit. Then we found the Mary Chain."

The Jesus and Mary Chain consist of brothers Jim and William Reid. They are the bewitching subject of a highly entertaining new book by Zoe Howe entitled Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story.

The Reids stumbled into making music through a heady combination of magic mushrooms and The Velvet Underground. Their friend Bobby Gillespie, who later fronted Primal Scream, gave a copy of their demo to Alan McGee. The impressed impresario released their first single Upside Down on his fledgling Creation Records label.

Music journalist David Quantick, who later authored the seminal satirical Channel 4 series Brasseye with Chris Morris, gave the Mary Chain their first press review. Quantick likened their squalling feedback at an early London show to "a swarm of bees in an elevator shaft."

As the band's popularity grew, The Jesus and Mary Chain played some of the most notorious concerts in live musical history. They regularly went onstage over an hour late and played for 15 to 20 minutes, which often incited a riot. Alan McGee fanned the flames of notoriety even further by declaring: "this is truly art as terrorism."

Football hooligans started to jump on the bandwagon. McGee hired two former SAS bodyguards to protect his protegés, who quit soon afterwards when they realised the extent of violent mayhem the job entailed.

"Everyone in that band, including the manager, was a complete head case," McGee says. "They were the most dysfunctional team of people ever to get success."

The Reids had a fractious relationship as children and teenagers, but add success, alcohol and drugs to the equation and they became ferociously volatile.

"I once threw William against a door and knocked it off its hinges," Jim Reid says in the new book. "Can't remember why." A former band member admits his main role in the group was to prevent the two brothers from killing each other.

Despite being the loudest and brashest band of their day, both the Reid brothers were very shy, which was one of their many contradictions. They drank heavily to pluck up the courage to go onstage. A potent cocktail of noise, drugs and booze became their coping mechanism.

Dublin blogger and writer Conor Ross-Magahy fondly recalls their first Irish appearance in the old SFX Centre on Upper Sherrard Street. "Rumour had it they weren't turning up," Ross-Magahy remembers. "Or if they did turn up, they'd play for few minutes with their backs to us.

"Thankfully, they didn't do either. It turned out to be the wildest, loudest most liberating hour of my life. I went out and got their debut album Psychocandy, which was also the first record I ever bought. I became a goth for a while, but more importantly, I became aware of the power of unashamed f*** you rebellion. I was infused by it. To this day, I still carry that spirit."

The Jesus and Mary Chain released six remarkably consistent albums between 1985 and 1998. On their 1994 semi-acoustic album, Stoned and Dethroned, they duetted with Hope Sandoval and Shane MacGowan. Pinning down MacGowan for a collaboration proved to be a considerable challenge.

Jim Reid offers a hilarious synopsis in Barbed Wire Kisses. "We sent Shane a demo months beforehand," Reid reveals. "I would call him up. I'd go, 'Shane? It's Jim', and he'd say, 'What? Jim who?' 'Jim from the Mary Chain. Did you get the demo?' 'What demo?' I'd say, 'We sent you a demo, you said you would sing with us...' 'Oh! No, I haven't listened to it yet.' So I'd say, 'I will call you back tomorrow.' And for about a month it would be exactly the same every time I called. 'Shane? It's Jim' 'What? Jim who?' Over and over again."

The Mary Chain split acrimoniously in 1998. Thanks to the efforts of their mother to broker a Christmas Day truce, plus the ongoing mediations of their long-suffering sister Linda Reid, who is known in the band's circles as "the Kofi Annan of The Mary Chain", the Reid brothers are back working together. They're bringing Psychocandy out on the road in the coming weeks. A guerillia warm-up show in Vicar St last July was under-rehearsed and underwhelming, but intermittently brilliant when they played material from their classic debut album.

Three decades on since its release, it remains to be seen if this live reprisal of Psychocandy will work. Whatever happens, it certainly won't be boring.

'Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story' by Zoe Howe is out now. The Jesus and Mary Chain will tour 'Psychocandy' in 2015.