Tere’s that feeling when the herculean vessel of a freight train comes rattling passed you on a station platform, leaving a bellowing silence, that you were nearly engulfed, taken by all of it – its sound, its energy, its presence. It’s like that when you’ve witnessed Te Jim Jones Revue tear through a venue. Te latest incarnation for a man well- versed in the industry already, Jim Jones teamed up with Rupert Orton and the rest of the band to create something that took rock ‘n’ roll to its most visceral place…
took photos of you guys that appeared in your album artwork. He captured you in a live environment, which is where you’ve made a name for yourself the most, it could be said… Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s the core of the band really. Everything else – well, we take it seriously, but it’s really just a vehicle to make sure we can continue to play live. I mean, we’re not coming from the point of view of being a trendy band, or a scene band, you know, we’re not in our 20s and we don’t really have access to that whole marketing thing from the NME and stuff, so what we do have is that if you put us in front of an audience, they’re gonna go away feeling elated. So that’s what we do.
So
Since the last record release, it looks like it’s been a really intense period of live performances – has the energy faltered at all? No, I think we’ve sort of become conditioned to it. One of the biggest losses for us was our original piano player,
Elliot, he decided to bow out; he felt quite conflicted because
I’m very pleased to say that one of our esteemed photographers actually
on the one hand, this was one of the best musical projects he’d ever been involved in and he sort of got a lot out of it on that side, but he wasn’t cut out to be away from home on these really long periods, you know? Te upside of that is that we eventually found Henri Herbert.
I watched a nice clip of Henri playing, actually – he seems to have taken the mantle on very well… Yeah, and he just loves the idea of going on the road, he’s sort of like the complete opposite to what Elliot was, but there you go, no two people are the same. But Henri, he came to the band with an already functioning, almost encyclopaedic knowledge. In one of the album writing sessions, he was warming up and he was playing this kinda piano playing that sounded almost Victorian, you know. He explained that it was this particular player, Albert Hammonds and he was one of the early pioneers of boogie
woogie stride piano, that later became rock ‘n’ roll piano. It’s considered a dusty relic and so of course for me, that’s like buried treasure and I’m like, ‘we’re having it!
It’s obviously kept you inventive, and although you’re a British band, you’re not just a rock guitar band, at all, but do you identify yourself within the lineage of British rock bands? I would say that we never set out to be like that, but inevitably we’re playing music that’s inspired by American roots music, which is kinda the same as what those guys were doing. We’re very conscious to do something that’s not cliché sounding. One of the reasons why we worked on the last couple of albums with the producer Jim Sclavunos is he’s been a guy who has worked with bands such as Sonic Youth, Te Cramps and Nick Cave, both with Grinderman and the Bad Seeds, and that’s to name but a few, but all of that stuff does the desirable thing; it takes the guts of it, which is fairly traditional music, but then it puts a spin on it, which then allows the listener to hear it almost as if it’s a fresh form of art again. It imbues that whole sense of violence that you could imagine if you
did hear it back in the 40s, or rock ‘n’ roll in the 50s, or any of those records
that stood out as being particularly
visceral.
Working with Jim Sclavunos – was it too tempting
38 /October 2012/
outlineonline.co.uk
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