The Sheffield Scenester

Scenester; What influences you when your song writing?

Jon; It’s hard to write about going out and doing X, Y and Z or whatever, but that was a time in our lives. We got criticised once because at one point it wasn’t personal enough, it was always about somebody doing something, but it was things that we’d seen or stories that we liked which does make it personal, so they’re still stories at the end of the day. I like the whole country thing in America because I like the stories, I liked them when I was little and I like to write stories now. Obviously I’ve not got the inclination to write a book or something...but I can create pretty much summarize them in a song. There is a track on the album which is about X factor and Britain’s Got Talent – which I love, well Mel watches it, so I kinda watch it with her and then I’m into it! What I love about it is that the auditions are funny, but what I hate about it is the songs they then release are crap; it’s just a pretty face with a good voice. Some of the people that go on it, I think, are not on this planet, so I wrote a song about this alien – this sounds absolutely mental...but honestly I have not just dropped an acid tab....Anyway this guy falls to Earth and he’s devastated because he remembers the 60’s and 70’s when music was really good, he can’t understand that great bands are being left by the wayside because people are watching TV and being told what to like, what to buy and how to act. So he can’t believe the way the music industry has gone and decides to take it out, he’s gonna take them all down, the whole panel, the whole show, he’s going to give it to everybody – obviously it’s not a true story but there’s other stuff like ‘Step Out The Man’ that’s about being in a band and then suddenly not, then you’ve got to decide; “what am I gonna do?” Then there’s this song ‘Bada’, which is just the working title at the minute cos that’s what it says throughout the track...it sounds a bit festive, like a jolly wintery kind of song. I just thought I’ll stick to what I’m good at, there’s no point in me trying too hard, having people say “Wow! Jon, he’s deep!”

Scenester; Well things are gonna change for you anyway cos you’ve grown older, you’ve got married…..

Jon; Yeah, just hope I don’t end up writing about my wife having an affair or something, that’ll be really deep and dark!

Scenester; Wasn’t Mel in one of the videos for LMT once?

Jon; No...but I’ll tell you a secret that nobody knows, she was on the front cover of ‘What Your Boyfriend Said’, nobody knows its her cos her head is down....it took a couple of glasses of wine! We didn’t have a cover for the single so thought it would be really nice to get an attractive girl, so I talked her into doing it and she loved it...I think. The photographer, Stevlor, wanted to do a photo shoot with her, but it would have been weird, the rock n roll star wannabe married to a soft core porn star!

Scenester; So you’ve made a debut album, when is it out then?

Jon; We’re doing some live shows in October so I’m presuming the album is gonna be out before then, in the next couple of months.

Scenester; How did you find writing the songs as an individual as opposed to having Maz and the band with you?

Jon; Strange, because a lot of the time I wrote most of the words, but Maz would come in with a killer line or something which made it work. I’d write the melody and then Maz would say “Why don’t you try this here?” it would work...which was strange. Now I’ve had to think about everything which is difficult especially with these two tracks that I wanted to sound LMTish, I’ve had to write the entire guitar part which is really hard cos I wanted it to sound Maz-like, but he’s a million times better than me in terms of his guitar playing. It’s a different but challenging kind of thing, if people hate it’s all my fault...so I can’t blame Maz anymore! so yeah different but good. Me and Maz had to do our own thing, we’ve played in a band together since we were about fifteen, when I taught him to play guitar before he got a lot better than me, I’ve never been in a band of musicians without Maz there, it’s always been me and Maz against the world, which we thrived on for quite a bit but now we had to do something different. I’m not ruling out that me and Maz won’t do anything ever again because I’m sure that in ten years time we’ll be working together on something, we’ll still do parties and BBQ’s now and then, you know we’ll get the guitar out and have a sing along…….

Scenester; So what are your views on the local music scene, have you seen anything lately?

Jon; Do you know what I haven’t, after LMT I found it hard to go to gigs, it was weird, like a strange time so I’m not up on everything, but I have started getting into wanting to see bands again, I’ve actually seen one person, a girl who goes out under the name See Emily Play, she is immense vocally, I like her, I like her a lot. She did like a guide vocal for me cos I did a track with Alison Wheeler from Beautiful South but I really liked her voice….

At this point the chat was interrupted by a phone call; I’m only mentioning this because much to my embarrassment I still had ‘House Party At Boothy’s’ as my ring tone. He jokingly said that I only put it on this morning as usually it was ‘Heavyweight Champion Of The World’, so once I got over that little faux pas, we carried on chatting….!

Jon; I listen to some stuff but don’t think it’s good, when we came through with LMT, the music was really good no matter what city it were from. Each city was as good as each other, but now it’s a little bit…. Mel’s more of a muso than me, she tells me about some real weird stuff she’s seen. I’ve seen bits and bobs, but in terms of going out and buying a ticket I haven’t really done anything, I want to go out and listen to some of the new stuff, but I listen to some stuff and I can’t comprehend how bad it is, I mean that song that got to number 1, something about fireflies or something, what does it mean? What happened to proper bands with something about them?!

Scenester; When we saw you with LMT it was almost as if you felt you didn’t deserve the success that you achieved, I was just wondering what you thought about that…

Jon; A lot of the time I was gob smacked, what we were doing for that period of time.. I’d just dreamt about when I was little and I saw other people doing it. I think I’m quite a down to Earth person and sometimes I was embarrassed of it to the point were we’d wondered ‘do we really deserve this?’ or ‘do we really mean this much to people?’ I think if you don’t expect anything then everything you get is a bonus; I had to stop reading reviews because a lot of the time we’d get bad reviews and most of them focused on me. When I was younger I used to take it personally...but I’m more confident now and people are going to come to these gigs and really enjoy them. I know for a fact that we’re going to give a brilliant show and the songs are going to be good, they’re gonna be exciting and we’re gonna deliver everything people want. There will be people who say it’s not as good as LMT just as they will when they see Maz doing his thing or the same with Ben, but now it’s me on my own, I’m building myself up for every bit of criticism, but now I think I can deal with it. I’ve got good people around me, I’ve got good family around me, I’ve got a fantastic set of mates who I’m in a band with, a fantastic set of friends and thanks to the LMT fan base I’ve got a good set of people to back me.

Having finished our drinks, Jon invited us up to his car so we could listen to a couple of tracks off his forthcoming album. The first one we heard was the track ‘Frankie’ (working title), the song about an alien who has issues with Simon Cowell’s media takeover (mentioned earlier in the interview), this was followed by ‘Bada’. Both songs had a definite LMT feel to them as promised and I can only thank Jon for giving us this sneak preview. If this is the standard that we can expect from the album then there will be a lot of happy LMT fans out there come October!

Following this we asked Jon if he would come up to the Botanical Gardens for a quick photo shoot, sure enough he obliged but a few yards up the street who did we bump into but Maz, apparently he’d heard Jon’s car stereo blaring out the new tracks and came to see what the fuss was about. Unfortunately he looked the worse for wear due to illness...so we didn’t keep him too long. Having done the photo shoot we made our way back to The Porter Brook, where we met up with Jon’s wife Mel and just sat chatting like old friends.

We’d like to thank Jon and Mel for their time and look forward to his forthcoming album as well as his gig at The Plug on October 23rd.