Jim Jones Revue–The Savage Heart interview
An Interview with Jim Jones by Helen Todner
The Jim Jones Revue will be hitting the road again in just a few days on a live tour that will take them up and down the UK before jetting off for foreign shores to promote their latest album ‘The Savage Heart’. Amidst the whirlwind of preparation the band and their entourage is currently undergoing their lead singer, Jim Jones, managed to find a few minutes to chat about the tour and the new album.
H: Are you looking forward to the tour that’s coming up, rehearsals and everything going well?
J: Yeah I definitely am, festivals can be great but there’s something about being on the road. I think I speak for everyone in the band where you get this thing after like three or four days you transcend a little bit. Everybody gets their telepathy switched on and you’re gigged in. There’s a definite palpable sense that you raise your game a good chunk. Once you hit that spot and the whole touring machine gets rolling nothing can stop you. We have been in those situations where no one’s had sleep for about three days, the equipment’s breaking down, but no matter what’s happening you can go out there and just take people’s heads off. You just develop this unstoppable force it’s like a juggernaut; I’m looking forward to that.
H: You guys got voted best live band in 2011 so you’ve definitely got a reputation as a live band, is it difficult to live up to that?
J:I don’t think we think of it in terms of living up to anything, it’s kind of a given you know? I’m repeating myself a bit but it’s the music itself, you have to give everything to it to get it off the ground. It’s like Frankenstein’s monster you have to put in a lightning storms worth of volts to bring it to life, if you don’t give it that it’ll just never get off the tarmac, it’ll be stuck on the runway. Fortunately the way the chemistry of the band is everybody wants it to get off the ground. You just naturally put your shoulder into it, lean into it, get it moving. You know you can’t really analyse how the chemistry of a band really works it’s one of those things, you can’t plan it, you can’t put it together, your just lucky if you’ve got it and your unlucky if you haven’t. I think it’s just the chemistry of the band is such that everyone is on the same page putting in 200%. I remember when, back in the day, the early days of recording I would sing something, record it, and I would put 100% effort into it and it would just sound like I was chatting with my mum on the phone or something and I realised that you just have to try harder. I think that’s when I went through that phase of either you give up or try harder and I decided to try harder. Certain people, like Little Richard or whoever, they could be chatting to their mum on the phone and it sounds amazing or its straight off the bat, other people have to work really hard and I’m one of the people who have to work really hard to get that sound out but it’s alright, you feel it’s worth it, in the end the payoff is great.
H: I was just going to ask along those lines, I know you have a new keyboardist Henri Herbert, he joined earlier in the year is he doing ok with everything? Is he getting the hang of everything?
J: Yeah yeah yeah yeah, I wouldn’t mind if you could refer to him as a piano player rather than a keyboardist.
H: Sorry.
J: It’s alright it’s just sometimes Rupert says that about him as well and I just associate keyboard player with someone who would do something with Phil Collins or something (laughs) doesn’t fit with something I want in my band. But yeah Henri is great; sorry what was the question about him?
H: Is he settling in with everything, managing to get to grips with everything ok?
J: He’s great. Going back to the Frankenstein analogy, if we were to go into a lab and designed the perfect piano player that would suit all out needs it would come but looking just like Henri! (laughs). He’s perfect, there’s nothing missing there at all, it’s all there and more! Interestingly enough when we first knew we needed to find a new piano player we saw clips of Henri on you tube but thought he’s never want to be in our band. He was playing with a lot of very purist R ‘n’ B type groups, very reverential, got to get the details exactly right, we thought he’s not going to want to be involved in a band that have a bit of vocation for guitar feedback and noise and chopping the structure up. But as it turned out he was dying to move on to do something else, when he came to us he was chomping at the bit to do that. He said to me that most of the guys he worked with before would be telling him “can you tone it down and chill out and you know back off a touch”. Whereas with us (laughs) it’s the other way around, we go “Come on! Give it some more everything you got and more!” It’s great he loved it, we loved it, and on top of that he came already fully… I’m trying to think of the right term… fully programmed with this encyclopaedic knowledge of all the esoteric early pioneering piano players. Not only did he know about them he knew how to play that stuff. When you hear some of it being played, it’s been so forgotten that it’s almost like its coming from another world, pre Victorian. I just think it’s great; you don’t hear people playing that music on records let alone hear them actually playing it live. So it sounds quite exotic to me, it sounds very evocative, and when you chop it up and put it next to a load of guitar noise you’ve got this whole new flavour that you. Our previous piano player had to bow out because he couldn’t get on with the heavy touring. He loved what he was doing, it was his favourite thing that he had ever done, and he had that same sense of release about being able to play piano in that way where you’re able to play in a band as an upfront instrument as opposed to a backing instrument. He was pretty upset that he just couldn’t hack it anymore and he was starting to get quite ill forcing himself to stay out on the road and in the end he had to quit. The thing with Henri is we said to him “right we’ve got three months of touring coming up” this was as soon as he started playing with us. We asked how long have you toured before and he said “oh for about a week” we said “right well we’re going off for three months” and he was “great”! He sort of admired all these early blues guys who would play with people like Muddy Waters and they would do it in cars and do these old long drives on the Chippin circuit. He has masses of admiration for that whole side of playing so he couldn’t wait to get stuck in. He’s just really a powerful little ox of a guy that gets behind the piano, you can’t always see it from the photographs, but when he plays the machine moves, he shakes it.
H: So the new album ‘The savage Heart’ is coming out soon, it’s a bit darker than the previous two albums. Was there a driving force to that or was it something that everyone got together and evolved it into?
J: Yeah, it’s just where we headed this time. When we did the first album we recorded because we just wanted to get better gigs as you do when a band first starts. It was done out of necessity, the mother of invention, we didn’t have any money.I wanted it to sound exciting it was a very low budget recording and we just kept pushing the levels until it was really in the red. There’s parts of it that are just why not? We thought no one’s going to play this so we were surprised when we heard it coming out on the BBC. They liked that about it, that it was different from everything else. When it came time to do the second album we were “right how are we gonna approach this?” Rather than get stuff quickly down onto a recording people know who we are now. We talked about it and we all agreed the one thing we didn’t want to do was a repeat of the first album. We wanted to take a step and so the same thing with the third one we were very concerned that we didn’t want to feel like we were standing still. So we started pushing out as far as we could trying to hang on to what we thought was the real guts of the Jim Jones Revue and what was good about the band. Which you can’t wrap up in one term, but generally, it has a certain intensity, a rawness, about the band. We tried to hang onto that but see if we could push it into new areas into deeper waters and really dig down. The stuff we found was a bit darker but we went with that. Normally people just see the outward faces and the psychosis of the Jim Jones Revue and this is a chance for them to dig down inside and see inside, see what makes it tick. We felt that everything that went on there, even though it was like a bit different, from what we had before. We tried to hang onto the essence, you can still hear that it’s us, even on something like the really slow one at the end ‘Moonlight Oceans and Savage Hearts’. You can still tell that it’s Jim Jones Revue even though it’s quite a long way from what you hear on the first album.
H: There is a song on there I wanted to ask about. ‘In and Out of Harm’s Way’ is there a story behind that one?
J: Now that’s very interesting. The way the songs were written was pretty much every way you could write them. There’s a couple of songs on there that were already fully formed and we were trying them out live before, there’s songs that came from ideas of mine that were completely fully formed and we worked them out with the band to bring it to life and then there’s stuff that came out of ideas from the whole band just going on a groove and building it from there that came out of guitar ideas and then there’s stuff that was written in the studio itself that’s quite last minute. For me a lot of my favourite records have a tribal sense about them. Songs like Elvis’ ‘Hound Dog’ or Jimmy Hendrix ‘Voodoo Child’, it has this tribal flavour to it, on the one hand sounds quite urban on the other hand it’s got this real connection with the cave man brutal instinct. So we were talking about Eddie Cocchran’s ‘Summer Time Blues’ which has that as well and we were trying to come up with a riff that had some of those elements that Eddie Cochran used, the way it swings the way it’s got a real good blend of white and black music and it ended up as the main groove for ‘In and Out of Harm’s Way’ a million miles from Eddie Cochrun (laughs). Anyway it mutated until it became that and we all quite liked it, so yeah we worked on it over the course of a few days. It’s probably the longest song we’ve ever done or recorded but we’re all quite pleased with it. In a lot of ways I think it’s like the centre piece of our album, it’s pivotal, it touches on all the other elements that are in the album but in a different way it’s like the birthing station. That was a song that was written in a way where the band just worked with it and I came up with the approach that I was going to use on the vocals, as you know it goes back and forth between something that is quite intimate to something that is quite shouty.
H: Yeah, it’s a hell of a song, defiantly my favourite out of the album.
J: Oh great, I’m glad you like it yeah. It’s very tactile you really feel like you can get your fingers into it and feel it, it’s very textural.
H: There’s a debate going around between the writers of With Guitars, the album front cover, where exactly was it taken?
J: We were down in Southend and we came up to the point where you can first see the oil refinery, which is Camdey Island I believe. We just thought it was good. The whole feel of the album, you know we’d been talking a lot about music and at the same time trying to reflect some of the times that are going on around us, what with the recession, you’ve had the riots, the whole 99% and 1% thing, and just to try and reflect the mood of the times, yeah it’s another thing that’s a bit dark as an album. We thought that was a great image of the brutal guts of the world pocking through with the oil refinery sticking up as its next to the water as well there’s something about that that’s quite cool. But it’s a good image and it gives a sense of a journey.
H: It’s a very dramatic image and definitely fits the feel of the album.
J: Ah cool, yeah, that was the aim really, just to try and touch on something and try to tie everything in together. Not to make a concept album because that’s not the type of band we are but to have something where everything touches on something together, to make a more cohesive whole.
H: Got any big plans for next year after the tour? Are you going to keep on touring or are you going to take it easy and work on your record label?
J: We’re going to be still touring next year, we’ll be on the road for the next 18 months. I know we’ve all agreed that we want to keep writing stuff, we feel that we’re in a certain creative pocket that we want to hang onto. Sometimes when you’re playing live regularly you lose sight of that connection, that creative opening, so we’re going to try and keep writing stuff for the next album so when the time comes you we can, bam, dive in the studio and record it. But yeah were just trying to get out and play it, play it everywhere England, Europe, America, Australia, we’re off to Japan in November, be the first time out there, which is quite exciting for us, I’ve never been out there before in my life so should be pretty cool.
H: Whole new horizons coming?
J:Yeah, and I think like with everything in this band we’ll just see how far we can push it (laughs) just keep pushing.
2012 UK Tour Continues
Thu Oct 18th – Norwich – Waterfront – www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk/events/the-jim-jones-revue1.aspx
Fri Oct 19th – Birmingham – O2 Academy 2 – www.ticketweb.co.uk / 0844 477 2000
Sat Oct 20th – Harlow – Square – www.thesquareharlow.com / 01279 305 000
Sun Oct 21st Bristol – Trinity – www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=gb_south&query=detail&event=520752
Tues Oct 23rd – Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms – www.seetickets.com/Event/THE-JIM-JONES-REVUE/Wedgewood-Rooms/652617/
Wed Oct 24th – Brighton – Concorde 2 – www.seetickets.com / 01273 673 311
Thu Oct 25 – London – Electric Ballroom – www.gigsandtours.com/Tour/Jim-Jones-Revue/?src=jimjonesrevue