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JamiroFan2000
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Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 2881
Location: The Jamiroquaized States Of America
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 Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2013 17:25 |
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[Read At Your Own Peril] JK Written Remaster Linear Notes!!
 Hello there,
I just received my remasters the other day and MAN, are they awesome! The new write-ups by the one and only JK on each album era are the most engrossing, unexpected and amazing reads I have seen in a long time. Since I noticed no other fan has taken the time, I decided to transcribe the new JK write-up linear notes and post them here 'album-by-album'. If you haven't bought the new remasters yet and don't want to read these for your own amusement, don't read this thread any further...hope everyone enjoys these reads, JK certainly has some inspiring tales to tell. To start it off, here is the linear notes by JK for the first album, "Emergency On Planet Earth", the other two will be posted in the coming days:
* IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SPOIL YOUR READING OF THE NEW JK WRITE-UPS UPON PURCHASE OF THE NEW REMASTERS, STOP READING THIS THREAD NOW! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED *
EMERGENCY ON PLANET EARTH NEW JK REMASTER LINEAR NOTES
transcribed by JamiroFan2000
Really, there are two key tracks on the album: When You Gonna Learn and Emergency On Planet Earth. When You Gonna Learn kicked the whole thing off - the sound, the flavour, the concept. Emergency On Planet Earth defined it. When You Gonna Learn was something I wrote long before I went to Sony, long before I signed to Acid Jazz even.
At the time I was heavily influenced by the American and First Ration Indians and their philosophies and what they were about - the name Jamiroquai was styled from Iroquois, the Canadian tribe: the fur hat, the coat made out of an old Pendleton blanket, the logo with the buffalo horns, were all inspired by Native American culture. In particular, the Cree Indians have a saying: Only when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught we will realize we cannot eat money. To me that seemed to get straight to the point of everything that was wrong with the world. I'd also just seen this horrific cull of elephants on a programme on the television - something like 40 elephants being shot dead from a helicopter - which I found deeply disturbing.
Anyway, I was working on some songs, trying to get tracks together to take to record companies, and at one point the guy I was working with popped out for lunch and I got on the keyboard. I plonked out these chords and started writing this tune, and almost immediately the lyrics came out: Yeah yeah, have you heard the news today? / money's on the menu in my favourite restaurant / well don't talk about quantity / because there's no fish left in the sea / greedy men been killing all the life there every was...
It must have taken 30 or 40 minutes beginning to end, to write. By the time the guy I was meant to be writing with came back from lunch I'd already put the whole thing together. Straight away my manager got very excited about it, so I went into the studio, the Round House in Camden, to record it properly so we could take it to record companies and publishers. Of course, as soon as I started recording it people were telling me what to do, and trying to get me to take lyrics out because there were too many of them and nodboy was going to get it and they wouldn't like it. The guy producing it took whole sections of vocals out, which annoyed me no end, and then he started trying to make it sound just like everything else in the charts that week. I knew that I wanted a particular sound, and I knew that it wasn't the tinny PWL pop sound, or the equally tinny acid house sound, that everything had then. I was a funk kid. I'd been listening to my mate's record collection which was full of Dexter Wansel, Earth Wind & Fire and tracks like Johnny Hammond's Los Conquistadores Chocolate. I wanted a proper live band with a proper live sound.
Typically, by the time he's finished with it, he'd cut out half the lyrics and made the whole thing sound awful. I was there for days, arguing, trying to get it put right. In the end I had put my foot down. I took all the shinny shinny stuff off and put all the words back in. Then we got Wallis, who I knew when we used to skate together, to play didgeridoo at the beginning: we added the string intro - which was an idea I got from Pleasure's track Joyous, which had these amazing strings at the end - and next thing I know I've signed to Acid Jazz and Trevor Nelson's playing When You Gonna Learn on Kiss FM.
Twenty years on, I think that track still rings true. Lyrically it's still relevant, and musically it hasn't dated - unlike all the other tinny, shinny stuff that was around at the time.
Between releasing When You Gonna Learn on Acid Jazz and signing with Sony, my manager told me he'd found this amazing keyboard player. So Toby came along, played a few chords which I just loved and I thought, Yeah, I can work with this guy. But that didn't last long because he also had a tendency to play these very ravey, very acid housey chords, which I wasn't having, and which he wouldn't stop playing, so I told him to forget it and I got someone else. A couple of weeks latrer we were supporting the Brand New Heavies at Brixton Academ, Toby was there and he came up to me afterwards and said: Shit man, I didn't realize you were doing that kind of stuff. After a bit of tete-a-tete, we agreed to give it another go, on the condition that he didn't play anyt more ravey chords, which he didn't. That was a critical moment. Toby really got it, what I was after, what I wanted to do.
The first song we wrote together was Too Young To Die. I'd just signed an eight album deal with Sony and we had When You Gonna Learn and not a lot else, and the record company were already trying to foist Erasure's and Sinitta's producer on me: an offer which I declined. So the pressure was on. We had to stick to our guns, but we knew that if we didn't come up with something that would reach a decent number in the chart, it would be over - eight album deal or no eight album deal.
We were in this studio in East London trying to come up with a second single, and I started singing this bassline - I have very limited musical ability in terms of playing, so when I'm writing I sing everything, all the parts: bass, drums, percussion, piano, guitar, horns, strings. I'm singing the bassline and the drums, Toby's working out what the chords are and where they go, and bang, we've got this great groove going. It was all about the kick of it, and the rhythm and the movement. Then I'm coming up with lyrics - I was quite an angry young man at the time. It didn't like what I was seeing on the television, wars raging all over the place, and that all started coming out. But when we hit the chorus I couldn't think of anything to sing over it. So I started scatting: do do do do, da da doh, da da doh. And it just sang out like a bird. By the time we'd added the horns and the strings we knew we had the perfect second single.
When it finally got released though, the thing that seemed to cause the most interest was who the amazing black girl singer was. I did one of my first interviews at a radio station in Birmingham and the DJ kept asking who the girl singer was. I kept telling him it was me, but he wouldn't have it, he kept saying: I know you do the music, but who's that amazing black girl you've got singing on it? And I kept saying: No, that's me. I AM the singer. Once we had When You Gonna Learn and Too Young To Die, the album pretty much started to shape itself.
If I Like It, I Do It always reminded me a bit of The Isley Brothers Harvest For The World, that same good natured vibe: I was starting to learn that things didn't have to be aggressive, that we could do nice stuff too. Music Of The Mind was another nice laid back, natural track. It's a freedom track. Freedom was a big theme on the album. I always had a penchant for Latiny-jazzy chords and Music Of The Mind was where that really started to come out. It was heavily influenced by Flora Purim's Moon Dreams, another track from my mate's record collection that I absolutely loved. It has to be said, there was a fairr amount of emulation on the album. Like Whatever It Is I Just Can't Stop, that was me trying to get the feel of that funky feel that only comers from having a real drummer. Blow Your Mind was another nicer, sweet, easy track. That came at a rehearsal for a gig somewhere. The band were on the stage - by now we had Nick the original drummer, and Stuart on bass, and a great horn section - Toby was noodling some lovely chords and I started singing Love ya, I need ya over the top. We recorded that in one take, and the brass was feeling so nice that when we got to the end I didn't want it to stop, so I motioned to the guys to go again, which is why there's the reprise. I remember thinking that was an incredibly clever thing to do.
It was so great finally having a proper band. The thing is though, when you'ver got all these great musicians you want to use them, you want to give them room to play. And I wanted this to be an album, not a collection of three minute songs. I didn't want tracks to be rigid, stuck in that verse, chorus thing. All the people I'd been listening to were jazz-fusion bands, they didn't do three minute tracks, they just played, which is why Blow Your Mind is eight and a half minutes long.
The other thing I wanted was balance. If we did a soft track, the next one needed to be hard and gritty. After Blow Your Mind and they were recorded in this order, you get Revolution, all ten minutes and 16 seconds of it. That had real impact - paramilitary drums, grinding bass: it was hardcore, cool, exactly where I wanted to come from. It said something, musically and lyrically, and it rounded off all the other things I'd been saying on the album. And I certainly had a lot to say on this album. I was angry about everything and everyone. You only have to look at the sleeve notes, which I wrote off the top of my head art the very last minute, to see that. Not that they were that wide of the mark. There are some things in there that are the kind of thing you say when you're 22, but reading them back now they're fairly eloquent and together.
For me though, Emergency On Planet Earth was where we really got to the point of everything we were trying to do and say, That was the real triumph track. The whole groove of it, all the syncopation, the strings gliding over the top, we were definitely winning with that one. And the lyrics were the hammer to the nail: The kids need education / and the streets are never clean / I've seen, a certain disposition, prevailing in the wind / sweet change, if anybody's listening / emergency on planet earth / is that life that I am witnessing / or just another wasted birth.
Emergency was a monumental track. It linked Too Young To Die and When You Gonna Learn, and oncer we had it, the whole concept of the album came to life. I was like, Right, this is what the album's going to be. Which is why it had to be the title track. When we had that we really knew what were onto.
I remember being nervous when the album came out, but at the same timeI had a feeling it would do well. Kevin our manager said it was number 32. I thought. That's not bad on the album chart, that's alright. Then I thought, I bet it's not, I bet it's higher than that, he laughed and said: No, it's number 1. And then it was number 1 the next week. And the next.
After three weeks at number 1 I thought, Right, that's it, I'm in the game
JK (March, 2013)
ROTSC coming next very soon! Cheers!
Sincerely,
JamiroFan2000
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Little c
Joined: 11 Feb 2002
Posts: 142
Location: France
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| Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2013 19:53 |
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only one word :Thanks !  |
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Funkalero
Joined: 13 Nov 2010
Posts: 138
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| Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2013 21:09 |
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Thank you very much for this!!! |
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zeioIIDX
Joined: 07 Sep 2007
Posts: 239
Location: Biloxi, MS
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| Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2013 21:17 |
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Incredible. I absolutely cannot wait to read the notes for the other albums!! I really hope Synkronized and the rest get re-masters as well with Jay Kay writing about them 
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JamiroFan2000
Correspondent
Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 2881
Location: The Jamiroquaized States Of America
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| Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2013 21:54 |
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| zeioIIDX wrote: |
| Incredible. I absolutely cannot wait to read the notes for the other albums!! I really hope Synkronized and the rest get re-masters as well with Jay Kay writing about them |
I agree that the turbulent years of Synkronized do warrant an indepth JK 'write-up' but as for a 'remastering', albums thereafter sound perfectly fine and don't really warrant it. Maybe in a 'boxset' situation about 10 years down the road, just maybe, but yeah, glad your all enjoying the first of these. Cheers!
Sincerely,
JamiroFan2000
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Curry
Joined: 19 Mar 2013
Posts: 184
Location: Arizona, USA
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| Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2013 23:04 |
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Hey, we're not just Canadian! 
He must be thinking about the Huron! 
You know, it takes a lot of grief to make something memorable.
Can't wait to see the other notes from the other albums. |
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JamiroFan2000
Correspondent
Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 2881
Location: The Jamiroquaized States Of America
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| Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 16:52 |
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Hello again,
Glad your all enjoying the reads, here's the second one:
THE RETURN OF THE SPACE COWBOY NEW JK REMASTER LINEAR NOTES
transcribed by JamiroFan2000
After the success of the first album, I wanted to get straight on with the second. I was hot on the trail of it and I realised the danger in lolling around too much and wasting time. The intention was to get back in the studio over Christmas, but our drummer at the time, Nick Van Gelder, who played on the first album, said that he was off on holiday. I said to him: Errr, well, don't go on holiday too long, I've got a big studio booked, we're in the game now, we've got a proper budget for the album, we've got a budget for strings, everybody's being very nice to us, giving us everything we want. I told him: We're in the game now, we can't afford to lose momentum.
This was three or four months after Emergency On Planet Earth came out. By the time we'd been out and toured and done all the promo, so as soon as I could I booked us into the studio. But Nick said he was going on holiday for four or five weeks, and we already weren't getting on, having constant arguments, usual band stuff, so I thought, Sod this, and started looking around for a new drummer. The first day Derrick came in to audition we wrote Just Another Story, from scratch, and recorded it in one take.
We didn't have anything written before we went into the studio. We were coming up with it all on the spot, and Just Another Story was an amazing start.
I knew a couple of people who'd been blown away and stabbed, the streets were fairly ruthless in that period of time as I remember it, and I wanted something that reflected that. I wanted a real Streets Of San Francisco, filmic, anthem kind of vibe. We started up with this dark bass, and then Darren the DJ comes in scratching, and then Derrick doing these stuttering, gritty fills, all very '60/'70s TV soundtrack type of thing, which went perfectly with the lyrics and the story of the track - it was important to me to have the music and the lyrics match somehow. The finished track was phenomenal - hard and rough, and I thought, This drummer's great, he's the man. And that was that, Derrick, was in.
At this point in the proceedings life couldn't have been better. As a band we were improving, and the influence of Derrick was making us better still. Our street cred was right up there, we were in the cool zone, everybody wanted to know us, we were hip, we were funky, we were in the game. I was getting a lot of nice attention from lots of very lovely ladies, and all in all was very pleased with myself and my choice of career. People were responding to the music, and the messages in the lyrics, and the things that I was saying in interviews. And most of all, we'd come off the back of a successful album, which was well on it's way to selling a million and a half copies, and we were off to a flying start with the next one.
Then second album syndrome suddenly kicked in and it all came crashing to a very definite halt. Everyone goes through it, the thing of how to follow what you did with the first album: how to say what you've already said, but say it better, and fresher, while matching the first album's success and everyone else's expectations. After the initial great start, I remember beign totally up against it, null and void of ideas and how to get around stuff, I wanted to push everything and make it better, and I remember not being happy with anything we were doing, and scrapping stuff, and starting again. What made it worse was the fact that I'd been getting deeper and deeper into the whole drug thing. I'd gone form a bit of weed and few magic mushrooms to hoofing up lines every time I needed inspiration, and by now I was going off my mind with it. I started to think, Oh god, this is a nightmare. The record company wanted to know what we'd got, which wasn't much, and they kept saying that, of what we did have, none of it sounded like singles.
Everything we were doing was so complex. The chords, the key changes, it was very ambitious, because I wanted to push things, but it was hard even for us to get our hands around. Everything was more delicate. Songs were more chord than bassline driven, and they were much, much harder to get a melody for. And that's where it was falling apart: the melodies and the words. I was becoming indecisive, I'd scrap lyrics, rewrite everything, I didn't know what I was doing. Everything was just so fucking difficult to get done.
Stillness In Time was the track that came when I was at my lowest. I was going out of my mind basically, it was an appalling time in my life. I was sat there in my flat, on my own, I hadn't been out or seen anyone in days: I was trying to write lyrics and melodies, but I was off my trolly that I couldn't, and suddenly the sheer soul-destroying loneliness of where I was in my own head made something click: There's a stillness in time / which I cannot define / does your heart bleed like mine / for a place we can go / where the troubles of our time are far away / and I have all my life in front of me / now my darkest days are trouble free.
The sweetness of Stillness In Time was really wishful thinking: a hope that things would get better. Like a lot of tracks on this album, I was writing it for my own self-healing. It was always 'we' not 'me', I was telling myself that we could do this. I realised that I was getting myself in a lot of trouble, and if I wasn't careful I was going to throw it all away before I'd even started, and that was fucking terrifying.
When I did finally get back into the studio, the record company were getting worried, still asking where the singles were, and we still didn't have any to show them. But I had come up with another sweet melody and the lyric: Yesterday I was / half the man I used to be / oh, maybe that's because / you're the other half of me. Toby came up with this beautiful keyboard part and very quickly we had Half The Man, which went on to become the second single from the album. It wasn't quite the lead track the record company were looking for, but it was a start. Again, another song that's deceptive in it's sweetness. It's actually sort of a homage to having had a twin and him not being around - he died soon after we were born - and that sense I always have a part of me being missing, but it also doubles up really nicely as a love song.
Mr. Moon was about the only one of the sweet songs on the album that didn't have a subtext. It was a love song for a girl I met at a rave one night, who I decided was The One - no doubt thanks to the acid I'd done. I thought the planets had aligned. I thought it was written in the stars. I'd met the girl of my dreams. She was absolutely gorgeous and after five hours of talking to her I'd decided this was it. I thought, I'll be married by the morning. Then I left her for two minutes and Toby copped off with her. So that was the end of that, hence the line: my destiny seemed to slip away from me / before I got to know your name [because Toby copped off with you]. Still, Toby did a great job putting what is an incredibly complex chord structure to that song, so I forgave him.
The thing in me in the studio is I get really bored, really quickly. Which is why when we're writing we tend to go back and forth between hard and soft songs. I don't remember which order everything was recorded in, but I can pretty much guarantee that after Mr. Moon came either Light Years or The Kids.
Light Years has got a very heavy vibe to it, and The Kids is just aggressive. And I wanted to do something aggressive, something that captured the feeling of the streets at the time. There was a real tension in the air, like people didn't like powers that be, and the Criminal Justice Bill was about to be brought in to allow the police to arrest anyone who went to one. It felt like kids were being demonised. Once we had that riff, the lyrics just seemed to feed off it: The kids got funky soul and groove emotion / but if you don't give the kids a chance to use it / they're always more than likely to abuse it / Everybody's talking about the kids / it's taking time for you to realise / now hunger turns to anger in their eyes / I say the revolution will be televised.
The other track which really said something was Manifest Destiny. It's so beautiful and tender, but lyrically incredibly heavy. I'd been reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Dee Brown's book about the massacres of Native Americn women and children at Wounded Knee, which were justified by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny: the belief that indigenous people wil always be slaves and white people will always be the conquerors: that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. It's quite full on and got me so angry that I felt I had to get it off my chest. It was one of the few times in the writing of this album that I felt absolutely sure of what I was doing. It came together like a dream, the chorus was spot on and there's something so fragile in the vocal. But then I was fragile, I wasn't in a good place. Sometimes I'd be in tears writing these songs, I was fighting for everything. Every track was a battle.
The turning point in the album was Space Cowboy. It was written about halfway through recording, when the album was on top of me, my drug intake was completely out of control, and I was losing my mind. I was desperately trying to get myself back from the brink before it all went wrong. We hadn't even finished our second album and I already felt everything slipping away. I needed a comeback anthem, Space Cowboy was it.
Everyone thinks it's a nice song about getting stoned, which it is, but for me it went much deeper. When I write I tend to jump about - first person, third person - and be a bit smoke and mirrors: Is it about me or someone else? Is it about marijuana or cocaine? What it was about was someone who was very lost, trying to hang on and come back before he drifted off into a blackhole never to be seen again. Writing that was my bid to restart the programme. Thankfully it did exactly that, because it finally gave us the lead single we were looking for, and the momentum to push on and finish what I still think is one of our most creative and accomplished albums.
JK (March, 2013)
The last one for Travelling Without Moving remaster will be up in a little while, till then, enjoy! Cheers!
Sincerely,
JamiroFan2000
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zeioIIDX
Joined: 07 Sep 2007
Posts: 239
Location: Biloxi, MS
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| Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 19:09 |
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Wow @ that Half the Man bit  I thought I remember reading briefly about Jay Kay having a twin at birth but I always forget about it. Now I need to go listen to the song again.
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Jamirowolf
Joined: 05 Apr 2005
Posts: 362
Location: Houston
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| Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 20:07 |
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This has got to be the single most important piece of information posted here. To me, reading it was a pleasant surprise like the NOMIS demos from Nick; yet to read the true meaning and understand the whole album process was indeed incredible. As I read, I went back in time to my own issues, which I dealt with these albums. Understanding there is such a deeper meaning to lyrics than I would've ever imagined was pretty cool. I could imagine the band back then..I could picture Jason being immersed in this atmosphere.
Particularly, learning about how MOTM came about was very enlightening (which sounds more like a copy, actually). I always knew every top musician in that album was a genius, but this confirms what I've always thought; Jason himself is quite a genius himself.
Thanks Brent, as always! |
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Sandriche
Officer & Jamily Coach
Joined: 07 Oct 2005
Posts: 5564
Location: Austraria
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| Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 20:10 |
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| zeioIIDX wrote: |
| Wow @ that Half the Man bit I thought I remember reading briefly about Jay Kay having a twin at birth but I always forget about it. Now I need to go listen to the song again. |
I always thought it was about a woman...! interesting read hey..
thanks for sharing brent!!!!!
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Adidas2076
Joined: 23 May 2005
Posts: 290
Location: Sunny SoCal
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| Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 22:33 |
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I have been wanting to know the meaning of Mr. Moon for YEARS! Obviously I know it's about a girl, but what was so great about her, where was it, who was she, why didn't it work out. Then to find out Toby stole her I thought to myself "what a weasel! But his chords he wrote for this album are (to me) the best chords on the album (maybe of all his chords) so I can't hate him. His apology whether intentional or not was writing killer music. For the rest of time, you can listen to it and hear I'm sorry through those unbelievable chords."
Then as I kept reading Jay said the exact same thing I had just thought a few seconds earlier!!! Very cool and very informative.
You must forgive me for gushing, but I'm a keyboard player so while I hear Jay Derrick Nick Simon Stuart I'm ACTUALLY really listening for all of Toby's brilliance.
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HoneyBee
Joined: 21 Jul 2010
Posts: 673
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| Posted: Fri Mar 29, 2013 03:15 |
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I think it's the First Nation/Native Americans (I'm sure it was a lot to type!)
Thank God he didn't use the producers of Erasure. 
Jay says "Stillness in Time" is written when he was at his lowest.
I would've never guessed that because it sounds so beautiful and peaceful!
But this is a genius track and probably my fav of the early 2 albums.
Mr. Moon -chat with someone for 5 hours and still not know her name!
Awesome info on the songs and history!
Thanks so much Brent! |
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JamiroFan2000
Correspondent
Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 2881
Location: The Jamiroquaized States Of America
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| Posted: Fri Mar 29, 2013 16:55 |
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Hello yet again,
Your all very welcome, and now here's the closer, the JK write-up for the 'Travelling Without Moving' remaster:
TRAVELLING WITHOUT MOVING NEW JK REMASTER LINEAR NOTES
transcribed by JamiroFan2000
Virtual Insanity was the first thing written and the last thing recorded for the album.
Toby and I wrote it in the basement of my little mews house in Paddington, from an idea I'd come up with in Japan on the Return Of The Space Cowboy tour. Wallis and I had gone for a walk one afternoon in Sendai, which is a huge city, but we must have walked half a mile before we actually saw another living soul. It was the middle of winter, everything was covered in snow, and there was absolutely no one about. We finally saw a little old lady and asked her where everyone was, and she pointed to these stairs, that led down to this whole underground city. It was insane. A proper city underground city, with all the colour and noise you get in Japanese streets. It was a mad, mad world down there, which sowed the seed of the chorus: Now there is no sound for we all live underground. We weren't specifically writing the album at the time, so once we'd added the verse and the piano we just did a rough demo and put it on the shelf.
The first track we actually recorded for the album was High Times.
If Space Cowboy was alluding to the drug issues which had helped make the 'difficult second' album an absolute fucking nightmare, High Times was admitting the truth of the matter, of where I'd been and how lucky I was to be coming out the other side, I've never touched crack cocaine, but it's a slippery slope and the verses imagine someone who's gone all the way down it: Little Angela / suffers delusions / from these high times / she's been cleaning up since fourteen / on the main line / and her hunky funky junky / of a boyfriend / got her on late nights / with her skirt tight. The chorus was more personal: Last night / turned to daylight / and a minute, became a day / last night / all my troubles / well they seemed so, so far away / searching my reflection / for a glimpse of, another me / I've got to get away from all these high times / 'cause these high times are killing me.
The lyrics are very hard and dark, but it's a huge track and there was a great feeling in the studio when we were recording it - Derrick laying down these solid drums and everybody grooving along to it; there was a real intensity there where carried all the way through the recording of the album. The vocals were done in one take, and when we listened back to it I knew we'd smashed it. I thought to myself, Yeah, this is good. Going into this album I'd decided there needed to be a few changes. Emergency On Planet Earth and The Return Of The Space Cowboy went on to sell nearly three million copies apiece, but at the time they'd done about one and a half million each, and while that was good, I didn't want to become this semi-underground kind of act that stuck to it's little niche and sold one and a half million albums every time. I wanted to breakout and be something bigger, more international. To do that we had to do things differently.
Firstly the way we recorded, I couldn't go through the experience of The Return Of The Space Cowboy again. We needed to be more focused and we needed momentum, so I booked us into a big residential studio where we would be on top of each other all the time, and could work all hours, whenever we needed to. Secondly, the skinny kid in the big coat and the fur hat had to sharpen up and get slicker, and so did his music. The second album had some amazing flavours and musical details on it, but it was incredibly complex and hard to get your head around, especially for us making irt. If we wanted to extend ourselves, we needed a more universal sound.
The residential studio had exactly the right effect, and probably went a long way to making the album the watershed it was. The vibe was great, there was great camaraderie in the band, we were getting more and more confident and we were having fun. They were good, good times and that comes across on the tracks.
The next track we recorded was Use The Force. I'd been asked to write something for Euro '96, so this was us going for that real vintage football vibe - Sola's doing all the percussion like it's Brazil '70. Already you can hear that confidence coming through. We're learning that we don't have to throw everything at a track. The changes are subtler, and even though it's one of the harder tracks on the album, it glides along - it's inflight, we're not pushing it, we're allowing it to have it's own momentum. We're learning that we don't have to hammer it all the time, that it doesn't have to be thrown in your face to be groovy.
Really, we're learning how to put the boogie in by leaving stuff out. The Return Of The Space Cowboy was all or nothing, everything's in there. On this album there's a lot more space. I remember having an argument with Stuart about Cosmic Girl because he thought the bassline was too simple. We'd just come out of a club, I'd had a great night and, for whatever reason, was feeling inspired and started singing: She's just a cosmic girl [I may haver had a particular young lady on my mind] from another galaxy, my heart's in zero gravity. Then I sang Stuart the bassline. He wasn't having any of it. We had a furious argument. I think I sang him Roy Ayers's Everybody Loves The Sunshine to prove my point that the bass didn't have to be complicated, that it could just play the rhythm. He wasn't happy about it though.
Alright ws another bassline that came out of nowhere. I'd gone for a pee and it came to me as I went. After I'd finished I went running back into the studio, told everyone to stop what they were doing, and within five minutes we had this boogie going. It wasn't true how quickly that came together. It was such an easy, natural groove, but there's a slickness to the sound, a sveltness, which along with all those gorgeous synthersizers and lovely grooving sounds that Toby was using, was exactly the upgrade we needed.
It was all about locking into internal rhythms and not forcing it with external ones. And it applied both to the party tracks and the chill-out ones - Everyday, Didjital Vibrations, Spend A Lifetime, beautiful, spacious tracks that just rolled along naturally and sounded amazing turned up loud on a good set of speakers at 3 o'clock in the morning after a hard night out.
It takes confidence to let a track breathe and do it's own thing and to not over complicate it. And it took even more confidence at the time. The likes of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers were having massive hits, with really banging, heavy tracks, and there's me wanting to ease off and lighten-up and let the groove speak for itself.
Meanwhile, I've got the record company coming in, as record companies are want to do, asking where the singles were - I remember being told that Cosmic Girl wasn't a radio hit and that it would only ever get played in gay clubs - and even having it suggested to me that we might want to try being a bit more Britpop. I don't remember exactly who said that, but I do remember them leaving reasonably quick, and possibly the odd thing being thrown at them.
You've got to be so careful that you protect what you're doing and that you don't let someone else come in and ruin it. Making an album is like designing a car: you have to resist the distractions and interference otherwise you end up with something boxy and average that looks nothing like your original swooping, curvy vision, the one that got everyone excited in the first place.
By now though, there was a real feeling within the band and we knew what we were doing and that this was the album. We were feeling good about ourselves and starting to enjoy a bit of lifestyle too. You can tell that I'm 26, on the lookout for girls, driving a purple Lamborghini and being who I am, especially on tracks like Cosmic Girl and Alright, which still to this day are the two tracks that everyone goes nuts for at gigs. Without a doubt, the grinning kid with the skateboard was leaving and his sharper, better dressed older brother was making his presense felt. The whole flavour of the album was just a bit leaner, just a bit cooler.
Not everyone was impressed though. When we played the finished album to the record company I was told, categorically, that there were no singles on it, 'Where's the big single?', they kept saying. 'We need a big single. Where is it?' We thought we'd cracked it. With Cosmic Girl, Alright and High Times we thought we were spoilt for choice for singles. But they just looked at us and asked if we had anything else. In the end Toby and I relented and said that we did have one other track that we'd demoed but hadn't recorded. I put the tape in, pressed play. The piano starts up, then the vocals come in: And it's a wonder man can eat at all...
Their exact words when it finished were: You've done it. I said: What do you mean, we've done it? They said: You've done it, that's the track we've been waiting for, it's gonna be huge. I didn't really get what they were talking about. One minute they're tell me there are no singles, the next the album's going to be massive. But we went back in the studio and recorded it, and thanks in no small part to Jonathan Glazer's video, Virtual Insanity catapulted the album and us way out of the million and a half album league.
In the end, Travelling Without Moving sold nearly eight million copies - one and a half million in America alone - and won an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection. Virtual Insanity won a Grammy and four MTV awards, including Video Of The Year.
I distinctly remember the MTV awards. It was in New York, at the Radio City Music Hall, back when they were a big, big deal, and it was something to be invited, let alone perform or win anything. I slicked myself up a bit for it, and everyone was very interested in us and being very nice. We performed Virtual Insanity which went well, and then it was: And the winner is...Jamiroquai, Jamiroquai, Jamiroquai, Jamiroquai. It was fucking unbelievable. I remember rolling back to my hotel room that night, grinning my head off thinking, This is great and tomorrow I'm going to wake up and it's still going to be great, and I'm going to be the man about town and I'm so having that. And why not? There's a time to be humble, but there's being humble and there's pretending to be humble, which is far worse than actually going, No, it's fucking great, we did it, bloody right, we whooped everyone else's arse. It's a long way from underground act to international, multi-award winning, household name - you've got to take your bit of glory and enjoy it when you get there.
JK (March, 2013)
 Thanks again for all the warm comments, it was a pleasure to transcribe them for everyone . Cheers!
Sincerely,
JamiroFan2000
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zeioIIDX
Joined: 07 Sep 2007
Posts: 239
Location: Biloxi, MS
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| Posted: Fri Mar 29, 2013 20:15 |
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"We performed Virtual Insanity which went well, and then it was: And the winner is...Jamiroquai, Jamiroquai, Jamiroquai, Jamiroquai. It was fucking unbelievable. I remember rolling back to my hotel room that night, grinning my head off thinking, This is great and tomorrow I'm going to wake up and it's still going to be great, and I'm going to be the man about town and I'm so having that. And why not? There's a time to be humble, but there's being humble and there's pretending to be humble, which is far worse than actually going, No, it's fucking great, we did it, bloody right, we whooped everyone else's arse. It's a long way from underground act to international, multi-award winning, household name - you've got to take your bit of glory and enjoy it when you get there."
I love this part
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Poderfunk
Joined: 24 Oct 2009
Posts: 320
Location: Buin close to Santiago de Chile
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| Posted: Fri Mar 29, 2013 23:15 |
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Amazing, simply amazing... thanks a lot brent.. thanks for writing all that
When I heard that there´ll be remastered versions of these 3 oldest albums I thought "nothing special... I want NEW albums" but is good to know now that they actually put something new, and also important and significative 
THANK YOU BRENT
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