John & Jehn
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- Bio: “This is not a love song', said John Lydon, back when he wasn’t advertising butter.And this is not a love story, either, as many of the lyrics will ... (more)
- Bio: “This is not a love song', said John Lydon, back when he wasn’t advertising butter.And this is not a love story, either, as many of the lyrics will bear witness to.
"It's about the despair of being in love" explains Jehn, with reference to 'Love Is Not Enough', a track from their forthcoming second album 'Time For The Devil'. "The idea of being in a relationship that's destroying you and you want to run away. You know when you wake up in the morning and the only thing you want to prove is you're not a couple?"
And indeed, John & Jehn are no longer a couple. They are now John & Jehn & Raph & Maud. On stage anyway. Raphael Mura (of Underground Railroad) has been enlisted to release them from the confines of their drum-machine, and Maud-Elisa Mandeau has been drafted in on guitar, freeing John to focus on bass, because it forms the foundation of pretty much everything on 'Time For The Devil'. "A lot of the new songs are dancey… groovy” Jehn tells us. “We were looking for a groove, and we always started writing the song with the bass. Never guitar." John picks up the thread; “A good friend of ours in Paris leant us all this great gear for a month in the summer of 2008, so we brought it all back home to Angoulême. It was a proper writing process in proper recording conditions. It wasn’t like the first record in our bedroom in Wood Green with just one mic. We didn’t have any time schedule, we didn’t have any label on to us (their UK label Faculty Records left them in peace and they’ve since signed a deal in France, for France, with Naïve) and we had Matt (Farrar, their engineer), so it was just for ourselves. We wanted to take advantage of the freedom to record something different so we focused on the writing and discovered we can do things we’ve always wanted to do; some really poppy, harmonic stuff. We recorded seven tracks in total, five we kept.”
Those five began with ‘Oh My Love’, a key-stabbed, bass-driven, night-crawling, Roxy-Music-stalking number, dripping with thinly-veiled insouciance, and ‘Down Our Streets’, perhaps their sweetest melody to date, laced with hand-claps and cheery synth lines and ‘la la las’, but pulled together with a lyric concerning itself with the relentless, suffocating presence of London’s CCTV cameras, and the resulting longing for the enveloping cloak of night to fall (another track ‘London Town’ deals with a similar longing to escape the glare of the daytime metropolis, into its tenebrous crannies). This juxtaposition of bright melody and melancholic subject matter appears again in ‘O Dee’. As the tune glances over its shoulder at The Ronettes, its lyrics speak not of the death of an individual, but of the personafication of death.
Sometimes it’s almost as though they’re trying to smuggle their shadowy themes past us, wrapped in a blanket of pop. John expounds:
“We don’t want to come across as philosophical. We’re not philosophical. We leave that to poets and philosophers. We take great care with our lyrics, to get them across. When we first moved to London we admired Cohen, Dylan, Nick Cave... but we’re French and we sing in English, and we can’t reach that level of literacy, so we want our lyrics to be clear, simple. Not dumb: simple.”
And what of the title of the album? ‘Time For The Devil’?
“It’s inspired by a short parable called ‘La Hora del Diablo’ by the Portugese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa. It’s a beautiful reflection on the Devil who's described as a gentleman who would never intentionally harm a human; not a symbol of evil or an enemy of God. He feeds our emotions and inspires in us a love of art and of love itself, and the emotions tempt us and this turns to desire and frustration in our souls and we do bad things. But the Devil is only the source, and our emotions aren’t bad or dangerous. What is dangerous is when they are hidden or suppressed. It’s safer and healthier to experience the vices of humanity, to express our emotions rather than label them as evil or dangerous. The sentiments inspired many of the lyrics on the album, a desire to explore the darker side of the psyche.”
One year later, in the Spring of 2009, the pair returned to Angoulême to build their own studio, to record the bulk of the album and to rehearse for their first live shows as a quartet (supporting Franz Ferdinand in front of 8,000 people in Paris was to be their baptism of fire). An intense two months ensued with just one five-day break and although the setting was idyllic - surrounded by vineyards and John's mother's home-cooking – this didn’t illicit a relaxing recording environment which suited John & Jehn’s work ethic, what with them preferring to knuckle down than smoke roll-ups by the pool (Angoulême is the birth place of Rizla cigarette papers, if any stoners are interested).
Anyone still labouring under the lazy journalistic illusion that this is some Gainsbourg-Birken rehash should have had a word with themselves a few paragraphs back. John & Jehn don’t sound much like much else right now, but their references are clear. “When we were living and recording with Matt he played a lot of ‘80s pop, stuff like Joe Jackson and Robert Palmer, and we’ve always been fans of the UK New Wave anyway.”
A casual listen to ‘Time For The Devil’ reveals the lineage between John & Jehn and PiL, XTC, The Psychedelic Furs, The Stranglers and their ilk, but also classic pop as they move from brooding atmospherics of ‘The Ghosts’ to ‘Vampires’ with it’s opening gambit echoing The Beach Boys ‘Good Vibrations’ but lyrical theme addressing a good friend who’s partner is, to quote the writer “a fucking pain in the ass, killing him with her depression and shit attitude.”
Never less than compelling – to the feet and the head - 'Time For The Devil' is perhaps most remarkable for finally delivering on record (or whatever the hell kind of format we're using these days) what John & Jehn always delivered live: pop songs, hypodermically injected with dancefloor potency, laced with literary barbs and acerbic wit.
“We’re having a party” as John Lydon almost said.
“…and everybody’s welcome.” (less)
