Before you could say ‘go’, ‘move,’ or ‘shift,’
they found themselves
hobnobbing with folk royalty the likes of David Barber and Tom McConville, who helped convince them they could go all the way.
“It was basically a weekend of them saying to us, ‘Yeah, you can make it as musicians.’ After like, being told all your life that music is just a hobby and that driving buses or working in Tesco is what normal people do.”
That was clearly not on the cards for them and, despite not winning outright, neither was remotely fazed. about the winning anyway.
It wasn’t Nor was
it about the taking part. For Mike it was all about getting to the semi-finals weekend where they could mix with musicians their own age, play ‘some tunes’, and enjoy the free concert on Saturday night. Nice. “You get there and find that you are up against a girl singing solo in Welsh and another guy clog dancing. That’s when you realise that the only way to get to the final is to play the style of music you love in the best way you can, and hope it’s what the judges want to hear.”
Of the thousands of hopefuls who routinely submit applications it seems that between Mike’s hell for leather mandolin and Jay’s voice, so full of blues it would send a recovering alcoholic back to the bar, they were definitely doing something right.
A year later they recorded their first album, 16 Miles, which was well received across the board.
One reviewer summed it up nicely:
‘As musicians Jay and Michael are way better than merely proficient in their chosen field, and often more imaginative in approach than one might reasonably expect from performers of this tender age.’
At this point the young Lucy Williams had not quite become the indispensable member she is today.
would all change after she laid down a bass track in post-production.
“When you hear a band without bass, and then you hear it with bass, the sound just fills
it right out. Sometimes when Lucy
can’t do a gig and we do it anyway, it feels so empty, like an essential part is missing. Even if you have never heard us play before, you would just know it wasn’t complete. Lucy is that important to the sound.”
Despite positive reviews a common sentiment was that although Jaywalkers were clearly a force to be reckoned with, there was still plenty of room for growth.
However, as
their second album, Early for a Thursday, prepares to find itself among the hallowed isles of HMV stores from Burnley to Brighton, all that has changed.
In the last two years
Jaywalkers have matured at a pace nobody could have predicted.
“The latest album is a lot different,” Mike tells me. “Lucy is a lot more prevalent for a start. She does harmonies and there are some nice bass solos in there. On 16 Miles it was a case of me and Jay having recorded everything with Lucy coming in later. Early is a lot more cohesive.“
And what about the actual songs; has Mike’s writing style matured along with the band in the two years since obscurity became a thing of the past?
“On 16 Miles I think I wrote five of the twelve, whereas now it’s nine of the twelve – so yeah, you could say that.
I mean, I’m not
a prolific song writer or anything, not like one a week. I can’t sit down and just write a song. It’s not like – right, I am going to sit down for two hours today and write a song. It just doesn’t work like that for me.”
Which is fair enough. Leonard Cohen has been known to work on a single song for literally years at a time.
However, that
What he said!
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