Gene Loves Jezebel have over nine years and five albums charted a career that has been a succession of ups and downs, victories and mishaps. Never an easy bunch to bag, they were originally fronted by lead singing twin brothers, released indie, left of field singles like "Shaving My Neck" and progressed to a full blown guitar band sound, achieving an independent number one album. Collecting a former Billy Idol sidekick guitarist along the way, they sold a quarter of a million albums in the States, and supported the likes of New Order and Echo and The Bunnymen on massive Stateside tours, while sounding like The Cult and looking like Hanoi Rocks. Three years ago, "Motion Of Love" looked likely to make them a chart hit act in their own country but it slipped away. And then Mike, one of the Aston twins, split. 

That was in 1988, and the band are back with a new LP, "Kiss Of Life", one lead singer and a growing sense of rock maturity, making redundant descriptions like "Goth toy boys" and taking them ever closer to stadium status. 

One suspects, though, that it just wouldn't be Gene Loves Jezebel if there wasn't a hitch, or at least a major disaster. As guitarist James Stevenson (the ex-Gen X man) and bass player Peter Rizzo explain, however, it wasn't the sudden departure of Mike, or even the partial destruction of the studio during the recording of the album in San Francisco, courtesy of the earthquake, that gave them most grief!!! 

James: "Jay used to sing more than Mike anyway. On the last album, 'House of Dolls', Mike only sang on two tracks. Having two singers in the band was always a bit of a problem, now there's no arguments about who's going to sing on a song. When I first joined it worked fairly well, they interacted with each other, swapping parts and stuff and it was all very intuitive. Two singers but one effect. But that just vanished in the end as it became a competition to see who could sing the most. Mike did the brave thing by leaving and now he and Jay get on better than ever. He's got his own deal with Virgin now and lives in LA, where he was spending a lot of his time anyway. He was back over for a few weeks and I did some songwriting with him." 

No, Gene Loves Jezebel's biggest bane throughout their turbulent career has been producers. 

Peter: "We have a long history of falling out with a long line of producers. Most of them have a cut and dry idea of how to produce a group and we've got very strong ideas about how we want to sound. John Leckie (producer on their indie chart topper LP "Immigrant", and more recently desk man for The Stone Roses) was very good and we got on okay with Pete Walsh (produced and largely re-recorded the single "Desire", which went on to become a number seven Billboard Dance hit)." 

Then there was Jimmy Lovine, who, along with Walsh, produced their last "House Of Dolls" LP. 

James: "We did two tracks out in LA with him, 'Motion Of Love' and 'Suspicion'. We spent six weeks out there doing these two tracks. We actually spent about five minutes recording, the rest of the time we spent sitting around waiting for him to turn up while he was off in Italy or somewhere watching Lond Justice, who he was managing at the time, supporting U2." 

Pete: "We'd finally get him on the phone and he would say things like 'right, get Pete to change his bass strings'. He's got a bunch of guys who work for him and he just deps it out to his team of engineers. They're good engineers though. You can get a Jimmy Lovine production without him even being there." 

For this album, the Jezebels went out to San Francisco to work with Paul Fox. 

Peter: "If you're working with a producer who doesn't have the same musical tastes as you but thinks he knows better, you're in trouble! We'd go off and when we'd come back there would be all these session singer four part harmony backings. He's a session keyboard player and he put a lot of keyboards down, some of it was okay, nice washes and stuff, but some of it was just West Coast session stuff. He'd have bass synths following along with the bass guitar and stuff, which just sounded awful." 

James: "Paul would have Jay record about 50 takes of a vocal - no exaggeration - and would take single words and lines from some of them to comp up a track. And then he would put some parts into a sampler, to alter the pitch on a single syllable. And the guitars just sounded so thin. He didn't even let me use my own set up, getting me to play through a Rockman. There was a guitar solo on 'Tangled Up On You' and I'm a Les Paul man and he insisted I play it on a really clean sounding Strat. 

"We spent three months over there and came back with a fully mixed LP and the hardest part was that when we got back, we couldn't even listen to it." 

Luckily the band's record company saw their point of view entirely and allowed to let them find a more sympathetic producer and put things to rights. The man chosen for the job was Tim Palmer, who amongst others, had made it happen for The Mission and Tin Machine. 

James: "We knew from the number of bands who had him back to do their next albums that he must be good. Having spent all that time in San Francisco, we re-recorded and mixed the album in five weeks at Marcus Studios in Fulham. We re-recorded about 90 per cent of it. 

"Tim really understands bands and how they work. He understands that a lot of good things that happen in studios with groups are accidents and not achieved by banging things out a hundred times. We listened to the tapes and decided what was salvageable - which wasn't a lot. The bass and drums were mainly kept, but we worked on the sounds of them. We did have to replace some of the drum sounds with samples and replace a lot of the fills because they had been so badly recorded. We rearranged quite a few of the songs as well - 'Jealous' is very different from how it was. 

"Fulham was an SSL and Studer A-800 Studio, which was the same as out in San Francisco, so it wasn't that the studio equipment was very different, just the way it was being used." 

Tim allowed James to use his own set-up in the studio, miking him up with the gear he knew. 

James: "Nearly all the guitars from the San Francisco sessions went, apart from a couple of solos and a couple of backing tracks that I liked. And we replaced all of the acoustic guitars. 

"Tim just miked up my Marshalls with a couple of SM58s, one close one and an ambient one. There was no Dl'ing at all. I used a lot of my own effects, just printing the sound onto tape. It usually takes a lot of talking producers into doing that, but if you've got a great sound, you should record it. I used a selection of my Les Pauls through a really old Marshall 100. It's a mid 60s one with tremolo - I've never seen another one like it. I've got six Les Pauls that I've accumulated over the years and I use them all. 

"One of the great things about doing so much touring in the States is that there are all these pawn shops where you'll find guitars for next to nothing! My Gold Top I got for about $400 about a year and a half ago. It's an early '70s model. None of them are really pieces, they're all '70s models, but the sound is just so solid. I've got another Gold Top which Gibson gave me last year and that's a replica '57 model, serial number and all. They had some quality control problems in the late '70s, but they've got their act together again on that front. 

"I also use a Strat in the studio when I want more of a clean wash, orlittle picky things. That's a mid '70s model. Guitars are such versatile instruments, just using different models can allow you to have such a huge range of different textures and sounds. In the studio, amps are the Marshall, Fender Twins and Seymour Duncan combo. I really like the new Fender amps, just called The Twin, and I use two of them in stereo live. In my effects rack I've got an S PX90, REV5 and DEP5. 

"The DEP5 I use for its really nice reverb - I don't like the spring reverbs you get in amps. The REV5 I use for stereo delays and the SPX90 for clicking in various sound effects that I programmed into it, like the motorbike noises I programmed up using the pitch change. I also use the MXR Dynacomp. It's meant to be a compressor but it's more like a gain booster. In the studio I make extensive use of the Roland 501 Space Echo. You can't take it on the road 'cause there's so many moving parts and they go down all the time. I use it a lot with the Strat and it gives a really warm sound. 

"We did a lot of guitar overdubs. Creating parts is one of the most important aspects of studio work for me. On 'Jealous', I double-tracked the riff in stereo, with Strat parts in the bridge and the solos - all straight through takes. I never like comp'ing up solos. All the acoustic was done on a Gibson Everly Brothers and Jay has a 12 string Ovation. Most of the acoustic parts consisted of two Everly parts, one each side and the 12-string in the middle. Tracks like 'Kiss Of Life' were almost entirely acoustic, and on 'I'll Do For you', there's a lot of acoustic sustained chords with really long reverbs, which doesn't really sound like acoustic guitar at all. Jay played some of the acoustic guitar, but he's not very confident in his playing - you've got to force him into it, but he'll come up with odd little things that work very well." 

Peter's set-up, which he also used in the studio in combination with a DI consist of a Peavey Mega Bass rig, bi-amped and feeding into 2x18" and 2x10" speakers. 

Peter: "I always use a Music Man Stingray, one of the original ones. I used to use Precisions and Jazz's but the Stingray's got a lot more punch. I don't like the new Ernie Ball ones very much though, the necks are too thick. I've also got a rack with an SPX90 which I used for a bit of chorus, reverb and flange. There's an ADA 2FX which gives a bit of delay. It's not as noisey as the SPX and there's less signal loss. I also use a Boss Chorus, the new stereo one, and a little bit of MXR Distortion on the album - just a touch." 

James: "All the vocals were redone in single takes - twenty minutes and it would be there.. At the most he would do three takes and would use one of them straight through. No-one could understand why Paul had had such a problem with them. Me and Chris (drummer) did all the backing vocals. 

"At the mix, Tim was really open to our suggestions and in agreement with the way we felt we should sound. We're going to have him back to do our next album!" 

The undoubted base rock of the band's support is now firmly established in the States, but it has been a success hard won. 

Peter: "We go to the States for two weeks and end up doing a four month tour. 

"On the first one, we did 10,000 miles in the back of a Ford Transit, nine of us and the gear! The last one it was a fleet of luxury tour coaches - the lot. Over there we play in 7,000 - 8,000 seater venues. We're going back over to do the first two weeks of the Billy Idol tour (bit of a strange one for James, that one) and then two months on our own. But that will probably stretch to six months!" 

The band, though, are intent on eventually matching that success over here. 

James: "We've got an audience over here, but we're aware that we've not really worked hard enough here. Maybe next year." 

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