Every morning before entering Mogwai’s Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow to work on the new Jesus And Mary Chain album, Jim Reid would head out on two-hour walk around the city. A meandering amble is one of the singer’s favourite things to do when his band are on tour, aimlessly wandering around a new town, taking in the sights, getting lost. It was the same but different in Glasgow, a location Reid knows inside out having grown up eight miles away in East Kilbride, where Jim and his brother William formed the Jesus And Mary Chain in 1983.
On some occasions Reid would look around and not know where he was. Other times, if he’d fallen off the wagon, he’d settle into a local boozer for a liquid breakfast. When he was sober, he'd find himself spending time at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, a place he hadn’t been to since the '80s. All around him was memories, the shards of four decades of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most potent and visceral forces.
Reid isn’t sure if being back on home turf had an effect on the new record by The Jesus And Mary Chain but mulling it over down the phone from his home in Devon, he concedes that maybe it did. For starters, it’s called Glasgow Eyes.
“My immediate reaction would be that it could’ve been recorded anywhere but maybe that walk makes the difference,” he says. “Maybe it makes you feel a little bit more in a Glasgow frame of mind. It probably does seep in in ways that I don’t realise.”
