Jesus And Mary Chain: "Eddie Van Halen ruined rock guitar. Shoegaze? Invented by some clown"

The Jesus and Mary Chain continue to stand out for their contrarian views. This time, Jim and William Reid have taken aim at both the term "shoegaze" and Eddie Van Halen, one of the most celebrated guitarists in rock history.
Interviewed during the Total Bummer festival in New York, where they performed alongside Dinosaur Jr., the Reid brothers took issue with the term commonly used to describe the British scene that emerged between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. For Jim Reid, it's an artificial label: “I have a problem with the term shoegaze because it doesn't really exist. It was invented by some clown at the NME.”

The conversation then turned to the role of the guitar and how they approach the instrument. Jim Reid explained that he has always favoured spontaneity and instinct over pure technique, a view that puts him at the opposite end of the spectrum from someone like Eddie Van Halen. William Reid was even harsher in his judgement: “I think guitarists should never learn scales. Eddie Van Halen? I can't stand the way he plays. He ruined rock guitar in the Eighties and Nineties because so many people tried to copy him. I never liked that race to play as fast as possible and cram in as many notes per second as you can.”
To explain his own idea of musicality, William cited Peter Hook, the legendary bassist of Joy Division and New Order, arguing that his riffs are “a thousand times better than anything Eddie Van Halen could ever have come up with.” Words bound to stir debate among fans, given how much weight both Eddie Van Halen and the Jesus and Mary Chain have carried in the evolution of rock, even as they embody two profoundly different visions of the guitar and of songwriting.

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