One of the greatest things the internet has done for music fans is in providing an infinite treasure of trove of entertainingly embarrassing video interviews.
Whether its the recent chat with forthcoming Big Day Out feature act Major Lazer which put itself forward as a strong contender for the worst interview of all time, or the abundance of television appearances from media-shy bands, you don’t have to dig through YouTube for long before striking awkward gold.
This new nugget comes to our attention via the fine analysts of internet culture at Dangerous Minds, who stumbled upon an unearthed interview from 1986 featuring noisy Scottish group, The Jesus And Mary Chain.
The alternative rock group were as famous for the cool-as-fuck attitudes of central brothers Jim and William Reid as they were their shimmering sheets of guitar, which often resulted in some pretty notorious dealings with the press that were as leathery as the band’s attire of choice. This archived video chat with a Belgian station however, perhaps takes the cake, recorded just after their career-making PsychoCandy album.
In the span of two minutes, its hard to pick a highlight as the loud-shirted interviewee feeds a series of press grabs to the band. But while Jim Reid slagging off some iconic bands with the straightest of faces should arguably steal the spotlight, his deliberately provocative comments (“Joy Division were fucking rubbish!”) are competing with the antics of the band’s drummer: a pre-Primal Scream Bobby Gillespie.
In the brilliant wording of Dangerous Minds: “in the middle of a question, apropos of nothing, then-drummer Bobby Gillespie just starts making out with an unidentified woman on the couch. It is never explained, announced, or acknowledged, but Gillespie just keeps on macking away.” Staged stunt or not, it’s a hilariously awkward moment, complete with the cameraman’s suave-like pan of the action before attempting to dismiss it before giving up and cutting back to the action. (Perhaps a tribute to PsychoCandy cut ‘Taste Of Cindy’?)
Aside from the tonsil tennis, Jim Reid pays out the Sex Pistols, says his band are “streets ahead of Joy Division,” compares themselves to the Beatles, and says with dead-eyed seriousness: “we’re a very commercial group. We’ve got our eye on the charts and the United States of America – our direct competition is Culture Club and Duran Duran.”
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For anyone with a working knowledge of the contrarian band, its clear that they’re taking the piss, albeit in their own stone-lidded, laconic way, but it doesn’t make the interview any less uncomfortable.
Definitely one to add to to the hall of fame, alongside the aforementioned Major Lazer chat, as well as this Sigur Rós’ interview which has pauses you could land a jumbo jet into, Killswitch Engage’s wincingly bad backstage talk, and Dylan Lewis’ all-star run on vintage ABC live music show, Recovery – with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo perhaps being the cream of the painful crop.
Check out the slagging and the snogging below:
