The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid says he and his brother William Reid have “had to” learn to live with each other.
Notorious bust-ups between the siblings have included punch-ups and endless screaming matches that sometimes ended in bouts of destruction, but Jim, 61, has now said he and his older brother, 65, have finally stopped pushing each other’s buttons.
He told the NME when asked if they have now healed their sibling rivalry, which broke up their band in the 1990s: “We’ve kinda had to. We’re brothers, and family brings you back together. “Also, if we want to be in a band we have to learn how to not wind each other up.
“In the ’90s, when the band broke up for that period, we would go out of our way to annoy each other and it isn’t healthy. It wasn’t that simple.
“It’s not like that’s why the band broke up. There was a lot more to it than that. “But we had nine years in the wilderness, broke up for nine years, we got back together and by that time, we’d kinda patched up our relationship.
“But I knew the claustrophobic environment of being in the band together again, it would have to be different from the way it was back in the ’90s.
“There are certain things, like he’d say something and if I respond in this way it will cause an explosion and I’m sure that he kind of addressed those issues in a similar way to me.
“If you want the train to keep on rolling you know what to do what not to do, and that’s where we’re at.”
The brothers have just announced their new album ‘Glasgow Eyes’ is on the way, and have shared new single ‘jamcod’ from the record.
Their 2024 tour will mark 40 years since the release of their debut single ‘Upside Down’, and Jim said about the new album: “You go into the studio and you just feel your way around.
“I guess what you’ve been listening to most lately has some sort of impact on the production values – writing, it’s always the same old deal really. I suppose that we were thinking it would be quite good to muck around with some synths and maybe just tweak the sound a bit.”
Jim added the ‘jamcod’ single came from “remembering painful past issues”.
He added: “It was about the break-up of the band,” he explained. “It was actually about the night in the House of Blues when the band broke up (in 1999.)
“There’s another song, ‘Chemical Animal’, which is similar but different in as much as I was thinking back to the drug days and what it was like.
“When you get that deep into (it), it’s like everything’s acting on instinct and you become like an animal and it’s all about drugs.
“It’s your driving force, the thing that gets you from a to b is whether you can score. It was a horrible way to live and I’m glad I don’t do that anymore.”