Brothers Gonna (Eventually) Work It Out

Digging into Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain

Nov 18, 2025

Sometimes, the vagaries of the publishing world can’t help but make a liar (or a fool) out of you.

Back in March 2024, while penning my “author’s note” for Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, I wrote the following:

[This book] is the story of two brothers who decide to form a band — a fateful decision which, as anyone who knows anything about such sibling-based musical concerns as The Everly Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival or Oasis can tell you, almost never leads to the smoothest of sailing… Now You’re One of Us is, to the best of my knowledge, the first rock autobiography where two brothers have teamed up to tell the story of their band.

At the time, I truly believed this to be the case; little did I know that William and Jim Reid — the famously fractious fraternal co-founders of Scottish noise-pop shit-stirrers The Jesus and Mary Chain — would beat Redd Kross’s Jeff and Steve McDonald to the “first bandmate brothers to publish a joint autobiography” punch by a matter of weeks. Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain, written by the Reids with assistance from Ben Thompson, was published by Hachette Press on September 17, 2024, three weeks before Now You’re One of Us was released by Omnibus in the UK, and six before it came out in the US.

But for whatever reason, I wasn’t aware of the Reids’ book until a couple of weekends ago, when I stumbled across a copy of it at Common Good, a fine little bookstore in Ellenville, New York. I admit to letting out an audible “Goddammit!” upon discovering its original publication date — but once that initial pang of being pipped at the post quickly subsided, I happily bought the book and hungrily tore into it upon returning it home. Because not only have I been a JAMC fan since 1985’s Psychocandy, but I was also the last journalist to interview them before the infamous 1998 show that broke up the band for nine years. And having witnessed the intensely bad vibes that existed between William and Jim firsthand, there’s no way in hell I would have ever envisioned them collaborating on a book, even though they’ve been getting along again well enough to play together in a reconstituted version of The Jesus and Mary Chain since 2007. This book, I figured, was going to be good…

Never Understood is indeed a really fun read, one which covers the full arc of the Reids’ story with various degrees of detail. While it doesn’t go as deep into the making of their records as many fans might prefer — their pre-fame life takes up nearly half of the book, though I actually found that to be the most interesting and richly-remembered part of it — it’s nonetheless quite enlightening. For one thing, the brothers’ reputation for being arrogant and standoffish pricks seems to have been largely the result of crippling shyness; chief among the many regrets Jim references in the book is the fact that Joey Ramone went to his grave believing that The Jesus and Mary Chain (whom he really dug) hated the Ramones, when in actuality the Reids were so paralyzed by encountering their heroes backstage that they could only stare impassively at them from the corner of the room. The alcohol issues that plagued the band during their first run likewise seem directly related to the Reids’ acute discomfort at being in the spotlight. “[Bowie] was always going ‘Look at me! Look at me!’” reflects William towards the end of the book. “Whereas me and Jim were always going, ‘Look over there.’”

Another misconception that Never Understood cleared up for me: The band’s name (and song titles like “Jesus Fuck” and “Bo Diddley is Jesus”) always made me think that the Reids were lapsed Catholic choirboys reveling in being blasphemous, when in fact the brothers came from a Protestant family that rarely bothered to attend church. “Neither William or I are religious people,” writes Jim, “But we both hated the way a residue of what I can only think of as superstition still impacted our lives.” (The Jesus and Mary Chain turns out to have been a name that William randomly suggested, and which Jim agreed to mostly because it didn’t sound at all like any of the bands then popular in the UK.)

And then there’s the whole heroin thing: While many listeners and critics (myself included) believed that many of the band’s early songs — most notably “Some Candy Talking” — were about smack, booze was actually the Reids’ biggest vice during this period. Jim would later get heavily into cocaine, and William heavily into weed (a chemical divergence that apparently had a lot to do with the breakdown in communication between the brothers during the 1990s), but heroin was a bit player at best in the band’s recreational adventures.

Of course, as co-author of Now You’re One of Us, I couldn’t help noticing the striking similarities between my book with the McDonald brothers and Never Understood. Like Now You’re One of Us, Never Understood is presented in an oral history format, with William and Jim (like Jeff and Steven) interviewed separately and often offering contradictory memories and assessments. And as with the Redd Kross book, it’s only the brothers talking; no recollections from other band members — or anyone else — are included. This was an excellent choice on Thompson’s part, as both Reids have a lot to say, are hilariously funny and bring very different perspectives to the table. I do, however, kind of wish that Thompson had occasionally inserted himself as narrator (as I did in Now You’re One of Us) in order to move the story along, provide some historical context, flesh out the supporting characters and lend some clarity to certain developments — especially the latter, since the Reids both admit to having some chemical-induced memory loss.

(And no, they don’t mention my fateful 1998 interview with them — which, given how hazy they are on the events leading to their breakup, comes as no real surprise.)

Story-wise, I was amazed at (and amused by) how often Never Understood reads like a brooding Scottish counterpart to Now You’re One of Us’s Southern California dreaming. In both cases, you’ve got brothers from tight-knit working class families bonding over 70s pop and punk and then working backwards to obsessively explore the more arcane and drug-addled music of the 1960s. Despite being true outsiders/underdogs without any apparent commercial potential, both bands are driven from the get-go by a combination of bedroom-mirror fantasy and an almost preternatural sense of self-belief.

Both bands are supported by puzzled yet loving parents — the Reids make their earliest songwriting demos on a 4-track Portastudio purchased with a chunk of their dad’s redundancy money — and are assisted by established local scenesters who “get” what the brothers are up to well before anyone else does. (Bobby Gillespie is essentially to the Reids what Black Flag are to Redd Kross.) Both pairs of brothers doggedly pursue their own vision and wind up making brilliant records that influence scads of other bands — even while repeatedly tripping themselves up with unstable lineups, addiction issues and poorly-timed career decisions, and their brilliance goes completely over the heads of the suits and number-crunchers at their respective major labels.

Of course, The Jesus and Mary Chain also score some sizable hits in the UK, make a shitload of money when their “Happy When It Rains” is used in a Chevrolet ad, and continue to headline much larger venues than Redd Kross can usually fill. But the two bands are clearly kindred spirits in far more than just brotherly dysfunction… and ultimately, it seems weirdly appropriate that both the Reids and the McDonalds should have released autobiographical books just weeks apart from each other.

If you’re a JAMC fan, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Never Understood. It’ll go down just like honey.