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Describing the guitar as a tool is perfectly appropriate to Jim's own approach to the instrument - at early gigs he wore a cheap Gibson copy around his neck like a fashion accessory, plugged in just to add to the general din of feedback. "I do play guitar sometimes also on this record," Jim laughs, "but I don't want to call myself a musician. In the studio we are not that hung up on who does what. Just whoever can do it best, so often the guitar gets handed around. We just don't have very defined roles. Basically we know what we want and we'll just do whatever it takes to get there. It's not unheard of to pass the guitar to the studio engineer and say 'Can you do it'?"
Reluctant guitarist William is currently using a distinctive guitar. Ben takes up the story: "He's got a Gibson 330 - it's got 'William' written on it. It's actually, technically, Jim's, but I don't think that he's ever gonna get it back. I know we used others, but this guitar is almost the only one on the album. It always sounds good and it's easy to play. In fact we rented a lot of old guitars just to try something different, but the Gibson 330 just sounded better."
Another distinctive part of the Jesus and Mary Chain sound comes from old, knackered fuzz pedals. One that made a sound like an air-raid siren was a particular feature at early gigs. "There's an old 70s black fuzz box pedal that we used a lot, a Japanesse thing but they don't make them anymore. That was the entire sound of Psychocandy," replies Jim. "Now, a lot of the sound we'll just get from the amps. A lot of the fuzz bass, comes from turning the Ampeg up to 10, which gives great distortion. You can't hear what you are doing, cause it's too loud, but if you put it in a different room, you can feel it off the floor, and it just sounds great on tape. But on stage I tend to end up with a lot of different pedals, in order to get the different sounds quicker and easier."
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