Quote of the day

"We could hardly play. It was as loud as hell because if we turned it down people would be going: 'those guys can't play a fucking note'. A lot of it was just: 'Fucking hell - someone's going to find us out any minute.' A lot of it came out of our insecurity and inability, I suppose. At the time, we thought 'We can't go out and sound like an honest to goodness rock band', so we would make it so that you wouldn't forget it. If you came to see the Mary Chain, it was something that would stay with you for a while. We deliberately pressed buttons. We knew we were winding people up. For a while, it seemed like a bit of a laugh but then it got out of control. It seemed like someone was going to get hurt bad. If it was us, then fair enough, but if it was someone in the audience then I didn't want that on my conscious [sic]. We stepped back for a bit. We didn't play live for about six months, and hoped it would all blow over. As luck would have it, it did."

Jim Reid of The Jesus & Mary Chain on the band's gloriously noisy and violent early days, from an interview with Stuart Braithwaite published by the Guardian last June to coincide with Mogwai's twentieth anniversary shows at the Roundhouse. I'm not entirely sure how I missed it first time around, but it's good to have stumbled across it now all the same.