|
As we were both in the School Choir
did that have any influence on his music career?"Absolutely!"
says Johnny "I would say School choirs and music lessons and all
of those things were very important. And I need to make a point
about the current education system. Music needs to be more
firmly integrated into the School curriculum so it's not just
something that is added on, it is something that is central." he
says with his parent hat on. "Actually being in School choirs
and Church choir as well, even though there was no God, they
teach an awful lot about harmonies, although these days
everybody seems to do hip hop songs so you don't learn about
harmonies."
We both had music lessons with
different teachers. I for one play the piano and just cannot
sight read music. In fact I am terrible at it but what was
Johnny like with his piano lessons at the time? "I
had piano lessons for years and I was absolutely rubbish! I now
discover that was actually quite useful because I now know how
chords relate to other chords but I'm still useless. I can play
stuff with the right hand, I can play stuff with the left hand
but I can't play the two together which luckily together with
today's recording technology is no disadvantage." A fair point
made by him.
"I also played the violin. And if my
piano playing was bad then my violin playing was absolutely
appalling until I chopped the top of my finger off and then I
had a fantastic excuse for giving up the violin but frankly it
had given up on me anyway" Johnny says laughing
So when did he start playing the
guitar because it wasn't at School and did it improve his
musical ability? "I was at college and I was going to form a
band, by which point I knew I couldn't play any instruments. I'd
played the piano and violin for years and another thing about me
is that I have no idea when to give up. This doesn't apply to
musical stuff, it's everything in general. So when I came to
form a band the idea was that I was going to be a singer
in a band and I wasn't going to play any instrument, but I was a
bit concerned about feeling incredibly exposed on the stage so I
thought I'd get a guitar, a huge great semi-acoustic essentially
to hide behind. I wasn't even going to plug it in! But when I
did plug it in and turn it up I realised it actually plays
itself, it's remarkably easy." he says proudly.
The idea of forming a band whilst at
College led to another strong friendship bond with David W.
Brown who is bass guitarist with "Modesty Blaise" and again
Johnny made a lasting impression. "We were at the same college,
Swansea, and on the same course but curiously we had no common
lectures at all so I managed to go two years without meeting him
at all which is amazing! And then when it was put about that I
was putting a band together. Various people who did know him
knew that he wanted to be in a band and so a meeting between the
two of us was engineered, whereby he came round to my flat."
"I really didn't know who he was but
he knew who I was and he tells a story about me whereby
there were two incidents that made him decide to join a band
with me. Firstly, he claims he met me at a party of a mutual
friend which was in a three story house with the bottom storey
as the kitchen, the middle storey was the living room upon which
there were a lot of people smoking illegal substances, being off
their faces and sort of listening to Gong or various other
rubbish like that. Dave had no interest in that and he wandered
up to the third storey where he found me." says Johnny
laughing. "I don't recall this, but he found me jumping up and
down on someone's bed to a distorting cassette player
playing 'Velvet Underground'. He came into the room and I
carried on jumping up and down, he was there for five minutes,
he went away and I was still jumping up and down! That's the
first story he tells of how we met. I have no reason to
disbelieve him."
"The second one was when he came
round to my flat to decide whether he was going to join the band
or not. It was 1986 or something like that. At the time of Jesus
and Mary Chain had released their first single 'Upside Down' and
I had a poster from the 'Mary Chain's' Upside Down on my wall
and it was hung upside down at which point Dave decided he was
going to join the band."
The name of Johnny's first band was
'Boats Not Ships' and the explanation of how that came about is
just as bizarre. "The idea behind it was things that are small
rather than things that were big. It wasn't much of an idea, a
philosophy as such. It was just one of those things from the
British comedies of the 40's and 50's. It's like 'I say sir I
like your boat' ' That's not a boat it's a ship' grumble
grumble. I saw it in a film recently and laughed much to the
dismay of other people." he explained.
The band's first demo back in the
day's when everything was stuck on audio cassette was called
"Give Elvis The Crumbs" and it contained three songs. "One Of
These Fine Days", "Shift The Sky" and "Caprice" and I still have
it in my music collection. What I do remember is that at the end
of the tape there is a clip of Elvis Presley talking and I did
wonder why call it "Give Elvis The Crumbs" and add the man
himself at the end of the tape.
"There was a stray dog and as people
in colleges tend to live in groups, we had a stray dog named
Elvis. It just came at the end of one of those conversations.
'What are we going to feed Elvis?' 'Oh I don't know give Elvis
the crumbs'. And then we found some tape of Elvis Presley saying
he hadn't had that many sandwiches and that everybody else had
eaten them, so we nicked that and shoved it on the end of the
recording" said Johnny
But that wasn't the only performance
for 'Boats Not Ships' whilst Jon was studying at College. "We
managed to get to play a John Peel Road Show which for an indie
band was a great possible leap forward. We played with 'The
Three Wise Men' who were a rap group." At this point Johnny
starts laughing. "And I remember walking into their dressing
room and them saying 'yo what ya jive to' and me saying 'we're
a pop group thank you very much'. It was very strange. But we
played the John Peel Road Show and we were the worst we'd ever
been, we were absolutely appalling. The guitarist was so out of
it he started the wrong song every time. The drummer had no idea
what he was doing. Dave and I tried to hold it together, failed
dismally, absolute shambles, broken guitar, always broken guitar
strings anyway, but broken guitars, broken amplifiers and
everything. It was a total shambles. It was unlistenable.
Typically Peel loved it!" said Johnny laughing out loud.
"We met John Peel and he said he
loved it and 'please send me in a tape with all your contact
details and we'll book up a session'. That was brilliant. Seemed
like a fantastic step forward. Typically I then messed that up
by going into a studio and recording properly. So I had all
these ideas about recording, what it should sound like and used
them all. I over produced it and tried to make it sound as good
as I could but it ended up as a light weight pop record which is
what we were interested in doing, but played live it was an
absolute shambles. John Peel liked it when we were an absolute
shambles and obviously loathed it when we weren't."
So in between finishing College,
disbanding 'Boats Not Ships' because only half the band moved
back to Bristol, Dave and Johnny continued with their musical
aspirations and attempted to find new members to join a new band
putting adverts in music magazines but whoever turned up just
wasn't right for what they had in mind. They played around with
names and at one point 'The Heartache Express' was used all but
briefly. In between Dave and Johnny took day jobs and continued
their search. However time wasn't wasted. "I used to concentrate
on song writing a lot of the time. I did do quite a few songs in
those days and I threw away an awful lot." says Johnny.
I reminded him of one song he had
written during that time where the lyric went "I can't wait for
it to snow again 'cause you can't make footprints in the rain".
"That song still exists." he says. "That had a really good hook
in it actually. We recorded that in a studio in Oxfordshire with
some fantastic session musicians. I'll dig that out one day and
see what that sounds like. We'd actually played that as 'Boats
Not Ships'. We played that for the first time in Port Talbot
once and we played there with The Bodenes." Johnny recalls
Another song I remembered was called
"February Forever Girl" which had some sort of connection with
Susanna Hoffs from The Bangles at the time. "Yes Susanna Hoffs.
Somebody gave me a Bangles calendar and obviously it just stayed
on February all year. It was February forever! But
I've come to realise that songs are rarely about
one thing and although they have starting points they don't end
up being like that. I can rarely sustain an idea beyond the
verse. Certainly the idea 'February Forever Girl' was an
interesting concept because you have February which is a fixed
time thing, twenty-eight or twenty-nine days and then you just
suppose that with forever which is something that is obviously
infinite. I thought that was interesting." Johnny says
thoughtfully
In that case I wanted to know how he
structured a song and how he went about song writing. "I don't
think there is any one way to write a song. If I find something
that I think is interesting then I will write about it. I have
in the past written from titles and do tend to work an awful
lot on lyrics and they will go around and around until I get
them exactly right. I've written from melodies too." he
says pausing for thought.
"In terms of structure I think that
I've had a tendency to do quite linear songs in the past. Quite
often I'll find a song where the structure is interesting and
then I'll use that structure to see what I can put into that
particular rhyming scheme or that particular way it's set up.
But the chief thing about writing songs is that you need to have
a reason and I realised that I just can't write them now for
writing's sake. Certainly there is a lot to be said for having
the habit of writing something every day but the ways of writing
songs are many and varied. I've never done the playing with
loops and that sort of thing though" he says.
I ask Johnny who influences him with
his song writing? "An awful lot of influence comes from the
golden age of popular song. Cole Porter, Jerome Kerr, that sort
of thing. The structures of some of the Cole Porter songs are
absolutely outrageous, so complicated. I used to know all this
stuff, I used to know what influenced me. I now realise that I
probably didn't know and probably don't know. I am certainly
somebody who analyzes things so if you went through song by song
I can certainly tell you which bits came from where, which bits
I ripped off. Which bits I changed"
So I ask about his song 'Carol
Mountain'. "The influence there was the Steven Gains book
entitled "Heroes and Villains" which is about The Beach Boys.
The stories and the song are taken from that. I read the book
and wrote a song about it. Musically for 'Carol Mountain' I had
a lot of songs that progressed whereby the chords dropped one
note each time and I reversed it. So the chords pick up one note
each time and that's all I did. Rather like the 'Four Tops' and
Holland Dozier Holland with 'I Can't Help Myself'. They then
needed a follow up hit to that and that was 'The Same Old Song'.
Holland, Dozier and Holland took the melody and reversed it and
it was the same old song".
Another song I saw the band play
live recently is a new track called "Girls Just Wanna Dance".
What was the influence there? "We haven't finished the recording
of that song yet but Gregory, a noted 'Modesty Blaise' guitarist
is a dancer. He likes going out to night clubs and dancing. I
don't dance and Dave and I and Gregory had a spate where we
would put on the most stupidest of flares we could and went out
to crappy night clubs. We were '70's vigilantes, we had huge
flares on and went out looking for trouble and it just came from
a few ideas out of that. The lyrics came from just a few things
that happened when we went out to night clubs and behaved
stupidly. I remember the songs gestation period was very long
and I'm pretty pleased with the final lyrics on that. I'm very
pleased with it in general actually. There's this idea you know
the bit 'You dancin' you asking, I'm asking, I'm dancing' thing.
I've got some idea where I'm going to put that
into the middle somewhere. It used to be from off the front of
The Liver Birds theme".
'Modesty Blaise' formed in 1993 with
Johnny Collins and David W. Brown as the nucleus of the band.
Other musicians have come and gone over the years. I even
remember their first gig at The Mauritania in Bristol that
same year but are 'Modesty Blaise' bad for business because the
Mauritania no longer exists? "An awful lot of places we have
played have closed down or been demolished after we play there!
The George and Railway, we played there, that's gone now. All
sorts of places. Not just here, but other countries as well. We
go and tour abroad and if we go back to places we've been before
we often find ourselves driving past an open space where the
night club we'd previously played had been." says Johnny. "We're
getting large parts of central Europe demolished! I've no idea
why that is. It does seem to happen an awful lot. Places where
we have played then go out of business which is excellent!" at
which point Johnny is laughing at the jinx the band must have on
venues. - Well 'Modesty Blaise' played The Cooler in Park Street
earlier this year and that is still open so maybe the jinx has
been broken?
So why call the band 'Modesty Blaise' as the name is associated
with a cartoon character. "I know." says Johnny "The interesting
thing about that was that we spent ages looking for a name and
there was this time limit on it as we were recording for a label
in Birmingham. They were going to release a single and we had to
plump for something. We rejected Belle and Sebastian as a name
which I still think was probably right and I remember the day
when the labels were being printed up for the single or the day
the artwork had to be submitted, phoning Dave up and saying,
'why aren't we called Modesty Blaise?' We couldn't think of a
reason and it just seemed like a great name because it was a
name that didn't really mean anything. However Modesty Blaise is
a 1960's cartoon character and people ended up thinking we were
a real '60s band. And of course the Evening Post used to have
the cartoons for Bristow and Modesty Blaise from the days when
my folks used to get the paper. I just want to say in retrospect
that 'Modesty Blaise' is a dreadful choice for a name because of
those very same reasons that people think we are a '60s group
and I loathe that now."
'Modesty Blaise' are signed to a record company in Germany and
yet their album and singles sell by the truck load throughout
Europe. They've even sold records in Japan and recently Johnny
found out the band were selling in Mexico as well after meeting
their Mexican radio plugger at a Music Industry event. Yet they
are still to break into the UK market. "The way that I explain
that to people abroad and that question gets asked everytime we
go there, is that the British music industry is significantly
more sophisticated than the music industries in the rest of
Europe. I don't know though if it is more sophisticated than the
US music industry or not but it's certainly more sophisticated.
It's more fashioned based. So if I want to get on Radio 1 in the
UK I'd have to be on a playlist and in order to get on that
playlist I'd have to employ a plugger to try and get my record
played or something like that. To get on Radio 1 in Germany the
person from the record company calls up and says we are in
Berlin, do you want them in and radio will say 'Oh yes but we'll
play their record a couple weeks before hand to promote it'.
It's less sophisticated. I'm not saying it's worse or better. I
think it's better obviously and easier to get heard. Music is a
very much DIY ethic now" explains Johnny. "It didn't take me
long to realise that record companies are mainly banks and
marketing departments. They lend you the money and market your
product and then they take the money back. It's actually that
marketing expertise that you need. And the British music
industry is fashion led".
Johnny has crossed paths with many
musicians and Edwyn Collins, formerly of 'Orange Juice' worked
with 'Modesty Blaise' on some of their recording sessions. "Edwyn
produced, what turned out to be our first single (Christina
Terrace) as a practice for recording 'Gorgeous George." Johnny
explains "He had a studio which we christened New River Studio
on account of the fact that New River was next to it in North
London. He was preparing to record his album 'Gorgeous George'
whence a 'Girl Like You' was released, and he just wanted some
practice before he did it so we went and recorded a single there
which he produced. He played on some of our tracks as well. He
is a quite astounding guitarist and it was a difficult time
actually. I remember at the time saying 'I'm never going to have
anyone else produce me again I'm going to do it myself from now
on' because I found it very difficult. If you listen to
'Gorgeous George' or if you listen to 'A Girl Like You' and then
'Christina Terrace' you'll find they have an awful lot in
common. A lot of the sounds are the same. It's the same
instruments we used."
And talking of the song 'Christina
Terrace' I remember the promotional video to that. "It
was recorded in and around Bristol and of course Bristol
Airport. I bet you wouldn't be allowed to do that now, film at
airports!" Johnny says proudly as at the time that was a real
coup.
The video itself was sort of James
Bond-ish in a way. "Ummm yes" and he starts laughing. "At this
point people thought we were this 1960's band thing, so the idea
was we would shove as many '60s cliches in three minutes as we
could possibly think of to get them the hell out of the way so
people would realise we were taking the piss and that we're not
a 1960's band at all. Nobody went poor by under estimating the
general public. But the video was just entirely misunderstood.
We threw in stuff like running along the station platform at
Temple Meads by the train in black and white and it was supposed
to look a little bit like 'Hard Day's Night' and Icaress files
bit. My friend Ashton was in a role along the lines of James
Bond Oddjob type thing. All of these sixties cliches, waving
from the plane, riding scooters and then playing on the tarmac
that was meant to look like the scene from 'I am the Walrus'
from The Beatles 'Magical Mystery Tour' and various things like
that. It didn't work at all. Everybody just thought 'oh look
they're a '60s band and they are doing all that.' 'No, no
they're taking piss, honest'." Johnny says frustratingly.
It was a fun video and formed
part of a HTV documentary that Johnny was doing at the
time. "The very first time I saw it was at HTV on a forty
foot video wall in front of everybody else, and the first
minute of the video, well it seemed like twenty minutes, is
a huge great close up of my head which I saw on a forty foot
screen and it looks like I've got no teeth! Oh god I hated
that. But I quite like it when it starts cutting about.
There are a few things I said at the time, no speeded up
film because we don't want to look like 'The Monkees', no
this, no that and virtually everything I said I don't want
in it ended up in it. And so that has actually become the
template for things that we have done ever since because we
do things that we think are going to perceived in some way
and they are perceived in exactly the opposite way. We do
things that are funny but are taken as serious and we do
things we think are serious and they are taken as jokes.
That is a pretty good way of working out what's happened to
us in terms of what we've done and that's been the way of
the world for us" he says
'Modesty Blaise' have been
referred to as the least hard working band in show business
and I wondered why. "It's a James Brown thing" says Jon
casually. "James Brown. Most hard working man in show
business. I yearn for the day when bands and artistes have
phrases like that after their name such as 'soul brother
number one'. 'The most hard working man in show business'.
And then 'Modesty Blaise. The least hard working band in
show business'. It's not far from the truth. When was my
last record released?" he asks. Well quite sometime ago but
another album is in the pipeline.
The band are also referred to as
'purveyors of fine pop music since the mid the mid 20th
century' and Johnny doesn't know why. "You have to write
something and it doesn't really matter what you say it's just
that we have a certain turn of phrase and it's the way we tend
to use it But I don't take that stuff seriously. It's very much
tongue in cheek" he says. "We are defined as different things in
different countries. It always comes as a surprise to me. In
Spain we were signed to a punk label called Animal but we were
regarded as a Mod band. I don't know where this came from, I
don't know what a mod band is but that is how we are regarded in
Spain. In Germany we are regarded as a Brit Pop band. That's
fine, you understand something from that but Brit Pop in Germany
means a completely different thing. Radiohead are Brit Pop in
Germany and it means you are a pop group from Britain I think
but then they lump it all together. It's hard to define to have
a genre that encompasses Blur, Oasis and Pulp. Three very
different sounding bands and yet they are all classed as being
of the same genre and we are too, a Brit Pop band."
But back to that album that is in
the pipeline. What can we expect from 'Modesty Blaise' in the
future? After all they showcased some new songs recently and the
fans loved them. "I need to finish the songs we have, but we've
come to the end of our contract with Apricot Records now and I
need to work out what we are going to do, because they are quite
keen to re-sign us but I'm not so sure. So I don't know what
record label we'll be with or if we'll be with a record label.
Who knows. The music industry is changing so rapidly." Obviously
a lot to think about.
But fans want to know when the they
can get their sticky hands on new 'Modesty Blaise' material. "We
are probably a third of the way through recording the next album
but we've been a third of the way of recording it for quite a
while now. Part of the problem is I need to do the horns and the
strings and for me to do that I need time and I don't have any
time at the moment. But a third of it is done and finished and
the final third I haven't started on yet. Eventually we will get
something out to the fans but when and what format, it will be
announced on our web sites." says Johnny
So would Jon consider going the same way as Prince with an
album release? "What give my records away with ....... the
Sunday Mail?! I don't think that is going to sell many more
papers is it? I think the idea that he is not going to make
any money in the UK is completely bizarre but it was a very
clever move. The music industry has changed somewhat. It
always used to be you lost a fortune by playing live but you
did because it promoted your record sales. It's becoming
kind of the other way round. You are losing money on
recordings but they are the things that attract people into
the halls to see you playing live and the ticket prices are
higher than they were before." he says.
So how would he like to see his music released in the
future, after all I am a bit of a vinyl junkie and prefer
that or CD to downloads. "I do like a physical format, but I
suspect it will be both. It very much depends on how long I
take to actually perfecting the rest of the material I've
got to do and it isn't as if I've been working constantly"
says the musical perfectionist. "Some of the songs for the
new album have been around for a while, but I've been
through all sorts of weird personal stuff which has meant we
didn't do anything for several years. It's very easy to be
in 'Modesty Blaise' because we don't do anything!"
But sometime ago Johnny mentioned doing some sort of Country
and Western tribute or project. What happened to that idea?
"I still want to make a Country and Western album and I want
to make a bossa nova album. I've got an album cover and a
title for the Country album. But you never know we may well
get around to it." -'Modesty Blaise' do Country and Western,
now that would be an interesting concept and major change of
direction for the band. - "I don't like tribute bands or if
tribute bands have to exist then it has to be in some kind
of parallel world. You just look down the listings of any
venue and you'll find a couple 'Led Zeppelin tribute bands,
a couple of Jam tribute bands, and you think oh what's the
point?"
With another album release on it's way but no release date
set yet, there is one thing Johnny would like the group to
be remembered for and he concludes this in his own words
"The least hard working band in show-business!"
|
