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FRA
Jamily Coach & Correspondent
Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 5477
Location: London don
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monisum
Joined: 30 Jun 2004
Posts: 1327
Location: Germany
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 Posted: Sat May 21, 2005 15:47 |
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How cool is that pic !!!!! 
That's a pleasant "torture" for all the female fans around 
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fUnK[iLo]
Joined: 05 Feb 2005
Posts: 472
Location: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina
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| Posted: Sat May 21, 2005 16:40 |
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Here's the complete article:
May 21, 2005
The Lost Boy
He’s sold 20 million albums, owns a fleet of supercars, and lives in a spectacular Buckinghamshire pile, but, for Jay Kay, there’s something missing. Alan Jackson meets a space cowboy who’s put the drugs behind him and is in search of his cosmic girl
An imaginary conversation is being acted out between one Jason Kay, bachelor of this Buckinghamshire parish, and the so-sweet, oh-so-kind, instinctively nature-loving, can-take-or-leave-London, surprisingly single and eligible (utterly gorgeous is such a given that it goes without mention) Woman of his Dreams.
JK: “I’m a really nice guy, you know, and there’s all of this [a gesture of the hand encompasses the 18th-century manor house, the endless arable acres, the famously fabulous cars, the lifestyle and, of course, himself] that I long to share with somebody.”
Dream Woman, smiling indulgently: “Yes, but you’re a pop star.”
JK, pleadingly: “I’m still a good egg, though. Very responsible. Eager to please. And, the fact is, I’m 35 now, and really want the chance to be a dad...”
Dream Woman, kindly but firmly, thus emphasising her total, unreachable perfection: “Perhaps, but you’re still a pop star. I’m sorry, but the answer is no.”
As we’re all of us smart enough to realise by now, it is entirely possible to appear to Have It All and yet still not to have attained the one thing you most long for. Indeed, we can probably imagine how the appearing to Have It All could prevent someone (a pop star, say) getting what they want, what they really, really want...
It’s quite a quandary for a talented, rich and handsome devil like Jay Kay, the man who is Jamiroquai, to find himself in. And that sympathy may be in short supply (he’s certainly not asking for, or expecting, any) is neither here nor there. Though rich and blessed, there is something about the person opposite me that causes Kate Bush’s song about the man with the child in his eyes to play in my head. At times, he is bravura personified. At others, you sense only vulnerability. Twice, during my afternoon with him, he weeps openly.
So what? Well, for those of us whose job it is to attempt to draw a true impression from the prepared soundbites and image-preserving obfuscations that comprise the media lexicon of many celebrity interviewees, Kay is an endearing rarity. He doesn’t court publicity, only rarely granting journalists access. But when you do sit down with him, he lays himself totally, artlessly open. When we last met, four years ago, he had only recently ended a relationship with the TV presenter/actress Denise Van Outen. “I know you’ll want to ask about that, but best to leave it to the end,” his PR had counselled me. “It’s a sensitive subject.” Yet within a minute of my turning on the tape, Kay had introduced the subject himself and, for the next half hour, talked unguardedly about the failed romance as if to a friend.
Then, finally dispatching the topic with an “I feel better for that!”, he turned his hands palms-upwards on the table as if to symbolise his guilelessness and remarked, “Of course, my confusion about the whole thing was made a lot more intense by my cocaine habit,” something I had no foreknowledge of at all.
Today, in the countdown to the release of a new and, against the odds, triumphantly accomplished album, Dynamite, he announces almost apologetically that addiction is something we’re going to have to talk about again. Rather than book into The Priory, as most with his means would do, Kay had insisted that he could wean himself off drugs alone. I’d wanted to believe he would succeed, but how perilous a strategy it seemed. So you didn’t manage to stay clean, then? He gives a rueful smile. “No. My best attempts would always work for three or four weeks, then I’d fall back into old ways.” And as for so many others, it took the subsequent experience of an all-time personal low to make him re-confront his problem.
“Christmas Day, 2003,” he recalls, and shivers. Midway through the previous afternoon, an acquaintance had arrived unannounced at the house. “And the first thing he says is, ‘Man, I scored this lovely gear the other day.’ Of course, an addict’s ears will prick up instantly. I forget about all the promises I’d made to myself, and to others. I forget the plans I’d made for the holidays. All that matters now is getting hold of some of this stuff. Not just one gram, one line, either. Once I start, it’s Game On with me. With the result that, next thing I know, it’s 10am the following morning and there’s a knock at the door. It’s my mum, here to spend the day. ‘Merry Christmas!’ she’s saying. ‘Merry Christmas!’ [Tears are streaming down Kay’s face by now; he cuffs them away with a sleeve.] I’ve not been to bed. My eyes are like golf balls. I’m completely dishevelled, having passed out fully dressed on the couch. No way am I going to be able to swallow even a mouthful of lunch. And she knows. She knows.”
The bond between Karen Kay, a popular cabaret singer of the Seventies, and her son is especially close. She brought him up alone (a twin brother died within weeks), having been left by his father soon after the birth. “So she’s pulling me to her [he pantomimes being seized by the shirt-front], telling me: ‘You’re going to lose it all, boy. Lose everything! Stop this now, or you’ll ruin your entire life.’” Eventually, her message got through. It was fear, shame and, increasingly, the physical toll of addiction (“Coke hits me really hard, and when you go back to it after giving up, the hit is intensified”) that, six days later, caused Kay to redraw a line in the sand. “My birthday falls on December 30, so New Year’s Day has always seemed doubly like the time for making a fresh start. Last year, it was even more the case. And finally, I accepted that I’d need some outside input. The right kind, though. Not me sitting in a group with someone saying, ‘So Jason, why not tell us your story?’ That wouldn’t work for me at all.”
An old friend, Ollie, came back into his life at just the right time. “We were ruffians together in West London in our late teens, but he’s had some issues of his own to deal with, and he’s been abroad for the past few years. We bumped into each other again and I found him to be on hard times financially, and so said to him: ‘OK, so you haven’t got any money. Well, I’m addicted to Class-A drugs and I really need some support. If you’ll help me, I’ll help you. Is that a deal?’” The plan was for the two men to be together 24/7, for as long as necessary. Ollie would function as Kay’s conscience, protector and boot-camp commandant combined. “The only rule was that he made the rules, and, man, his rules turned out to be fierce. On January 1 last year, day one of the new regime, he had me up at 7am to go running. From there, we were straight into the gym. And that evening, when I went to the fridge for a beer, he was at my shoulder to say, ‘No, mate. No alcohol, and no spliff, either.’ I was thinking, ‘I’m not sure I can do this. I’ll barely last a month.’”
But Kay insists he has not used cocaine for 17 months now, and will never again go back to the drug. “I want always to be able to look the people I love in the eye and say, ‘First of January 2004... I promise I’ve been clean since then.’” To which end Ollie remained a constant presence for 13 months. “He and I are bonded for life now. Fate brought me the right person at just the right time. If he hadn’t watched over me so well, or been so tough, I’d never have broken the chain.” Which was? “I’m not naturally relaxed in public situations, and find it hard to be smiley-happy among strangers. A drink helps, but can make you reach for a second and third. Then it’s, ‘I know. I’ll have a little line now. That’ll straighten me up.’ And so on, and so on.”
Gradually, a system of “treats” for prolonged good behaviour was introduced. “A glass of good wine [he has poured himself one as he has been speaking], or a little joint. Those are my rewards to myself now. But never, ever coke again.” This has meant jettisoning some past friends and previously favoured places. “Certain people only want you back using again. I don’t have room for that kind of ‘friendship’ in my life. And I’ve spent enough nights snorting stuff off toilet seats in clubs. To anyone who still thinks that’s such a great way to use your time and money, go ahead, but I’ve moved on.”
With the implicit hope, also, that new era Jay Kay might
finally find his dream partner. “I’m no longer a slurring mess of a man slumped in the corner of some VIP area, unable to talk to anyone properly and wanting only to do more drugs. Who will you meet when you’re in a state like that? Only someone else who’s off their face. It’s not difficult to find some groovy London chick in a miniskirt who thinks you’re the dog’s bollocks ’cos you can get in to any party. What I’m looking for is someone who’ll be happy staying home at nights with this [he repeats that empire-including gesture].”
At which point, a re-enthused Kay leaps up, insistent on giving me a tour of his home, the £2.3-million renovation of its three-storey interior having only recently been completed. “I look upon myself as a weaver bird,” he says, leading me from kitchen (huge) to dining room (intimate) to private cinema (tech heaven) to master bedroom (beyond huge). “He builds a lovely nest for his potential partner, and then asks all the ladies, ‘So, what d’you think?’”
His is more than just a fastidiously restored period house. It’s an estate. “And I take my responsibilities as its manager-owner very seriously. Just as I don’t want people in here chopping out lines on my new furniture, so I want to preserve its integrity outside. Repairing fences, replanting trees for the next generation, restoring the kitchen gardens, raising sheep organically, encouraging the bird population... It all takes time and money [£250,000 per year, he tells me, in staff wages alone]. London? I miss the buzz sometimes, but it’s only down the road.”
What funds it all, lest we forget, is Kay’s joyful, swaggering ability as that pop star: more than 20 million albums sold since his 1992 major-label debut, Emergency on Planet Earth. At the time of release, it was not just its obvious homage to by-then-unfashionable black music pioneers such as Gil Scott Heron and Bootsy Collins that set it apart from prevailing trends in British dance culture. The preoccupation of his lyrics with environmental issues and Third World debt further marked Kay out as a singular figure in that world. The outlandish hats he favoured may have become his visual trademark, but clearly there was a sharp, inquiring mind beneath them. Dynamite, released next month, deserves to be his most successful release yet, and for fans will provide a ready-made soundtrack to the approaching summer. In among the dance grooves, however, the melancholic side of Kay is in evidence, too.
“Look at this,” he commands, peeling a Polaroid off the wall of the home studio complex he has now led me to, and where his musicians are in energetic rehearsal. I look, and see a bearded stranger with long, unkempt hair, and no expression in his darkly ringed eyes. I have no idea who it is, or what I should say. “It’s me, taken in Costa Rica in October 2003. I’d gone out there with the band to work on stuff for the album, and the first thing that happens on arrival is I’m handed seven grams, ’cos that’s what people have heard I’ll be wanting.
A beautiful villa, but on the edge of nowhere. So what did our man do? Just sat in his room doing coke. I’d be up for three days solid on it. And whereas, in the early days, most of the people around me would be doing it, too, these guys, bless ’em, just aren’t interested. It hit me like a train one daybreak: I’m the only one now. And I can see it in their eyes: ‘We’re wasting our time here. He’s not going to hold it together. This album will never get made.’”
They were wrong, happily. It did. And at least his lonely epiphany on a faraway balcony inspired one song, Hot Tequila Brown. Kay plays it to me from the mixing desk and, as I stand alongside, he harmonises with himself on a lyric about sitting stone-cold in the rising sun, toxic with fear and self-loathing. “If you want to know what cocaine addiction is like, it’s that,” he says when the track is over, and I turn to find that, again, his face is running with tears. The Polaroid of his haunted, 2003 self he then thumbs back into place, a glossy, curl-edged reminder of where he found himself and how far he since has come.
Dynamite is released on the Sony/BMG label on June 20. A single, Feels Just Like It Should, is out on June 6. Jamiroquai play their first live show in three years on Clapham Common on July 3
Enjoy it  . Thanks to Abou Moslem for finding the complete version of it   
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I really know this little Corner of the Earth it smiles at me... |
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monisum
Joined: 30 Jun 2004
Posts: 1327
Location: Germany
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| Posted: Sat May 21, 2005 17:30 |
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What a great interview! So emotional. Let's hope for Jay, that he can stay clean of coke, especially under the stress of the album release, tours and high publicity in the moment and the future 
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todd_15
Joined: 06 Dec 2004
Posts: 511
Location: byronbay, australia
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 04:41 |
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Wow thats a great interveiw very heavy!
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miss sparkles
Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 411
Location: In the TARDIS
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 05:24 |
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Oh my!
Great interview, great pic 
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Fascist.
I < 3 DOCTOR WHO |
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Dye
Correspondent & Expert
Joined: 16 Nov 2003
Posts: 5146
Location: Planet Home; Buenos Aires, Argentina
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 16:43 |
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Hello there,
I love interviews!!! And this one is very cool. Thanks Flor and Ale
I like specially when he talks about songs and how they came out, it really makes you hear the song in a different way.
D! (dyego) |
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Miss Mary
Joined: 09 Apr 2005
Posts: 110
Location: Denmark, Jylland
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 16:20 |
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MMMMMmmmmmmmmmMMmMmmMMmmmmmmmMm
I'm drewling
Miss Mary
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jamirokaki
Expert
Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Posts: 3472
Location: basque country
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 17:15 |
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i only have read half of the interview 'cos i really don't have time to read it full this days (to understand everything i have to read it carefully, i'm not engish speaker) but it seems so good interview with Jay so truly there
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Miss Mary
Joined: 09 Apr 2005
Posts: 110
Location: Denmark, Jylland
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 18:53 |
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I think the journalist is auwfully critical!?? 
It's seems as if he just doesn't believe Jay Kay, even though I'm sure Jay Kay is pale honest!
What do you think?
Miss mary
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Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
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High Times
Joined: 25 Oct 2004
Posts: 744
Location: music written by JK/Toby Smith
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 19:08 |
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i printed it and read today in the morning while i was working 
i was sad and happy at the same time.. its a great interview!!!
i want to support Jay as much as i can. |
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Miss Mary
Joined: 09 Apr 2005
Posts: 110
Location: Denmark, Jylland
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 19:10 |
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I totally agree! Sad to hear it really was that bad! 
Miss Mary
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Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
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jamirokaki
Expert
Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Posts: 3472
Location: basque country
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 19:54 |
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i finished it now.
i really hope Jay goes out from cocaine forever, and things go well for him 
my total support (as always)
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mainveinman
Joined: 18 Jan 2005
Posts: 43
Location: Essex - England
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 20:19 |
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it says though, that he still does spliff as a treat !! |
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FRA
Jamily Coach & Correspondent
Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 5477
Location: London don
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