to say ‘do what you like with the album’ because of his credentials, or were you really strong minded? Yeah, no, we pretty much know where we’re going, but Jim’s there to make sure we don’t fall off the track, which is quite easy to do when you’re going out into deeper waters and trying to be open to new approaches. I mean, it’s nothing astoundingly new like playing a clarinet under water through a wah wah pedal – not that we’d want to do that! But on the whole, if you’re trying to retwist something, sometimes you can stray off into areas that wouldn’t be desirable and you end up sounding like some pretentious prog rock band, which is the last thing we want. And anything you ask him, his answers are very considered. Nothing will phase him; you can come up with the most outlandish request, like ‘right, for this track we wanna get the sound of
you’ve lived it, you know – well you kinda can in some ways, in terms of being a story teller, but you know, I try to invest as much of my own experiences into it as possible. But I think where the last couple of records have been more concerned with the outside rawness of the band, and the psychosis of the band, with this one we wanted to allow ourselves to make an opening, and dive inside, and see what was at the source of some of these things. Tere was a lot going on in the last 18 months of touring that led up to us recording this album and we’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff that really did set off mechanisms inside the mind, which started ticking furiously. Ten there are these other various elements that come up in song, you know, a voyeuristic element, which pertains, or can do, to Close Circuit Television – and apparently England
YOU WERE LOOKING AT THE TELEVISION SET SEEING CARS BURNING, THEN YOU LOOK OUT THE WINDOW AND IT’S WHERE YOU ARE!
standing on the train lines with the train coming’, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid! He’d say, ‘OK, first of all we’d need to decide what train…!’
I read that you were setting out to explore new lyrical and musical territory – first of all the title, ‘Te Savage Heart’ is a more humanised title than the detachment of ‘Burning Your House Down’ – were you thinking in more personal terms with this album? Haha, well I always try to be personal and I always think that you can’t talk about something unless
has got the most cameras in the world per square mile, London has the most CCTV cameras in the world. We were driving back from France and we were driving into London just as the riots were unfolding. I live right next to Mare Street, so I had riot police walking past my window one way, then protestors coming past my window the other way. You were looking at the television set seeing cars burning, then you look out the window and it’s where you are! Tat was pretty sharp focus, but it kinda gave everything a focal point.
I’ve had the album for a few days now, and what I thought was funny was on
first listen I thought that ‘7 Times Around the Sun’ conjured this chain gang blues sound, then as I got further into the album, you actually had a track called ‘Chain Gang’! I think it was just an element of what we were experimenting with; on the one hand, you want to hang on to what’s good about the band, that raw energy that’s part of the Jim Jones Revue – that unhinged, slightly psychotic element – but at the same time, we wanted to see how far we could push it. We started to strip stuff down; you can keep adding, and keep adding, and it becomes a wall of white noise, or you can start taking stuff away. So there are these tracks on the record where we’ve basically stripped it back to the bare bones minimum that we could.
So Jim, you’ve played Norwich before to wild appreciation – do you remember anything of our fine city? Yeah, I really like the venue. And Rupert spent his formative years there, so he’s got a gang of cronies that always come down, who seem very cool and so he likes to go back there just for that reason, but it feels really good. We’ve played somewhere quite close to Bury St Edmonds too, which I believe is quite close – that was a wicked venue as well. It seems to be good each time, and we’re looking forward to getting back there again.
Emma Garwood
Te Jim Jones Revue come to the Waterfront on October 18th and will be preceded by the release of their new album, ‘Te Savage Heart’ on October 15th. For tickets, go to
www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the full interview at
Outlineonline.co.uk.
outlineonline.co.uk / October 2012 / 39
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