Jim and William Reid of The Jesus and Mary Chain Photo: Mel Butler
Forty years after forming The Jesus and Mary Chain, Scottish brothers Jim and William Reid have learned how to recover from the "horrendous arguments" that tore their band apart in the '90s.
On their new album Glasgow Eyes, the alternative rockers - now in their 60s - prove they can still make powerful music together, too.
The Jesus and Mary Chain will perform at Auckland venue The Powerstation on 30 July.
Glasgow Eyes isn't especially a tribute to the Scottish city the Reid brothers grew up in, Jim Reid tells Charlotte Ryan, but nostalgia does infuse the record.
As a kid, Glasgow felt like a "little outpost" where being in a real band seemed like an impossible achievement.
While he and William were music lovers, Reid said the brothers were not "natural musicians".
Then in the 1970s when punk stormed in - "a bunch of snot-nosed kids who looked and sounded like us" - their fantasy of musical success became a possibility and then a reality.
"I suppose we kind of expected it, but at the same time when it actually happened we were like 'Geez, we're kind of famous. That's weird.'"
These days, Reid enjoys an anonymous life in a little coastal town in Devon.
"I'm just some guy that lives in a house down the road a bit and nobody bothers me."
Before making Glasgow Eyes, he and William questioned whether it was "undignified" for them to still be making and performing music: "Isn't The Jesus and Mary Chain kind of a young person's thing?"
Yet 39 years on from their explosive debut album Psychocandy (1985), Reid said heading into rehearsals and climbing on stage still feels great.
"As long as we felt good about the music, which will be forever, and as long as people are standing out in front of us, apparently entertained by whatever we do, then there's a point to it."
While an "organised chaos" defined The Jesus and Mary Chain in the 1980s, Reid said he and William's resistance to making firm plans is the only area where anarchy shows up these days.
"People always say 'What you going to be doing next year?' Well, I don't know. Let next year take care of itself. There's a kind of a chaos in that. That's as chaotic as it gets."
After 1998, when a heated row left the brothers estranged for several years, Reid said their mum and their sister Linda - "the United Nations of The Jesus and Mary Chain" - were instrumental in getting the band back together.
"Whenever we had big blazing rows, we would each get on the phone to Linda separately and say, 'Okay, guess what she said to me.' You know, be like that. So Linda was kind of trying to get us back together.
"Then we were doing [Linda's 2015] Sister Vanilla album and we both started to work with Linda but separately. I think that was the beginning of the repairing process."
Reid said he and William's arguments - including a "massive screaming row" in Italy a couple of weeks ago - could still have high intensity but the brothers were more cautious with each other these days.
"Because of [the band breaking up] in the '90s we know that if it goes beyond you're going to say things that can't be unsaid. You get to that point and you sort of step back and just lick your wounds a bit."
In the upcoming book Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain, Jim and William separately share their childhood memories, recount their early days as a band and give "completely different" accounts of the 1998 break-up.
At the very beginning, the brothers were resistant to doing a biographical book, Reid said, but then they decided it would be worthwhile to "blow the myth" and tell The Jesus and Mary Chain story as it really happened.
"There's no point in doing a book unless you're going to tell everybody the true story. And we told everybody everything. Anything that's in that book happened, it's warts and all... I mean, some would say it's just warts."
Once "a bit full of ourselves", The Jesus and Mary Chain don't try so hard anymore, Reid said.
"In the very beginning in a band, a lot of drunk guys weren't really that sure that we could do this. Somewhere in the middle it was a case of trying too hard to be things that we couldn't be. I can never be Iggy Pop or Mick Jagger, and I got so drunk and out of my head on drugs trying to be … these days it's Jim and William Reid being themselves."
