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For a brief period in the early 1990s, a rousing new music subculture mushroomed in Britain. Wedged between the baggy indie-dance music of Madchester and the retro leanings of Britpop, this scene meshed samples with dance beats, alternative rock and the aesthetics of the skatepark. Bands included Pop Will Eat Itself, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine and EMF. But the kings of the scene, which momentarily sounded like the future, were Jesus Jones.
Jesus Jones sold millions of records, knocked Sting off the top of the album charts and cracked America, where they were nominated for two Grammys and had a number-two hit with 1991’s Right Here, Right Now. But the shifting sands of musical taste flattened their trajectory. Weeks after the release of Jesus Jones’s spry third album, Perverse, in 1993, Suede released their debut album and Blur told us that Modern Life Is Rubbish. By the time Pulp released His ’n’ Hers the following year, Oasis had arrived on the scene and Britpop, with its reverence for the 1960s and 1970s, was the only game in town.
Sitting in a pub beer garden in north London as Jesus Jones gear up to release their first album for eight years, singer Mike Edwards, 62, says that he could easily have followed the Britpop herd. “It was an option that I could see, but it was one that I couldn’t stomach,” he says with typical candour. “I thought everything about it was so un-rock ’n’ roll. There was nothing progressive about it, nothing particularly exciting. There were some nice tunes, of course, but, you know, Bing Crosby had nice tunes.”
While changing musical course might have been commercially expedient, it was “not what we’re about”, he says. “In the Hollywood film version, the band then do their own radically different thing and are a massive success. In the real world, the band then do their own thing and it doesn’t really work out.”
In 1997, Jesus Jones left their label, Food Records, and Edwards became a personal trainer (“the band thought I was nuts, but I was always the least rock ’n’ roll in the group,” he said), while keyboardist and band manager Iain Baker, 60, who is also sitting with us, became a DJ on XFM and NME Radio.
But despite this, Jesus Jones never technically split up. They’ve released three albums this century, have toured the world and later this year will hit the road to mark the 35th anniversary of their album Doubt. Meanwhile, their upcoming new album, Twilight, is a hugely enjoyable, grown-up record in which the glitchy samples of old have been rounded out with ventures into Americana and flamenco. The highlight, the country-tinged Shot in the Chevy, has “Radio 2 playlist” written all over it. Edwards calls it “the non-Jesus Jones song… It’s the kind of thing we would have absolutely hated in the early Nineties.”
The band’s story started in 1988, when London-based Edwards bought a rudimentary £40 sampling machine from Loot magazine. The small device could either be used as a guitar delay pedal or as a recording device to capture four-second clips of sound. “It was an absolute revelation. I was up until four or five in the morning. It set my imagination alight,” he says.
Debut single Info Freako was a riot of scratches and samples over a catchy melody. The late Andy Ross, who signed Jesus Jones to Food, said he’d “never heard anything like this in my life”. On the track What Would You Know?, the band sampled the sirens of a boat in the war film Apocalypse Now (1979). Jesus Jones would tour with a 30kg tower of samplers, sequencers and hard drives on stage. The technology’s limitations forced innovation; they’d sample things at half speed to save precious floppy-disc space, leading to degraded sound, which perfectly suited their techno-punk shtick. “A lot of our sampling came from tortured methods,” says Baker.
Signing to Food was a masterstroke as the nominally independent label was actually a “feeder label” for the giant EMI, giving Jesus Jones both indie credibility and corporate muscle. Take-off was vertical: the band went from playing to modest crowds at the Kentish Town pub the Bull & Gate to supporting the Wonder Stuff and the Shamen. “When you’re in a band you just want people to notice, appreciate, understand and like what you do. When we got the Wonder Stuff gig, we got those four things at 1,000 miles an hour,” says Baker.
Their first album, Liquidizer, did well, but it was their second that propelled them to the big leagues. Doubt, released in 1991, knocked Sting’s earnest The Soul Cages off the top of the album chart. Its lead single, Right Here, Right Now, which sent them stratospheric, initially sampled Jimi Hendrix and Prince’s Sign o’ the Times, but wily music industry lawyers had cottoned on to the uncredited use of samples. Producer Martyn Phillips suggested that Jesus Jones drop the samples after a previous track he’d worked on, The Sun Rising by the Beloved, resulted in an out-of-court settlement when an opera singer was surprised to hear her voice on it in a supermarket. Forget the law, though. It was three other letters that were catching up with Jesus Jones: EMF.
Gloucestershire band EMF mixed samples with indie guitars and dance beats and dressed like skaters. Sounds familiar. Is it fair to call EMF a cartoon version of Jesus Jones? No, retorts Edwards. While he “could see similarities”, he “could never hear” imitation. What about when EMF’s Unbelievable topped the US singles chart in July 1991 while Right Here, Right Now only peaked at number two the following week? I’d have been livid. “I was kind of annoyed that they’d had bigger success than us before us. But I felt it was their own talent,” says Edwards. Baker claims it didn’t rankle at all. Either way, Jesus Jones were riding high: that same month they supported INXS at Wembley Stadium.
Jesus Jones fully embraced booze, drugs and hijinks, although Edwards, as leader and songwriter, was the sensible one. Baker describes the vibe – pre-internet and pre-smartphone – as being like a “turbo-pub environment where the bar never closed”. Guitarist Jerry De Borg would seemingly end every flight covered in marmalade, while bassist Al Doughty was once dangled from a hotel window by legendary tour manager Alan “Gimpo” Goodrick, a long-time associate of electronic duo the KLF. “Gimpo’s holding Alan by the ankles. Alan’s wearing a pair of swimming shorts and motorcycle boots, nothing else. He’s seven floors up over the entrance lobby, which is all glass. All I can hear is Alan laughing at the top of his voice,” says Baker.
Then there’s the Billy Idol story. Jesus Jones had spent the day at an EMI music conference in America, sharing a table with labelmates Robert Palmer, Whitesnake’s David Coverdale, the Pet Shop Boys and Sinéad O’Connor. Drink flowed and Baker commandeered Jesus Jones’s limousine to go clubbing with Idol. “We go clubbing all night. I remember saying to Billy, ‘How are we going to get into this club?’ and Billy says, ‘You just do the face…’” – sideways gurn – “‘and they let you in.’ And so it’s a crazy night.”
Baker and Idol returned to their hotel where, just a few hours later, Baker bumped into his new best friend in the lobby. “I was, like, ‘Mate! How you doing? That was really crazy, man.’ And he just says, ‘Who the f--- are you?’ He had no idea who I was.” Unbelievable.
Life on the road could get grubby. In Select magazine in 1992, journalist Miranda Sawyer wrote a feature about musicians’ carnal escapades with groupies, interviewing members of Blur, Chapterhouse, Jesus Jones and others. In it, De Borg talked about a sleazy but consensual late-night incident with a fan in what he called “the Bathroom of Doom” of a Washington hotel suite.
How do Edwards and Baker reflect on bands’ general behaviour back then? “I was definitely not there,” says Edwards about the Bathroom of Doom night. Baker says it was “not a very enlightened time”, but adds: “As far as partying goes, we were no better or no worse than anybody else. But as far as debauchery goes, I don’t think we were anywhere near the league of a number of other bands.” He doesn’t name names.
Things dipped for Jesus Jones when 1993’s Perverse sold only 500,000 copies (a figure for which many bands would “cut off their right arm” today, says Baker). “Not upset, just bemused” was the keyboardist’s take. In fairness, the performance was hardly surprising for an album that was, as Edwards put it, so “diametrically opposed” to the surging Britpop and grunge scenes. Fellow Food band Blur, once the opening act for Jesus Jones, were soon top dogs. After 1997’s Already, Food and Jesus Jones parted ways.
Lots has changed since then. Today’s much easier digital recording process would have “blown my mind at the end of the 1980s,” says Edwards. That 30kg on-stage Heath Robinson rig has been replaced by a MacBook Air. But modern music’s overabundance of options has birthed the tyranny of choice. “You can spend four days trying to find the right bass drum sound,” says Edwards. Baker likens the infinite choice in the studio to “creative doomscrolling”. “We learnt by necessity to be uber-creative. And that directness and creativity now serve us well at a time when the possibilities are limitless,” says Baker.
Such single-mindedness is typical of Jesus Jones. Admirably, they’ve never followed trends. They’ve also kept going. “We’ve never had more than two or three years off from playing,” says Edwards, despite their various side hustles. And now they’re back with their first new music in almost a decade. Keep this to yourself, but they’ve even written some nice tunes that Bing Crosby might himself have approved of.
Twilight is out on September 21 on Jesus Jones Recordings
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