Interview: The King Blues

15 June 2011

Photo: Joe Speak

Female First caught up with our favourites The King Blues at Download Festival to see what's been going on since we last chatted. Guitarist Jamie Jazz spoke to us in depth about squat raids, playing in Germany and future plans.

-You were at Night & Day last night in Manchester. How was it?
We were indeed, it was fantastic. We just spent the last four or five days before that in Germany doing Rock im Ring and Rock am Park, and a few club shows in Berlin.

They were cool, and the first time as a band we've been out there. It was a lot of fun, but it was getting mildly lost in translation as we went around.

To come home and do Night & Day last night was amazing. We glad to be back, glad to be home.

It's always cool to play those little sweat-box shows, you know? Kids flying about the place and there's a huge connection. I love that, I really do.

-Is there a big contrast between the fans you've just been playing to over in Germany, and the fans back here?
That's kind of a difficult one, because we haven't done it much. I genuinely thought no-one would come and see us!

I thought we'd be lucky if 10 or 15 people showed up, but they did come out. They really did enjoy it.

I don't think [there's a difference], you know, because for me, music is a great equaliser. Music speaks to everyone. When we did press out there, a few people asked if we were every worried about the language barrier, with people not understanding the words because Itch is a wordsmith.

Genuinely, I kinda wasn't. If the kids got it, they got it, and they did. There wasn't too much difference.

-I last chatted to Itch at Hub Festival last month. Besides the shows in Germany, what's the band been up to?
Since then, we've hit up a few more festivals. We're trying to get a tour ready, trying to get our stuff back on the road.

We've got a mega-busy summer and rest of the year. We come out of the summer run and go straight to Europe to tour there.

After that, we've got a UK tour being booked in November around the Roundhouse show. In any downtime we have, we try to spend it at home doing some laundry, trying to watch our kids grow up and then get back out on the road again.

-The album was crafted at a transitional time for the band, with members leaving and new ones coming in. Was it difficult?
Well, there was a period between the line-up change and the record coming out. When that all happened, yeah, that was an incredibly difficult period for the band.

It crossed over not just to the band, but it was affecting personal lives and home life. It was a really fucking difficult time, but me and Itch knew we had to rise above it. We knew that we were always going to continue, we knew that we were always going to push forward no matter what.

That's what we do, and that's when we met Dean. He was a lifesafer, as far as I'm concerned. He came in and instantly we jelled. Instantly, we hit it off and did a tour together. I genuinely was just so happy to have him in the band.

Over that year we had a couple of peope coming in and out to help us on the road. We made some great friends and met some great people. We got a solid line-up again, and it's cool.

The writing process was real easy. At that point in time we were writing a very different record, a personal record. A deep record about what had happened but also about becoming parents and losing people in our lives. Live and death, stuff like that.

Then the coalition government came into power, and we saw our friends losing jobs again. We saw people getting fucked over in the street again. We saw the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer again.

That really angered all of us. It really sparked a fire in Itch again. We put everything else we had on the shelf and wrote the record that became Punk & Poetry.

That process was really easy. It was the easiest record, honest to god, that we've ever made, because it was with people who genuinely wanted to be there for the right reasons. It was fantastic.

-With it being that personal and real then, were you pleased with how it sold?
I was over the moon. For me, chart positions and anything like that...they're not really important to me.

That fact that kids get it and like it...they listen to it and have some kind of human response to it, whether 'I love that song, I hate that song'. Some kind of anything. The worst thing for me is if someone says 'I got it, but I didn't put it on'.

Luckily enough, the response I'm hearing from people is that they love it. That, for me, means the world because I love every second of that record.

Once we'd changed and put the old record on the shelf, we went forward again and set out to make a record.

I think at the end of it, when it went out and people starting buying it, we made the record we wanted to make. I'm very proud of that.

-With the success of that, and artists like Frank Turner having chart success, is it good that people so politically minded are finding some kind of mainstream success?
I think so, yeah. I think that there is more room for politically motivated and minded people to enter into the mainstream and to grow as artists.

It's important that those artists with something to say really do get out there. I think we're seeing a change in what people want as well.

The general public are kind of sick and tired of Brit-school acts being brought up to be famous and then thrown into the limenight, not working hard for it.

They're looking into the underground, they're looking into punk and hip-hop and they're getting more into home-grown bands, who come from a real place.

This rest of this year's going to be fantastic for a lot of bands. Next year we're going to see huge things from The Skints and Mouthwash, those sorta bands are really going to have a lot of attention, and it'll be well deserved.

-Back in April we had the Royal Wedding, but the band were quite outspoken about it, talking about police raids on the day. Is there anything you can tell us about all that?
I live in Bristol now and a lot of shit went down. I got home just as the riots started, but I live on the other side of town. I didn't hear about it until the morning.

I turned on my phone and had a tonne of messages from people. I just thought, the Height squat had been there for so long.

Using Bristol as an example, that area of Bristol Stokes Croft is known as the People's Republic of Stokes Croft. It always has been, and it's always kind of been untouched. There's never been too much trouble.

I just feel like it's a horrific clean-up act. It's done underneath the guise of while the rest of the nation is watching the Royal Wedding, you get out in the street and get rid of human beings.

Treating human being like rats, and throwing them out onto the street. I just thought it was horrific. We stood as long as we could there and we tried to hold it, but the fact of the matter is...people will rise up.

People will come back. They can take us out of that building and we'll just find another building, and we'll make that ten times better.

We'll keep doing it because they will never remove us. They will never remove that society, that way of thinking. That won't happen.

-Shifting back to live music and the contrast in venues you've been playing, is there a different mentality with a festival show like this, rather than a more intimate headline show?
For me, not really. I focus on being able to play my guitar, remembering how the songs go and trying not to fall over. They are the genuine things that go through my head when we play anywhere, and I usually fail at all of them!

I genuinely treat a show like a show. I'm very humbled whether five or five thousand people come to see us.

I find it's a little bit easier like that, because in intimate settings you can see everyone.

I just keep my head down and just remember that the fact that I'm able to do this is because of the people who come to see me. I try to do the best I can and hope they enjoy the show.

-Does it affect the set-lists, because on some of your own shows you've played older tracks like 'Out of Luck', which don't get played at festivals?
Yeah, it's that awkward thing of having three records and wanting to play the new stuff, but wanting to keep some old stuff.

You have to pick the best set for the time. I do feel, when I write a set-list, I tend to leave the acoustic bits out at festivals.

People want to party and want to dance, so I tend to put in faster, more upbeat songs. It's kinda like that really.

-There were a couple of singles in between albums, 'Holiday' and 'Headbutt'. Was 'Holiday' one of the tracks that got ditched when the album was re-written?
Yeah, I guess so. Ditched isn't the right word. 'Holiday' was always a contender for the album, and the idea was that it was always going to be on it.

A few songs made it through from those that we put on the bench, like 'Everything Happens For A Reason'. I was like...that song has to stay on the record. It meant too much to me, so we kept it on.

'Holiday' just didn't find it's way onto the record because we couldn't find a place for it to fit, and make the record flow as a body of work. It had already been released, if the kids wanted it, it's there.

It did it's thing, and I'm happy. It's lived its life, and it'll always be there for people who want it. I was never too worried that 'Holiday' didn't make the record, from that respect.

-Over the weekend are you getting a chance to catch any other bands?
I hope so. We're only here today really. The only band I would be really gutted to miss is Mr. Big. If I miss that I'll be genuinely upset. I may throw a rock-strop.

-Going back to the writing process, how does it work for The King Blues?
We all kinda write a bunch of riffs and ideas. Itch'll lock himself away and do a bunch of demos. Itch is constantly writing lyrics everyday, there's always something in his head that he's writing.

He'll bring the songs to life on a ukulele or an acoustic guitar. We'll just do various different versions of it and start arranging it.

We'll start trhasing out versions, we'll do a ska version, a hardcore version, a punk version, one that has a kazoo and a bass drum. Whatever idea we have that's best for the song.

We just kinda compile everything we've got, flesh it out and then take it from there.

-What have The King Blues got planned for the rest of the year?
Festivals, festivals, festivals. We're going out to Europe again, across Germany and Austria which should be pretty fun.

Then after that, we come straight home and have the Roundhouse show in November.

We might put in a little tour there, and that'll take us through to Christmas time when we'll start writing the next record.

Female First - Alistair McGeorge

Photo - Joe Speak (taken at Hub Festival)