First of all, I got a promo copy to review your new CD and for this interview and it didn't contain any lyrics. I wrote a review [already posted] and I was kind of pleased with the album. The first two songs were a bit rocky in my opinion but it gradually got a lot better along the way. The melodies and vocal melodies were quite good, but I'm not much into rocking symphonic rock myself [and the other interviewer as well]. The guitar is very prominent with you, isn't it?
Gary: Yeah, I wanted it to be even more rockier than it was, actually. I really like symphonic or progressive music when it has a heavier edge to it as well as the actual track More Than Meets The Eye which has no fuzz guitar in it and which is very melodic and mellow and like A Life Is All You Need which is quite mellow as well. I like all that, that's great, but I like the rocky element as well, really raunchy. I like the balance in a band. I think what lots of bands do is...we just don't want the same sort of thing all the time. We wouldn't want to have this all rock and heavy and fuzzy. You know what I mean?
No, it's not all heavy and fuzzy, because I think that the melodies also have a very prominent place, but more than other progressive bands you seem to have that rocky edge.
John: Yeah, I think, to an extent... I think that with progressive as a title, is a strange one, because with most titles, they explain exactly what the music is like, like Rock, Metal, Soul, Reggae: you know what type of music it is but progressive is more like a category. What it means is that you take music that is one step further on. So within that there's room for a whole range of music. It has got so much interesting and well-developed about about it and as Gary says that allows you to play virtually anything you like, within your style as long as it is not straight. And well even that is allowable within prog.
Well, of course it's allowed. Anything is allowed.
Gary: Our album is different from the last album. There's no rulebook that says Jadis has to sound like this. Jadis has a particular sound, but it can be treated like heavy or gentle or melodic, you know. It's got eh..even if it sounds different from the last one, you can still tell it's Jadis. I mean it's no point in doing an album that is exactly like More Than Meets The Eye, like there's no point in doing a next album which is exactly like Across The Water. I like people saying that's their album and that's that.
John: I think that any band that has a quality about it gets a style. That's also true for Jadis. What the elements are and to take those elements, you know it comes from the qualities of the songwriters and the musicians within it and to take those qualities into different areas and very interesting stuff comes out and like Gary says it would have been easier for us to just make another More Than Meets The Eye but it was a case of, well let's try experimenting. Things happening all the time in music and it's nice to take elements of that and use different things.
I do believe that you're a very popular live band. I have heard of other bands like Egdon Heath and they make a sort mellow keyboardist prog and they had trouble playing it live. The problem is that it's only beautiful, it will not get people to go out of their minds. I think you do have that.
Gary: Yeah, I think we try.. I would like it to be more so than what it already is. We're still mainly a band where do just listen and they get their enjoyment from just standing there and listening as opposed to shaking their heads about and getting into it. Still they are enjoying it all the same. So you might say that we're a good live band, we are, but still not like, how you would have everyone like headbanging to bigger bands and how people get into Dream Theater. Becuase we're not really manic, we are not a manic band. We have heavy rocky passages.
John: So the next album will be a rave album
Gary: Yeah a rave album [laughter]
John: What I like particularly about Jadis live is that it's a different experience from the album. The album is controlled and live there's an attitude that comes out. With later releases we do try to capture more of that live attitude, because you get more of that edge coming out. The rock and the melody are coming together...oh I think I am getting philosophical.
So, but you do think you have an advantage that you have a rockier sound because it's easier to play live?
Gary: Yeah, but we also enjoy to play a little bit rockier.
When you see people in your audience go mad, it must be a kick?
Gary: Yeah it is. When you see people sining the melodies and the songs and getting into it, that's already worthwhile even when there's only a handful of people.
John: It's all a reaction thing. Any performance, you get that communication thing going between the members of the band. You stand together on stage and you get a bit going Yeaaah and you also get that with the audience when you see that they are really into it.
You will be gigging with Enchant today. Enchant is also a band that has worked with Rothery like Jadis. Is that a coincidence that you play together tonight?
Gary: Yeah a coincidence. I don't know how it came about. When did you meet them?
John: Yeah, we first met Enchant when IQ played the States in February. Enchant was one of the few bands that did supporting. And it's all very weird because when I met Gary, Christ when was it, '88? When I first met Gary, Jadis was supporting my old band Ark, in Birmingham, because that's were we were from and I remember watching and having the old word with him and suddenly years later I knew him really well. With Enchant you know in the States, we knew that within a few months time we are gonna know these guys real well. They're okay, good band, good players and nice people.
Funny thing about Enchant is that as an American band they released their album only in Europe and not in the States.
Gary: They do not have distribution for that.
John: I guess the thing is that their label is German.
You also play in IQ, like Martin [Orford]. Does that interfere a lot with Jadis and does it cost you a lot of time to do both bands.
John: Well, it's not an ideal situation. We are trying to sort it out to let it become a bit better. I am trying to move some commitments out of the way. By the main thing is that I have a very understanding girlfriend. I think that certainly helps. I think the world of Jadis. Jadis is probably my main priority, because it's band that really wants to go out and play and do it. IQ is wonderful, but it's a different progressive kind of thing.
Maybe with Martin this might be different because Martin has been with IQ from the start?
John: Hmhm, well Martin has got his other commitments as well, but I mean it's a different set-up with IQ and Jadis. Jadis is a band that wants to get out there and make it.
A gigging band?
John: I mean of Gary comes up to me and says we are gonna be out for the next seven weeks doing seven nights week, I damndest make sure that I'd do it, but it's an entirely different kind of fish with IQ.
Are you a pro band or coming to be a pro band?
John: Well, yeah
We mean do you have any jobs beside it.
John: I am the only one with a job.
Gary: All the rest of us are unemployed
John: Full-time musicians [laughter]
Gary: We get up at eight in the morning and we play our guitars for 20 hours a day and than we have breakfast. That's basically all we do, the band really. We don't have any outside jobs, so we don't have any commitments. I'm not married, I haven't got any kids, so. If you have all those commitments, it kind of slows you down.
But it did take quite long for a new album after More Than Meets Yhe Eye?
Gary: Yeah it did. There were a few problems, like we did plan when to start writing and all but that didn't work because Martin started writing Ever and that sort of got in the way of how the schedule was going to go. So that didn't help. I wanted to have the album a lot sooner out than this.
So it was Ever that got in the way
Gary: Well no not exactly. It was one aspect of it. You can write the melodies and the riffs, but when we arrange we want to do that with the whole band, so that everyone is satisfied with it.
So it's hard to get all people together at the same time and the same place?
Gary: Yes, it's not all that easy, because John lives so far away, that was a problem. Now John will probably be writing a lot more.
John: Yes, the problem was that until recently I wasn't a full-time member of Jadis. I mean in a long term there was a question of leaving Jadis and that was very much the case. So I sat down thinking what I wanted to do musically and how that would be best achieved. There were different qualities of the music and the people involved, and in the end I decided that I didn't want to leave Jadis after talking to Gary and other people about it. Before, I gave Jadis a small percentage and now I will give it a hundred percent.
Will you be moving closer to the band than?
John: I can't really, because I have my work. Yeah, I'm looking [for a job somewhere else I think but I'm not sure], but basically it means that I have more time to spend. But what I really like to do is to play with Steve, Steve Christy is a great drummer, he's a corky drummer. That was one of the real reasons that I like keeping working with the band. It's really nice, because when we are on stage we listen to eachother, what we are doing and we are picking up on eachothers playing without looking at eachother. We have a lot of that kind of communication. The problem with IQ is that Paul [Cook] always plays with Mike [Holmes]; they do that between them. That's a relationship that came about because of the way the band was formed.
But is it then that you feel more uncomfortable in IQ?
John: No, no, I feel very comfortable in IQ. It's just that they want different things from their music than I want.
Can we see you leanving IQ then?
John: I really don't know. The thing I want to do know is to do IQ around Jadis and not the other way around.
My idea was that having two members of Jadis in IQ, would slow things down.
Gary: Yeah, it probably has a little bit. We cannot make plans because we have to take into account when IQ will be writing their new album, playing a few dates here and now. But...
John: we are trying to work it out.
Gary: Yeah, we've been wanting to do a lot more live, gigwise. Last year we didn't play a lot of gigs at all.
Well, fortunately IQ doesn't play that much live. They do not record and write much either. They move at quite a slow pace.
John: Yeah, the thing is that it's a difference between attitudes of both bands. IQ has a different attitude from Jadis. I would be wonderful if they had the same, but they don't. Jadis has got all the things that are important to me in music. I get on very well wit heverybody involved and we can really make it work. It's great to work on stage.
Ehm, there has been some trouble, we heard, with GEP. It was rumoured that it had been taken over by Roughtrade. Is that true?
Gary: No, that's absolute nonsense. We do not know how the rumour got started but GEP is as strong as ever [Ever?].
But is Roughtrade only doing distribution then for the Netherlands? I do not know about other countries.
Gary: Yeah
John: You see, GEP has distribution in several countries now. Previously they had distribution with SI, but there were major problems with SI, which resulted in moving to Roughtrade. So it's not a matter of Roughtrade taking over GEP, but it's just that GEP went somewhere else. It's the same with Pinnacle records in Britain and Zero records in Japan.
What are readers might like to know; how about the US.
Gary: Well, we will probably be doing a gig there in February.
Okay, but what about a distributor there.
John: Well, they are trying to sort one out. There are people that are distributing the albums for us on an independent basis. We can get these addresses for you, of someone in the US that distributes out CDs there.
I once read in an interview that you wanted to record a mini-album?
Gary: Yeah we did, a three track mini-album. We did it in November. There are three old songs on it. These are songs that a lot of people like and which we think are good songs, but not for our new album. They are not really a move forward for us. The point was that we play them live, but people couldn't find the songs, because they weren't on any album. We will be doing this with another couple of songs.
In the shops I found something like a CD single from you. Is that it?
Gary: It's got an orange cover. It's called Once Upon A Time.
John: But there's a CD single as well.
Ahhh, that would be the one I saw.
John: The single has the same cover as the new album, but there's an additional three track EP as well. It's great old material but it doesn't fit in with the rest anymore.
Are you planning on hitting the charts with this single? [Laughter]
Gary: Well, the idea is that we want to get radiostations interested in things we do. I mean there's lots of radiostations around and at least one of them in each town will have it's own cult program. They will be play Jadis more easily if they hear it directly, so we have edited the songs down, but we have included the full version. So if they like it they can play either version. It's just a way of getting airplay.
So it's like a radio promo that's also available to everyone else?
John: Yeah
I do not have your lyrics like I've already said, but from what I've gathered they sound fairly optimistic.
Gary: Optimistic, hahahaha.
For instance A Life Is All You Need sounded quite optimistic to me.
Gary: Yeah, well I do not know how this one came about. I do not think it's optimistic. It's actually quite down [Editor note: Oops!]. Usually words come into my head and I do not know what the hell I'm talking about. If I have the vocal melody the words just come into my head and so I just rite the words around the melody and so it doens't always have anything to do with how I feel. I can be very happy and still come up with words that are quite sad.
That's a things that always struck me with IQ: the lyrics are extremely depressed, but if you see them live doing Wiggle and all that, they seem like a bunch of humourus guys?
John: It goes both ways. With any lyrics you can read into it whatever you want. I'm a big Yes fan, but if you look at what he's singing it's just a load of bullocks. They are just words that sound good, but also the images it sparks ... I mean look at Roundabout, I love the lyrics but they aren't about anything.
So, the sound of the words is more important to you than their meaning?
Gary: Yes. When I write words they do make sense, but that is of secondary importance. The music must be good, the music they are on top of. A lot of bands do it the other way around: they write lyrics and then the music to it.
John: What I think is that the songs on this album, the lyrics reflect the two years or eighteen months since the last album, so it's very much about what has been going around and about the band.
Gary: Lyrics do come easy to me. It's not that I can say: I'll write lyrics for the rest of the week, bit more like when I'm having a cup of tea, I'll start writing some words down. Or I take the song and start singing words over them. It doesn't always come that easy. On No Sacrifice the chorus came out with the music and A Life Is All You Need was there in a day, but other songs you just have to work on to let the vocals fit in with the music.
Well, I did hear some cross-references between songs. The title Across The Water comes back into various songs.
Gary: And More Than Meets The Eye. There's a lot on this album that wasn't on the former one and I thought it would be a good thing to establish a link between the two albums and making people think "Oh yeah". This is because it's different from the first album.
John: It's full of surprise. You hear themes on an album that keep coming back. It shows you've thought about it as well instead of having just a collection of songs.
I once read that Martin Orford before joining the band found that it was a pity that your riffs didn't come back later in to the song.
Gary: No, I don't use riffs very often in a song. I just don't like it. I do not have formats or anything. I do not want to say section A was at the beginning so we will also have it at the end. I just want it to be good melody or song. Martins way is more methodical.
You are more inspirational.
Gary: Yeah, I'm more erratic. Martin sits down with a sigaret and thinks about it. For instance in the chord changes. He thinks ages over it and I say no, no and then we get into a big fight.
John: I think the nicest songs are the ones we all do together. There are always loads of ideas flying around and really within an afternoon, the arrangement of a song like Everwhere I Turn was finished.
When I listened to your album, I thought I spotted some similarities between the songs. They start off easy, move into a vocal part, followed by an instrumental solo, after which the lyrics take over and the song moves quietly to an end. What do you think?
Gary: No, no I think we are a very unformatted band. We do not think, it's just whatever happens. If you listen to A Life Is All You Need...
Well, that would be the exception, because it's smooth all the way through.
John: I think I can tell you what you are wrong with. When I first started playing Jadis and IQ, I found that IQ was always fairly logical to play, while with Jadis I had to learn all the various parts of the songs and how the parts ran into eachother. If it was a formatted song, it wouldn't be like that.
Is it that IQ is more structured?
John: The thing is that you just do not have to think about what's happening next. With Jadis, I mean it comes more naturally now, but for a long time it was 'hang on now'. There was no logic to it.
There are more surprises in the music?
John: Yeah definitely.
What next after this promotional tour?
Gary: Well, we will be gigging in the UK. It's always a bit of a fiasco over there. I mean there are a few societies, like Rock societies who put on their own gigs. So there's one called the Classic Rock Society where people go to see bands like us or IQ. They organize the venue and organize ways to get the people there. There are a couple of them up and around.
John: What we are trying to do is to get everything moving up to gear. So that for the next album there's a sort of foundation laid.
So a lot of people know you?
John: A lot of people knowing the band, seeing the band.
Yes, you have to gig to get known in this line of music.
Gary: Yeah, gigging and promotion.
In the magazines you do not get a lot of attention. I mean we do have SI, but not every country has that.
Gary: No we certainly do not have that in the UK to that degree.
It's coming along though, because even magazines like OOR [Editor note: a well-respected non-specific music magazine] do review obscure progressive rock these days.
Gary: The thing is that we want to get the band to a large audience. This is possible in Holland if it is well promoted in good venues like Noorderligt in Tilburg with say 700 people which I think is very good for this sort of band. I just like to see this happening in other people as well.
I do think that this has to do a lot with people living close together in Holland.
John: I also think that people in Holland are a bit more receptive to progressive rock.
Well, it always seemed to us that prog was cut down to size in the seventies in the UK by the magazines and we didn't really have that here.