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Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain
304 pages, Hardcover
Published August 29, 2024
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January 28, 2025
The Reid brothers’ rock and roll memoir sets the record straight on some of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s more notorious lore. The book also explains their overall strategy, ethos, and aesthetic in terms that confirm some hunches I’ve had (eg about the abundant humour their work delivers deadpan), dispel some others, and generally illuminate the musicians’ distinctive oeuvre, their struggle with addiction (and each other!), and the deeply corporatized rock industry that evidently has never truly known what to make of this era-defining act.
PS: addiction and especially drinking get discussed so much in this book that I get vicariously hung over just reading it. And yet (as also found in reading fellow sibling-rockers the Wilsons’ 2012 Kicking and Dreaming) it’s hazardous to meet our heroes (a Reid mantra): here too a show I fondly recall as defining my youth the band recollects as a low point if not nightmare.
PPS The Reid brothers have a gift for irony, contradiction, paradox, and chiasmus. The words sing, wryly, from the page.
PS: addiction and especially drinking get discussed so much in this book that I get vicariously hung over just reading it. And yet (as also found in reading fellow sibling-rockers the Wilsons’ 2012 Kicking and Dreaming) it’s hazardous to meet our heroes (a Reid mantra): here too a show I fondly recall as defining my youth the band recollects as a low point if not nightmare.
PPS The Reid brothers have a gift for irony, contradiction, paradox, and chiasmus. The words sing, wryly, from the page.
Displaying 1 of 1 review