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How did The Jesus and Mary Chain get their strange name?
When it comes to naming a band, artists are faced with a real challenge. If they strike gold and make it big, they will be forever haunted by this tattoo choice of their youth. What’s more, on a superficial level, a name could be a factor in an artist’s success or, indeed, failure. Where would Red Hot Chili Peppers be today if they had kept their earlier name, Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem? It’s quite a mouthful, and TFMMMM isn’t the most palatable of initialisms. The Chili’s aren’t alone in their narrow escape, The Beatles were just inches from paving their legacy as Johnny and the Moondogs. Strange names like these make me wonder where they came from, but one that I had never pondered until recently was The Jesus and Mary Chain.
I have been a fan of The Jesus and Mary Chain (JAMC) for many years now. I have always been intrigued by the strange name but never thought to trace its origin. I have always assumed that Jesus referred to our famous friend on the cross, Mr. Christ, and Mary was presumably his mother, the Virgin Mary. The final piece of the puzzle, being the “Chain” part, always made me envisage Jesus holding hands with his mother, but I assumed that the Reid brothers intended it to refer to some fictional cult.
So, after quenching my curiosity, what riches do I return with? As it transpires, a band who modelled themselves on a bad boy image, with dark shades, leather jackets and deadpan faces, started out as the Daisy Chain. Presumably, this early handle was a bid for protrusive contrast.
Ostensibly, once this joke had run its course, the Reid brothers changed the name to The Jesus Mary Chain, a name that oozed with intrigue and deception. This was the banner the band flew during one of their earliest televised performances on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, a few months prior to the release of Psychocandy in 1985.
The BBC broadcaster Trevor Dann, who helped the Mary Chain land their gig on the Old Grey Whistle Test, once likened the name’s impact to that of the Sex Pistols. “The [Jesus and Mary Chain] was the first big thing we’d had since the Sex Pistols. Because here’s a list of things [you] shouldn’t do: You shouldn’t name yourself something that presenters have a hard time saying,” Dann noted. “So being called the Sex Pistols … you forget how radical that was. Sex was not a word that you said!”
“The Jesus and Mary Chain” had been William Reid’s brainchild. He didn’t have an exact explanation for the choice other than the fact that it was decidedly obscure. “I don’t know where [William] got it from, but he just said ‘The Jesus and Mary Chain’. And at first, it sounded like, ‘Naah, no way,'” Jim Reid told Philadelphia’s Phawker in September 2015. “And then you kind of think about it, you think, ‘Well, fuck, that sounds like no other band.’ So we went with it.”
“It sounded like a psychedelic street gang. It conjured up images,” Bobby Gillespie, the original JAMC drummer and Primal Scream frontman, was quoted as saying in Zoe Howe’s 2015 biography, Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story.
Despite the religious connotations of the band name, the Reid brothers have suggested that there wasn’t a religious connection in mind. However, Jim did have a brush with the Bible in his youth. “It’s kind of a fascinating subject,” Jim told Phawker’s Jonathan Valania when asked about religion. “I discovered the Bible when I was like in my late teens and out of curiosity, read through it to see what it was all about. But, in the end, came away with the idea that it’s kind of a lot of mumbo jumbo.”
After deciding religion perhaps wasn’t for them, the Reids embraced music with an aim to shatter the pristine glass of pop music and shake the foundations of rock as The Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols had done before them. Their image was hedonistic and, if religious at all, probably more associative with the antichrist than Jesus.
“Onstage, we’re one of the sexiest groups you can imagine,” Jim said of the band in 1985, toying with an interviewer. “Three or four guys in leather, rolling around and showing their backsides to the audience.”
See The Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1985 performance on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle test below.
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