Bluejuice

Fri 16th Dec, 2011 in Features

“We’re not Radiohead exactly, you know what I mean, but in doing the record we want to try and do it as well as we can, as well as what we can do. We tried as hard as we could to be the best version of us as we could on this record really. I hope that people put it on and enjoy the songs just as pop songs which is what they’re supposed to be. Just 2 and a half minutes of fun or a certain type of mood that you can enjoy in your day and it’s not supposed to be a big deal.”

With the release of their new album, Company Jake Stone from Bluejuice gets a (little) bit serious and sincere yet still has time to talk ironing, pashing old women and Phil Collins.

Hey Jake, how you doing?
Yeah not too bad, just ironing a shirt. I’m trying to do a good job cos I always do such a bad job of ironing.

Oh me too don’t worry, I don’t even bother these days.
Yeah it’s pretty hard to get the creases right..

I’m just like you know what it’s gonna get creased anyway so might as well just leave it
Except some people make fun of you when you turn up with an un-ironed shirt, and you’re wearing like a nice thing and they’re like oh nice job on the ironing oh you’re like “ah fuck” so that’s why I’m really trying to get this right this time.

Well good luck with that… So, this new album, Company, it’s great that you’ve managed to grow up slightly with your topics yet you’ve still kept the song so sharp and witty in that Bluejuice way
Oh well I’m glad to hear that, cos that is what we’re trying to do..

It’s fantastic because it’s refreshing, it’s still you guys but take the track The Recession for example, that it’s brilliantly upbeat despite the topic of recession. How did that one come about?
Well it’s based on Steely Dan’s Peg, which has similar kinds of chords and I really love the song, just thinking about how they write, not that different to us really, they kind of write cheesy sounding songs with really sometimes pretty dark or weird lyrics. And I had the line “now is the winter of our discotheque” I thought that was really funny, and I was like ok well I want to put that line in a song, and with everything sort of going wrong in my life and being blah and whatever.

I wanted to make a disco song about something amusing, you know make a fun song about everything being shit…and then I just thought well The Recession is a great title for something and I’ve got these kind of KC and the Sunshine Band Give It Up style chords slash Steely Dan style chords, maybe we could just make a full on cheesy 70s song about the recession, no one’s writing about it really so we thought we give it a go.

And it works, it works brilliantly, love it!
Good, I’m glad!

Bluejuice – Cheap Trix

You also had a few friendly co-writers on this album, you had Alex from Sparkadia, Julian from The Presets… these are mates of yours so they were happy to help out?
Yeah yeah it happened pretty easily. Julian I don’t know as well so I was kinda trying to establish a writing relationship with him by asking that question by saying you know can we write together and stuff and he was keen on that which I was surprised about. And then with Alex it just happened, we just went and hung out at his house for two days over summer about 18 months ago and wrote Act Yr Age and Shock there and it was just easy you know.

I’ve never really co-written with anyone other than the band before and it came out really easy with him so I kind of thought well, maybe we should just extend this concept to the rest of this record, because it was fun and what we need after 10 years of doing it. It’s more fun, vary it up like a marriage, when you get bored after a while, you know?

Everyone’s gonna get a bit bored after 10 years in any relationship so we kinda needed to do something that would make us not just go “oh we’ll make another record, we’ll just go to BJB [studios] and do the same thing that we always do” and we didn’t really want to do that. You could tell by talking to the other guys that nobody really wanted to just do the same thing so that seemed to be a good solution, plus we also wanted to get more out of the band and make it sound bigger.

We wanted the record to sound like a professional pop record and not just make a kind of garage record. So then we were like “well if we’re getting other writers then we should get other players” cos we know all these fuckin jazz players who are good like Tom Rawle who is a fuckin evil, evilly good guitarist, so why don’t we get all these talented people to contribute to it because we’ve got a budget we can pay them and they’ll make it sound better, it will be better to have better people on it..

Yeah it’s refreshing for you guys, you need a new take on it sometimes, bring other people in it’s like alright let’s get it happening. As you say 10 years is a long time, you need a new spark every now and then..
Well that’s right, you know it could’ve been terrible… The songs that we were writing as well at the end of the last record, they weren’t that different to one we just made and we needed to take a break from writing the same type of songs and go away and listen to different types of music, have a think about what we want to be and do you know. And luckily that’s what happened in that process, that really did work, it definitely worked for the band to do that.

Ok, so that pash scene in the Act Yr Age clip… brilliant use of a red balloon and a mesmerising sequence all together…
The clip was really an idea who’s time had come, and it wasn’t a big deal performing the kiss. As long as it’s sincere and romantic, it’ll find it’s way to being funny on it’s own. The actress Christine was awesome, and our director Sam Bennetts was his usual disgusting self. It was fun.