Where Dylan had his ‘Judas’ moment going from acoustic to electric, Jack Jones has made a switch that might bamboozle a lot of his fans by going from electric (guitar) to electro. Having established himself as a guitar slinging matinee idol fronting Welsh riot starters Trampolene and playing in Peter Doherty’s band the Puta Madres, Jack has hung up his guitar and embraced a fresh and highly contemporary sound in which to couch his hard hitting state of the nation poems of contemporary fear and loathing. His lyrics tackle many of today’s burning preoccupations: mental health, drug addiction, mortality, and the tortuous demands of technology. There’s also joy and hope in there. With some of his catchiest tunes so far, it’s a record that’ll both open up this natural-born star to untapped audiences, and reveal hidden depths to those already ‘on the team’ . It was a tough but ultimately triumphant journey, which saw him facing down his demons, examining his darkest experiences, ultimately to emerge with the defining record of his career so far.
“I’ve always worked in the elements and atmosphere of a band,” says Jack, in his enthusiastic South Wales lilt. “Growing up, I was obsessed with guitarists, especially Johnny Greenwood [fromRadiohead], and Tom Morello [Rage Against The Machine]. I knew I needed to try something different, to try and improve as a writer, and see what was lurking inside me. ”The new direction arose out of an introduction to Mancunian artist/producer/laptop warrior Adam French. For Jones, French’s way of composing and recording was like being teleported into a parallel dimension. “Everyone from my generation is so computer savvy,” he explains.“I love playing computer games, but when it comes to music production, my brain just shuts off for some reason…” “So,” he smiles ruefully, “working with Adam was a massive challenge. I wasn’t sat there with a guitar, or listening to a John Cooper Clarke LP. It was like, ‘Right, this is the concept for the song, there’s the beat–you’ve got five minutes to write something!” Jack, however, is a compulsive wordsmith, an obsessive jotter-down of phrases, and weird things that people say. Across three studio albums and a hatful of singles and EPs since 2013, his work with Trampolene has always drawn from this humungous, ever-accumulating verbal resource. On his own, he has also published a novel (2023’s ‘Swansea to Hornsey’) and recited poems and delivered spoken-word on stage. In that sense, he had plenty of ‘previous’, and was more than equipped for the task.
The results on ‘Jack Jones’ are vibrant, infectious and finely nuanced, ranging from ‘Make It So‘s stumbling electronica through to the bangin’ housey pulse of ‘Who Let The Bass Pump Through The Floor?‘ from synth pop shimmy ‘Peaches Out Of Reach’ and late night disco ‘What You Waiting For‘ to a concluding heart string tugging elegiac balladry ‘Love and Tears‘.
Like much of the greatest music ‘Jack Jones’ both unflinchingly examines the recent personal trials of its creator and also captures the wider mood and concerns of their immediate surroundings.
As for so many of us, recent years have been gruelling for Jack. While his girlfriend an NHS doctor worked on the front line, Jack battled mental health problems. “I always thought I was immune to that struggled with anxiety or intrusive thoughts. Theres a Line in ‘Peaches Out Of Reach’ where I say”I don’t know whats happened to me, I used to be King of the kitchen disco, now I can’t start a day without a five mile run, a 20 minute meditation and a cold shower.” After living that carefree life of going out with your mates, suddenely you arrive in this very different moment, and thats interesting to me, beacuse I know its where me and all my friends are – we’ve all arrived there at the same time.”
As a backdrop to the honesty in the lyrics, Jack formed a deep bond with Adam French who drilled him in the bedroom ways of recording, and Jack came to trust his method and judgement.
“We didn’t really know each other before,” he says, “and now we’ve become such close mates, it’s like he’s my brother. We shared our most honest and heartbreaking stories with each other, but also had the most ridiculous fun as well. We had really similar upbringings–working class, going out, living for music. He has Cystic Fibrosis, which connected us straight away, because I have Crohn’s Disease. We were so truthful with each other about our lives, that it just came about.
TRACK BY TRACK INSIGHT ON ‘JACK JONES’ THE ALBUM BY JACK JONES
MAKE IT SO
Spooky window into first wave COVID darkness…“This one started as a poem I wrote in lockdown, during the first wave of COVID. Me and my girlfriend were living in Swansea, but because she’s a doctor, she got drafted in to work on the front line at some of the London hospitals. So we got COVID quite early on, maybe like a year before the vaccine, and we were really bad, fucked, and she still suffers from the side effects now. “It was a really dark time. The only thing I had were my diaries, the chronicle of my life through the last three years, which turned into a lot of the album lyrics. I kept this five-minute journal, these cheesy little things you can buy, where you write the things you’re grateful for today, and what you want to do today. Afterwards, I looked at what I’d written, and it was ,‘I just want to feel okay’, literally for about two years. That’s how long it took me to get over it. “But this poem was in the diary: ‘Dire world forever turning, desire for truth always burning, life is always reoccurring, as she reads her books/ So face the stress and taste the pleasure, lliving isn’t always leisure, learn the worth of what you treasure, and never let it go…and make it so, just make it so! Spark a light and guide me home… ” I think I’m trying to bring myself backup. “It’s taken months and years to get over that mental health thing. I’m still washing my hands like fucking six times a day, sticking antibacterial gel on there. I mean, what the fuck! When I come back in, I sometimes think, ‘Fuck, I better change my clothes.’ My girlfriend, Lena, she was working on COVID wards, so before she came in the house, she’d have to take all her clothes off. It was such a bizarre time, just mad like living like a ghost, and I don’t think the consequences of it have really been dealt with.
BREATHE
More meditation on early-’20s anxiety and ensuing self-medication: “You never forget your first panic attack, too big of a line, one too many blow-backs…Just breathe while you’re down on your knees”… “I’m so glad this whole period is over! There’s a line in another song that goes, ‘You can’t really explain or talk about or understand mental health until you’ve had it!’ I’ve lived that line myself, completely! I always thought I was completely invincible. “I imagined with the move from Swansea to London with the band, that we would be signed by Christmas. Five years later we were living in a van, but you still felt invincible, then all of a sudden you maybe haven’t achieved the things you wanted to, and I don’t know–maybe you give up a little bit, or maybe you just drink too much, but then the demons creep in, and the mind can get very loud, and you have to take measures to shut it up.“Things you never anticipated could happen to you actually happen to you, like being addicted. Those things you think you are too strong for end up absolutely humbling you, and you have to kind of rebuild yourself and find out who you are again.”
GLADYS
Moody disco strut about a shrink who just ain’t helping…“The idea for this song is, you’re sat in a therapy room, and the therapist isn’t really helping you much: they’re just telling you to get on with it, kind of thing. Originally it was six minutes long and the verses were huge, with loads more conversational stuff, but we cut it right back to make it more of a tight song. “I got the name Gladys from Peter Doherty’s dog. Back in the day, we drove to France randomly, as you do ,then we got to France and Peter was like, ‘Oh fuck, I was supposed to pick up this dog in Coventry, so then we drove back to Coventry. I thought he was joking, but there was literally this little Rottweiler-Doberman type dog waiting there, and we turned up at 6am to pick it up. “Peter named it Gladys there and then, and I always found the name funny, so I thought it was a name that could be good in a song, so Gladys just seemed like the right name for this therapist.
PEACHES OUT OF REACH
A whole different reality bites for the ex-addict, of clean living and insomniac TV binges. Oh, for the simplicity of being a nipper again… ‘Get me back to Gameboys and waterslides’… “I think this album is interesting, because the moment where it arrived in my life–you’re not a teenager, you’ve obviously lived a life that’s full–full of having lived it, you could say–and you’re not even presuming you’re going to live that long, or that you’re going to make it intoo your 30s. “So you’re looking back at those things, but also with the struggles of being that now, and coming through COVID, and having mental health problems, which I always used to think were a made-up thing–that struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts, which I always thought I was invincible to… “There’s a line in this one where I say, ‘I don’t know what’s happened to me, I used to be king of the kitchen disco, now I can’t start a day without a five-mile run ,a 20-minute meditation and a cold shower!’ “When you’ve lived that life of going out with your mates, then suddenly you arrive in this very different moment–that’s interesting to me, because I know it’s where me and all my friends are. I feel like I’ve written something for me and all of them, because at the same time, we’re all arriving at that moment. “Now I’m just addicted to late-night movies. I keep saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna go to bed at 11 and get up at 6am, then I look at my phone and it’s 3.30am, and it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve watched more of that crap!’ That’s my big problem now.
THE MOUNTAINS I’VE CLIMBED
After all the graft and knock-backs, a ray of hope glimpsed in detox. “You winner, you’ve still got time”… “That’s a metaphorical song, and more optimistic. I went to live in a silent Buddhist monastery up in Newcastle somewhere, trying to get off the Tramadol and Diamorph, and me and Adam wrote this one together as sooon as I got back. I was quite scared when I went there that I would never come back, and I almost didn’t.
“It helped me a lot actually, because there’s so much of life where you’re expected to talk, but then i fall of a sudden you decide not to for a bit, it really calms you, chopping wood for the monks, carrying stuff around and fixing the monastery, doing gardening and living together with other people in this hall. We’d listen to the monks singing in the morning, which was beautiful, and watch them living out their lives. “In the past, I’ve struggled so much to meditate–Jesus Christ, it’s been like trying to get some kid with ADHD and all these manic thoughts to sit still! It’s been super hard for me, but I just kept on trying, and by the time I got out of the monastery I did feel like that normal anxiety that lives in me, that tension that lives in my stomach, which I’ve had since I was a child–it felt a bit less tight when I got back. “That experience definitely influenced the song, because otherwise I don’t think I would write about mountains or monks–literally, because that was where I was!
WHO LET THE BASS PUMP THROUGH THE FLOOR
Jack’s teenage delinquent house party, with a colourful cast and bangin’ rave beats “This was one of those concept ideas. When we first started drinking as young kids, we couldn’t get into pubs or anything, so we used to always have house parties, and they were all *outrageous*. It was just an excuse to find someone’s house and destroy it. “The song’s the idea of people arriving from the street ,and coming in, each with their own back-story, and the more we wrote, the more it made me absolutely hysterically laugh. It’s a bit of a banger, and I was imagining the video, where one person turns up, then another, and then there’s the strange old person, who wants to come in and join the party, and then there’s the weirdo down the street… I was just trying to get as many different characters into it as we could. “Maybe there should be a little cameo for Peter in the video! ‘No, you can’t come in–you’re too reckless, mate! Actually it would probably be, thankfully the opposite nowadays. ‘No, mate, you can’t come in, you’re too sober!
MDMA DAY
Ecstasy alarm bells ringing to a 2 am disco shuffle…“This is how I lived my life for years. When I first took MDMA, right, I thought to myself, ‘Fucking hell, I can’t believe I’ve denied myself this all my life! I don’t care that it’s a drug that made me feel this good, every fucking human in the world should feel this okay! Like, it should be a God-given right, to feel this happy! ’Then the next day, I wanted to fucking kill myself. It was like the best and worst of yourself all in the space of 24 hours. You almost lose all dignity on that shit, like, how could you do that to yourself and other people?“ But ecstasy culture is definitely alive and well. I mean if you go to Glastonbury… They might as well call it MDMA-bury. It’s just like everyone’s on it. It’s extreme.
DUMBPHONE
A life-long technophobe’s torrent of invective on smartphones and Tech… “There wasn’t really anything pre written for this one. The concept was there, then the mic was on, and I just started swearing. That’s what Adam was brilliant at, as a producer and co-writer: he was all about the concept and getting me to do things that I’d never done before, and guiding me to it. On-the-hoof is a good word for it! “We were listening to a lot of hip hop as well. I remember listening to Mike Skinner when I was at school, and that UK sound, even Katy B. It was never the music I wrote, but when I went out on a night out , underage, sneaking into a club, that was the music that was on, so now I have a nostalgia for that sound. “I dreamed of doing something that had that sound to it, but I never really knew how, because all I really knew was how to plug in and make some noise with the band. I never knew how to make beats. I still haven’t got a laptop. I have a phone, but I don’t have a computer. I like to keep my head in the clouds. “That’s what’s so tough about being a musician these days, the social media part of it is more important than the music. I always think sometimes people believe in themselves even when it’s so clear how crap they are, but just that belief to put something out there is enough to get them over the line. That’s what I think about Taylor Swift: she believes she’s amazing and she’s managed to convince everyone else she is. Although she has got some belting tunes, I suppose. “So, that concept of making music, I had to get my head around it pretty fast…
WHAT YOU WAITING FOR
Teage dance floor hijinx filter through bedroom-pop intimacy “When I was quite ill from my Crohn’s and didn’t drink, I used to drive my mates to clubs and take them home after, and I used to enjoy just going on the dance floor and feeling that base hitting me through the chest. So I’ve always had a nostalgia for that sound, and The Streets, and sometimes even Sleaford Mods have that hypnotic thing going on.“ But as I say, I’ve never known how to make music like that, because I’ve never had a computer! I’m organic as fuck when it comes to my songwriting, I won’t let Apple dictate to me what my song should sound like! But anyway sometimes you give in to being who you are, and you find out you can be someone else. “This one is a case where the singing is very different for me on this album. Usually I’m used to getting in front of a microphone and singing as loud as I can, but on this one there are lots of harmonies, and lots of different singing techniques, which Adam challenged me with. Like there are these big vibratory-ad-libbing singing parts towards the end of the choruses, and some of it has this really gentle, soft Billie Eilish-style singing which was totally fucking alien to me. “I understand that if you haven’t got the biggest voice, it makes you sound big somehow if you sing softly and really close to the mic. It’s not the same, but you get something similar with The Stone Roses, because Ian Brown’s voice is very soft .Like somehow, the softer you can be, the less compression there is on it, and that kind of lets it grow a bit. So it was a matter of learning these production things. “Doing the bridge, I was like, ‘I’m supposed to be singing this song for humans to hear it, aren’t I? ’I was singing so softly I didn’t think anyone would be able to make it out, then I heard it back and I was like, ‘Oh, it sounds quite good…’
LET DOWN
Pop musing on disappointment, with catchiest chorus of late summer: altogether, ‘such a fucking let down!’ “This one’s from a poem I wrote called On Being Let Down.‘ I could tell you a thing or two about being let down, I’ve had my fair share of cancellations and hanging around’… The poem kind of went all along on that kind of drone, but it was more funny. Adam was challenging me to write, not just to do what I normally do, taking the piss out of myself, but to try and take it more seriously, which I’m never good at doing!
“So I’m not sure where this one ended up in the end, to be honest. I do remember enjoying the chorus vibe, the drop-down where it comes just to my voice on its own, and then it goes on into this whole‘ let down’ robot thing. I was all up for that! Oh yeah, then it goes, ‘On the subject of being let down, my girlfriend dumped me, how pathetic do I sound?… for money and a better moustache, no doubt a bigger cock’, or whatever. It got so trivial, I couldn’t believe it, but then I thought, ‘Well, it made *me* laugh so we kept it.“ Such a fucking let down–that phrase was from a notebook. I heard someone saying it, probably about a shit film or soemthging. But it can be quite a trivial thing, or quite a profound thing too.
LOVE AND TEARS
A lament for Jack’s late grandmother, with Bon Iver autotune and family samples “This started as a poem I wrote just after my grandmother died. Losing her was tough, because she was like the heartbeat of the family, she’d make me these ridiculous cooked breakfasts. If you made that for somebody now, within five minutes they’d literally be admitted to A&E in cardiac arrest. “There are lots of samples of her in the song, then I found a video of her trying to use an iPhone. It’s hysterical, she’s going, ‘You put that there, you put that there!’ So we used that, then we had this idea: my mum sent me a video of my girlfriend, and we put little bits of that in there as well, and my sister, so the song became about all the women in my life who’ve been so strong and helped me so much–a song for them all. “They don’t all necessarily know that they’re in the song yet, so they’re going to have a bit of a surprise! Maybe I’ll get sued by my own mother. In fact, that would be a good PR story, we’ll have to try and remember that one. “The song was actually a bit influenced by Bon Iver, because we were listening to a bit of his music, how he uses AutoTune in a tactful way. We tried to make it a bit more obvious, and kind of use it as an instrument. “It felt like an album closer, because of all the lyrics. ‘And as the ending nears, the congregation…’It just sounded like a closer from the minute we wrote it. ‘You saw through shadow people, but not love not joy not tears’. It was just things that she gave me. I might go and play it at her grave, once the album’s out. ‘Look grandma,I did this for you!’
THE SONGBIRD HQ
All photographs by Daniel Quesada
T H E S O N G B I R D 