Interview: The Jim Jones Revue
The Jim Jones Revue should not exist in the 21st century. They belong to the rock and roll psychosis and cannon of the late 50’s sitting next to Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. But somehow, The Jim Jones Revue have made rock and roll look cool again. Something our grandfathers would be thankful for, especially in a world full of invading and demoralising pop commercial music. Noted for their live shows which are capable of burning ear drums, melting brains and leaving audiences sweat dripping for more, The Revue are beginning to make a name for themselves in many major music circles. After releasing their debut self-titled in 2008 and their acclaimed follow up Burning Your House Down in 2010, the garage punk five piece are beginning to ignite their new found recognition and are taking it back to Australia for a run of festival and headline shows. I got the chance to chat to Jim Jones who revealed that if you are ever in a sticky security situation in the US, just mention David Letterman and you’ll be fine.
Hey Jim! I wanted to firstly congratulate you on your London Music Award nomination.
Oh thank you very much. I only just found about that myself.
How was your reaction to it?
Well, you know, we weren’t really expecting it. But it’s great to be nominated for the music award. Some of the other people involved in it, there are some quite heavy weight names, you know, PJ Harvey, Arctic Monkeys and Laura Marling and people like that. It’s sort of like, “Wow!” I feel really privileged to be included in all that.
What do you think your chances are for taking out the gong?
I have no idea mate. Yeah, I guess we will have to wait and see what happens. We will just keep doing what we are doing.
You finished your US tour not long ago. That seemed to be a gruelling tour. How was that experience for you?
It was quite gruelling. We set out to do the David Letterman Show straight after this concert in Paris called Rock en Seine and we were organised and scheduled to do that show and then the next day we had to fly into New York and then we would do the Letterman thing and then from there we would have a couple of days and go on to the West Coast and start the tour.
But as we were finishing our show in Paris we were hearing on the news that in New York there was a hurricane coming down and they cancelled all the flights and we were horrified. We were like “Oh no!” So we tried everything like – can we fly into Philadelphia and drive across into Boston and drive down – and we went through all these options and it seemed like nothing was going to happen. In the end the people at the Letterman Show said they had to cancel it and said
“Don’t worry we will book you in another night” and we thought like “Yeah, yeah, yeah” you know, when will that be?
But they did. They turned it around and had it the following week on the Wednesday. But what it meant was that we had to drive home from Paris and then because of the way the airlines were they wouldn’t change the flights from London. So we had to drive back to Paris, fly from Paris up to Vancouver to start the West Coast part of the tour and come down a few days and then we went across to New York to do the Letterman Show where it was rescheduled and back to San Francisco to do two shows there and then it was back to the East Coast to play some shows in Brooklyn and then we carried on up through the mid-West. So our body clocks and time zones were completely shaken up. We didn’t really know if we were coming or going. But it was so exciting to be out there and doing these shows and the response we got was amazing. So that keeps you going.
I wanted to ask you about that Letterman show, what’s the pressure like before playing in front of I guess millions of TV viewers? Is it a weird pressure?
Yeah I know, I mean, I think for us in some ways the process of just getting there was so convoluted that by the time we were there we were just so glad that it happened we just wanted to get on there and do our thing. I mean we played pretty much every night when we were on the road and it was just like “OK, here’s another show, go on, get on the stage and do it!” Obviously it was exciting to be involved in the Ed Sullivan Theatre and so many people have played there over the years. I mean Elvis Presley played there. It’s hard not to sense a certain historic relevance of the building and the place. Everyone there was really cool and I think David Letterman genuinely liked it, you know, a few people have said “He don’t talk to people he doesn’t like” and he definitely came over and congratulated us and he was really into it. It was really good, it went well and we were really pleased and I think it went just about as well as it could have.
You guys used a blog to keep track of your travels in the US, did you find the blog as a therapeutic thing to get you through these tough times on the US Tour.
Yeah, well I mean, it wasn’t me who wrote the blog, it was our bass player Gavin [Jay]. He had sort of taken it upon himself to do that and I’m glad he has, because I just tried to get myself together with trying to sleep and getting up and doing a show and you know, and then travel. I mean one of the journeys we did was nearly 16 hours and that was on the road and you know, that was enough for me. But yeah, I imagine a blog keeps his head together. I just kind of buckled down and worked on writing down ideas for new material.
You guys were playing a few new songs on the US tour. Where are The Jim Jones Revue now in terms of writing and recording?
Yeah we are working on getting material together for our next album, which will hopefully come out early in the New Year. We have the tour of Australia coming up, which is pretty exciting, the Falls Festival and the other headline shows that we got coming up. So we are pretty excited about that. And it looks like we are playing at Artrocker, which is this sort of online magazine; we’ve been nominated for best live band for that. So we will be playing at this Artrocker show at the beginning of December with this guy Gruff Rhys, the guy from the Super Furry Animals. That’s what’s going on with us at the moment, just writing and rehearsing and getting ourselves ready and just looking forward to Australia. That’s what really the next big thing in our sights.
Can Australian audiences be prepared for a few new songs live?
Definitely. Yeah, that’s going to be the perfect time for us to test drive all these numbers before we go and record the album. So you can definitely look forward to a few new surprises.
You were here last on the Big Day Out tour in January. How was that experience for you?
It was just incredible. For me it was the first time I had been to Australia and you know, before I went there, there were a couple of people saying to me “This is the best entrée to a country you going to get” and it was just incredible. You know, the people we were hanging out with, the guys from the bands from Grinderman, the Stooges, Primal Scream, Wolfmother, it was like the coolest people we’ve seen regularly and you know staying at the same hotels and traveling together and playing the shows and it was sort of really good to be among them. It’s like a real comradely as well you know, being a part of the Big Day Out sort of show and it was just sort of a good time from start to finish and it had great shows, great hotels and good company. And you know every now and then you’d have to play a bit (laughs). It was this incredible experience.
A lot of artists say it is the most relaxing tours they could possibly do.
Yeah the Big Day Off (laughs). I mean, we crammed in a lot of stuff; we had a situation around Christmas time. Our piano player, due to the gruelling schedule of the touring we were doing, he just had to leave. Which left us in a predicament, it was too late to get someone together and organise a work visa. So we had to find someone in Australia that could play piano for us which meant any of our free time was spent just trying to rehearse and we worked with this guy called Clayton Doley who is from Sydney and he was amazing. He was really good but we did have to work hard to make sure we were up to speed with the songs. Most of our time off was taken up with that unfortunately, but it was still an amazing experience.
Your shows are so full of energy. How do you pull yourself up the next night to play another gig? How do get that energy back up?
It’s kind of quite daunting in the early part of a tour. You kind of get conditioned; it’s like anything else I suppose. Once you get out and in front of the noise of the guitar amps and the drums and stuff, it kind of lifts you, the audience as well. The audiences have been so amazing in Australia during the Big Day Out and then the shows we did ourselves, we had a fantastic response that can lift you off your feet, even if you are on your last legs, because the energy gets put across.
The writing of your music comes from your London environment. What happened during the London riots? Do you think that can have an impact on your writing for the new album?
Yeah. The riots, yeah. I mean, it happened actually right where I lived. I actually got caught up in a situation where I was walking up the street and they were closing the stores around me and I was going in to try and buy a birthday present for my wife actually. I had just come off the road coming back from France and landed back in London and jumped off the bus and this was going on in the streets and there were police vans whizzing up the street and I was like “Wow! What’s going on?” I heard a few reports about a few disturbances but you know, within half an hour, the next thing was riot police, you know, coming down my street and I had to go back home and just watch it all out of my window. And then I tuned on the news and I could see film footage of around the corner from where I live of cars being set on fire. It was just quite mad experience to see that and you know I feel really bad for old people and stuff who couldn’t take care of themselves. Things got quite out of hand and you know, if you could imagine some of the older people in the community just not knowing what’s going on and seeing things being set on fire, it must be quite worrying.
After a gig, what’s the mood like back stage after a performance?
Yeah, pretty elevated. It’s similar to like two boxers coming back in after a fight or something. You know, its sort of completely sweaty but its elevated. To be all quite high and charged up, you sort of need this kind of period of cooling down not just physically but emotionally. You are sort of highly charged and you kind of have to dissipate before you can talk to people on a normal level again. I mean, generally it’s always good. I don’t think I can think of many shows where we don’t manage to turn the crowd around and as long as you get that feeling of elevation where everyone has sort of, the band and the audience have put in 100% then you, I don’t know, you have to try really hard to be in a bad mood.
The audience reaction is a fascinating thing. You guys had a gig on the anniversary of 9/11 in the US. How was that? The mood was apparently “sombre coupled with paranoia”. Was that a weird experience?
Yeah, in Brooklyn. I mean the show itself was really good. It was the same as always for our shows. But there was that sort of mood. It was really weird actually because we had to come from out of town to drive back in from New York and they had roadblocks stopping any suspicious looking vehicles and of course we were in this big vehicle with a load of us and they pulled us over and they were talking about how they wanted to search the back of the thing [van]
and make sure we weren’t carrying any explosives or any sort of terrorist activity going on. And they looked at us and these cops were saying, “You guys in a band?” and we were like “Yeah, we just played David Letterman,” as soon as we mentioned David Letterman that was it, they gave us the green and off you go (laughs). It was like American express, yeah that will do nicely. It was like “Wow, we should use his name more often.”
The Jim Jones Revue are playing at Falls Festival Marion Bay and Lorne. In addition they will be playing The Zoo on the 3rd of January, with tickets on sale here.