BAND OF GYPSIES

“I GET all the neurotics.” 

“He gets people who tie themselves to his bed and… 

“Slash their wrists ‘n’ stuff…I get all that. It gets really freaky…it shakes you sometimes.” 

“There’s some who’ve followed us from LA in cars on this tour…thousands and thousands of miles…” 

Mike and Jay are talking about girls. They’re on tour in America, special guest (which means bottom of the bill) on a package with New Order and Echo & The Bunnymen. Right now they’re in my bedroom, in my bed, in a New York Hotel. Lucky me. 

Jay’s the one who gets all the neurotics. Mike’s the one who’s talking: “If we’re sharing the same hotel as the other bands, it takes them aback because they can walk in with great comfort but there will be 30 or 40 kids who will freak out around us. It’s hurting their egos a little bit and they’re saying unpleasant things about us, like we’re a hairdresser’s band, or just a girlie band.” 

James Stevenson, bless his heart, gets a little cob on: “I think having a fanatical girl audience is a very credible thing to have. All the greats have had it.” 

Gene Loves Jezebel see themselves much more in line with Prince than Joy Division these days. Why the change of heart? 

Mike: “We’re always the antithesis of those dark English bands. You can’t base your life on such a dark, negative force. I remember when we walked into Beggar’s Banquet the first time, Modern English took one look and thought we were the wildest drug fiends of all time. All the bands like Bauhaus had very artistic, renaissance sleeves or whatever, so we stuck our mugs straight on our covers. Nick Cave and everybody hated that.” 

Jay: “And now, through an evolutionary process, we’ve discovered we enjoy writing three or four-minute pop songs.” 

Mike: “Our music has almost reversed – it used to be very insular but now it’s very optimistic and out-going. In the past we had a little bit of that English nihilism. 

Jay: “Yeah, we were very self-conscious which was very much a post-punk mentality that existed for a lot of groups coming up through the early Eighties. We were victims of that but we found out it was much more fun to dance than be stilted and cool.” 

There was a lot you weren’t supposed to do, as if a period of austerity was necessary to purge pop of its decadent excesses and rescue it from the irrelevance of show business. Are you saying you’re liberated now? 

Jay: “Exactly. We found it was better to make mistakes and look ridiculous. We’re not so frightened of looking stupid anymore – there’s nothing banal about that.” 

Perhaps America has taken to you more enthusiastically than Britain because, apart from the New York nightclub clique, there was never the insularity essential to foster any sense of shame through which to develop a doctrine of fashionable taste. 

Jay: “Yes, here they celebrate the otherness, they love what’s different about the group. In England, the fact that we were very colourful didn’t seem to go down very well. They’d prefer us to be a bit more inward-looking.” 

Mike: “When I began, I always thought being in a band would liberate me but, when we stepped out the first time, I was shocked by the negativity about the whole idea. It was quite frustrating and quite uncomfortable. Being in a band was supposed to be normal, like doing anything else and people’d say ‘You can’t dance like that on stage!’ Eventually we just come to the conclusion that we would do what we wanted and to hell with everything. I think things got easier from that point.” 

Jay: “The moment we said ‘This is the way we are. We’re going to be 100 percent Gene Loves Jezebel, whatever it is; we’re going out there and wear all our colours,’ things changed around us totally.” 

Mike: “We stopped apologising. In interviews we’d always be defending ourselves – they’d say ‘Why do you wear this?’ We just swung it round and said ‘This is this, take it or leave it,’ which has made us more comfortable really.” 

This defiant attitude emerged simultaneously, like cause and effect, with the brothers’ discovery that the legendary thrill of playing with creative non-musicians was, in fact, mere legend and that recruiting players who knew what they were doing sharpened their focus, imposed some structure and cemented a sense of identity. Jay dyed his hair red the day Mike learned to write songs and, pretty soon, James Stevenson, who’d started with Chelsea, got his picture on the cover of the last Gen X album and mimed a lot of TV with Kim Wilde, was adding some flamboyant conventional flash; producing on stage and on record what used to be known as guitar heroics. Strangely enough, it gelled and goth mutated quite gloriously into glam with the “Heartache” single and “Desire” LP. 

James: “Before I’d met them, I’d listened to the records and had this image of something very indie but, when I did the first tour, it was very colourful and exciting and glamorous and I really got into it straight away. 

Writing about Gene Loves Jezebel before today was always been a task for me, an attempt to divert peoples’ expectations, to chafe against what their photos said or what the other papers maintained. I realise now that I was always writing to confound expectations, to keep the whole question of content and image open until the brothers sorted themselves out or at least learned to articulate that they’d never get over being twins together in a band. Maybe it’s because I wrote the first ever feature about them after witnessing their early primal scream at the ICA and I just felt fond and partly responsible, or maybe my instincts spotted stars all along. 

Whatever, they’ve blossomed now into their own ugly beauty and their ragamuffin rock – all rouge and power and badly applied mascara, rat’s nest hair, red ribbons and grinning smudged lipstick; cheap Indian chiffon and beads and scarves and patchouli – is still caressing the crits up the wrong way. They’re suspicious, of course, of a new band of gypsies and worried that history may repeat the worst indolent hippy indulgences. 

There’s some good reason too. Gene Loves Jezebel songs read like adolescent poems half the time love perfumed with mystique, cliches clothed in magic. Girls become swans and the rock ‘n’ roll grunt dons robes from the pallet of Arthur Rockham. But add the guitars carefully colliding by accident and the tinny howl and the power pop beast and I find the chubby, baby oil, bare-chested cheek of “20 Killer Hurts” and “Gorgeous” and “Treasure” and the single, “Motion Of Love,” and “Set Me Free” and “Suspicious;” songs, like their titles, somehow so old they’re new – cheerfully incautious, almost idiotically uncalculated and deliciously uncool. 

…….should be closing the show. They’re really threatened by us. They don’t wanna talk very much and there’s antagonism, which surprises me because they shouldn’t worry. They’ve made their 10 albums each and they’ve been around 10 years. They should be comfortable with what they’re doing.” 

Mike: “I always get surprised when a lot of these post-punk English bands who gave this notion of egalitarianism are, in reality, just as spiteful as any of the bands who have ever been. Still, their story’s been told, y’know? Our story hasn’t even started.” 

GENE Loves Jezebel’s glam is very late Sixties Rolling Stones – there’s a bit of Pan about them, an illusionary whiff of hedonism (the brothers barely even drink!). The cloven hoof suggestion of arcane rites and unimaginable pleasures is fantastically appealing – something utterly unattainable, gods not men. But, then again, there’s the essential tarnish, the signs of wear ‘n’ tear which allay our jealousy because they may be getting more and better of everything than us but it’s taking it’s toll. They wear their ribbons like battle scars and what separates them from The Cult and Hanoi Rocks and the reactionary rock circuit is that they may be lads but they’re never oafish. They don’t believe in the myths for one minute, they cling to a touching belief in the mystery of romance and they refuse to do cover versions. Oh, and they’re sexy of course… 

Jay: “For a lot of groups like Motley Crue, it’s all black and white – it has to be this and you can only do that. It’s cock rock, it’s chauvinist, it’s heavy metal. For some reason, I think Gene Loves Jezebel cover a much wider spectrum of the human expression and all that..."” So you prefer the sensual to the sexual. 

Jay: “Well, that’s the way we are. That’s the sum of our experiences.” 

Mike: “We are conscious of what’s ugly in a lot of…….music.” 

…….or Prince or The Rolling Stones at their peak. It’s rock music at it’s most interesting, at it’s most exciting to watch. It’s a visual thing as well as a sound.” 

Jay: “It’s the feeling of just being glad to be alive, being taken out of a very mundane life…” 

Mike: “That notion of performance.” 

Mike’s notion of performance has grown pretty OTT on this tour. In his Wurzel Gummidge straw hat, he drapes around James like Jagger used to off Richards and, at the Pier in New York, he disappeared into the crowd and reappeared at the other end of the arena about 50 foot up a lighting tower. 

James: “Jay came over and went ‘Where the f***’s he gone?” 

Mike: “That was very brave – I’m so frightened of heights but it was daylight and …” 

Jay: “It’s a very unreal situation for us. We’re a band that’s very much to do with the night. We think we’re something to do with light on those cold nights. We think we’re the fire you come out to see.” 

Mike: “Most British bands stand back; they don’t want that contact. They wanna be aloof. The Banshees wanna be up there and godlike but I wanna get that contact with the audience. I wanna be part of it because that’s the greatest excitement for me. That’s where the unpredictable happens, the tragedies, the dramas…I think ‘Is this the show where I get stabbed or my leg breaks,’ y’know?” 

“People who come to see us and don’t know anything about us are going ‘What is going on? Is this really 1987? What are we looking at?’” 

There are those who maintain this era, our era, is pop’s worst ever, that the notion that anything goes reduces all to the lowest common denominator. Gene Loves Jezebel just see horizon after horizon. 

Mike: “To be hemmed in is such an awful feeling. It should be wide open because we’re all humans. We’re much richer that some marketing guy would have us all believe.” 

Jay: “I would say we’re more anti-fashion that anything. It’s funny, when we go onstage with these bands, they walk on in all this sports gear like the Beasties or someone would wear and all the audience have got their tee-shirts and their Adidas and their Reebok. That’s what’s going down, that’s fashionable and they’re the ones, to me, who are buying down. We’re going on and people are still surprised and shocked. Gene Loves Jezebel is in a weird place in a weird time.” 

Mike: “Gene Loves Jezebel is not hung up and a lot of the acts we play with are very hung up.” 

Jay: “It’s a real contrast. On this tour, it’s like having your dinner and having your dessert first. Really we…….just building up to those moments in the right kind of way. That’s why I think the new album is better than anything we’ve done before because we reach peaks and come down.” 

Sex as a sacrament? Isn’t that adolescent? 

Jay: “I think it goes right through life, personally. It’s special to anybody. It’s like the Holy Grail isn’t it? No one ever attains – or, I dunno, maybe they do? – That perfect relationship but you always go through, looking for it, more and more.” 

Most bands start off naïve and end up cynical but you started off cynical and ended up naïve. How come? 

Mike: “Because it’s only now we’re writing for ourselves. What happened with us is that we started awkward and we were cynical because we felt so awkward but, once we went through the process of learning about ourselves, we felt very comfortable and realised that things were attainable and there is a higher ground.” 

Do you think any of your early fans will think you’ve gone pop or soft or sold out now? 

James: “No. We haven’t contrived anything. We haven’t sat down and thought ‘Let’s make a record that Radio 1 will play.’” 

Still, “Motion Of Love” is nudging the Top 40 and, judging by the letters we get a MM, many people have taken you up as a cause and your success will justify the faith of the great disenfranchised who believe the charts and the press are full of hypes. 

Widespread recognition and success wouldn’t rob you of your appeal? 

Jay: “No, the fact we’re twin brothers has always protected us because there’s always that slap on the wrist if you’re too out of hand. Mike and I have hated working together. Many times we fall out and we write separately and say ‘I wanna sing that’ or whatever.” 

Mike: “James and Chris and Pete are caught in the middle between us. Both of us think we could go up there alone and sing but they go ‘No, no boys, you can’t see it. Without either one of you, the band wouldn’t exist.’” 

Is there more affection or friction now? 

Mike: “I think we’re more for each other now. Before we were slightly hung up about being twin brothers and being in a band but now it’s a fact of life, let’s celebrate it.” 

The Mike and Bernie Winters of pop? 

Jay: “No no…we don’t feel like twins any more, that’s the difference. We still think we’re got a lot to prove though…and we’ve still got a slight chip on our shoulder. As long as we have that…” 

Never stop. 

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