by Poppy Z Brite
| The first thing that drew me to Gene Loves Jezebel was the cover of their second album, Immigrant, a delicately tinted rose-and-golden photo of Michael and Jay Aston embracing. There was something so tender about this photo – |  |
Gene Loves Jezebel are the Aston twins, Michael (vocals) and Jay (vocals and guitar), Pete Rizzo (bass) and Marcus Gilvear (drums). They have released eight singles with a treasure trove of B-sides (often further explorations of themes and motifs in the singles), two albums, and will soon release a third LP – all since leaving their native Wales and coming to London in 1982.
“When we came to London, we signed a deal almost immediately with Beggars Banquet,” says Michael (the fair-haired twin, for readers with inquiring minds). “We’re weren’t terribly experienced. We made one record, “Shaving My Neck;” then we didn’t do anything for a long time. We were very arrogant and very convinced of how things should go, but we learned that sometimes you have to go about things in a different way to get things done. So we spent a long time after making our first single adjusting, really. We were embraced in England. It was so – I won’t say ‘easy’ but it was so comfortable for us. To walk onstage with, at the time, five or six drawn-out themes. We were very naïve and very brave and very enthusiastic in our approach to music then. At the time, we had no real fixed notion of how it was going to go. Then to just go onstage and perform in London, to get a record deal… that left us feeling a little cynical toward the industry, because we couldn’t understand how they could embrace something when, in truth, we hadn’t even formulated it properly. It was an evolving thing and we felt it was too early and that was why we drew back.”
Jay (Jezebel) and Michael (who got his nickname as a child, when he broke a leg; Jay nicknamed him Gene after Gene Vincent, a 1950s singer with a hobble) grew up in Porthcawl, a South Wales seaside town. What, I ask, was the setting like?
“There’s lots of beautiful countryside and then there’s the steel company there and the coal mines over there; there’s an industrial state a few miles away… I love the sea, especially here, because it’s mostly cold. It tends to be a more violent sea. And that’s good for me.”
You’ve said the people there only understand Michael Jackson and Iron Maiden. Do you feel that as artist you were influenced by that setting?
“Certainly as children. When I was growing up in school we had all the rock bands and all the pop groups. But I was always inclined to kick against it. If I’d gone with an early Roxy music album, they’d have switched to Michael Jackson or something. But there are interesting people wherever you go, and fortunately we managed to escape a lot of the horrors and miseries of South Wales by having our own little clique. I don’t really like Wales very much. I couldn’t live here. I find it very claustrophobic, very stifling. I still love my family, of course, but that’s the only reason I come down here. And when I do I try to go to some sort of wilderness or something. I’m glad I’ve escaped.”
Do you have problems going back now, having come further, looking different?
“It’s less problematic than when we lived here, in our late teens. We were much more naive then. When you are young, you are more inclined to live with something because you think it’s a good idea. Usually you almost do. The difference between that and now is that now I don’t have to put up with it. People don’t bother me about the way I look. Most of them know who I am; it’s a well-known band in this country. But I don’t feel any more warmth toward the area or the people. I mean, they’re weirdos. Normal people generally are, aren’t they?”
Normal people? But being a twin -- a decidedly unusual situation – must have influenced you as well.
“Well, yeah. We’ve been together all our lives. But we don’t really live out of each other’s pocket. The real strength of our relationship is the honesty of it. The fact that you can confide in someone or be brutally frank with someone about what they are doing or how they look or what your approach is. That’s the great advantage of having a twin brother, I suppose. But anybody who had a really, really, very, incredibly good friend would enjoy that relationship anyhow.”
Are there disadvantages as well?
“Oh, yeah – sometime we can compromise each other a bit too much. Imagine a situation where you’re doing a song and you both have incredibly strong ideas on how that…….
Are you very concerned about having a large listening audience?
“The music is more important. Anybody and everybody will tell you that, whoever they are. Be it true or otherwise. I’ll agonize more over a mix or the way a song is going than I do about how the review’s going to go or if we’re going to get on National Radio One at ten o’clock in the morning. I don’t think about those things. I don’t think about pop stardom. I think about music. I put far more energy into making a record for my own sake than I will for whoever’s going to listen to it at the other end. (Laughing) That’s pretty selfish…”
Your image has always been very definite. Do you feel that you’re following a tradition of, perhaps, androgynous musicians – men who would be called “ beautiful” rather than “handsome” – from Bowie and Eno to the Cure?
“There is some truth to that. But we didn’t wake up in a band; the band came second to the way we look. We didn’t sit down and think about it. We’d still be the same whether we played or not. We just care about the way we look.”
Every band is going to present an image, even a band like New Order who is very concerned with presenting no image…
“Well, of course, that’s the most contrived of all.”
Jay has said you’ve been objects…….
They like to be able to pigeonhole you. To call you, say, Gothic, like The Cure.
“Every band has its joke. Bands just laugh at it. Any band that comes forward – ‘oh, they’re Gothic.’ Nobody even knows what it means… God… Gothic, to me, is morose and somber and old.”
There are overtones of darkness on your first album, Promise.
“Yeah, but I saw that as the Welshness, really. I didn’t see that as Gothic. The darkest song was “Bread From Heaven,” which is a song about Wales. We weren’t dancing about in the graveyard. For me, we’re… probably like the Cure, I suppose. They could claim the same things we are just dealing in emotion. And lots of emotions are very dark, aren’t they? Most of them, in fact.”
Why do you dislike commercially popular bands? Do you feel they’re not talented musicians, or just overrated?
“Usually, I just dislike them for what they project; it’s either their
arrogance, conceit, or their lack of any depth. They could be the greatest
musicians that ever lived, but if I didn’t like whatever they give off
as human beings, then I couldn’t possibly like their music. You shouldn’t
really think about music like that; but I think instinctively, sometimes,
you just feel something that’s negative, ugly – lots of bands give you
that
feeling. And lots of the so-called ‘alternative’ bands give me that.”
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