It’s a beautiful spring day, the sun is shining and the birds are singing; you can just make out the distant buzz of the sound-check going on inside the club and the faint hum of the traffic… until the peace is shattered by the intermittent wail of the car alarm that no-one knows how to stop. But none of the laid-back members of punk rock band Jesse James seem to mind…
It seems as though it’s becoming quite a trend for interviews to take place in Esquires car park, as once again I found myself in a van with four of the personalities that make up the colourful septet: saxophonist Pete, trumpet player Paul a.k.a. ‘Ponyboy’ (I thought it safer not to ask…) and Donagh (known as ‘Dko’) the band’s bass player and vocalist. It’s all been pretty quiet since the release of their second album, ‘Mission’, and I was sure they would have had been up to lots since then. ‘You would think we’d been up to lots,’ laughs Dko, who throws a confused look at Paul and Pete, ‘what happened in 2003? Umm, we did the second album in San Fransisco with Ryan Green, which was fantastic fun…’ Suddenly, the door is wrenched open and in stumbles guitarist Ben, who collapses onto a seat with a smile as Dko continues, ‘things had been going quite well until that stage really, and then when the album came out it just didn’t get promoted by our label over here so there was lots of frustration. We went and did a tour of Canada, then we did Europe, and just basically toured the hell out of that album, and after that we didn’t really want to see each other again for a long time! [laughs]
Pete: We did a lot less for a little while.
Dko: We met up for some festivals in the summer and then it was like, ‘this is great fun, wahay! Back on the piss again…’
‘I think what we’re trying to say,’ begins Ben in a mock-serious tone, ‘is, the band is as much about making music as personal relationships between good friends,’ he laughs.
Dko: Fun, it’s about keeping it fun isn’t it? So yeah, we pretty much just took a lot of time off after that and we’ve just started doing things again now we’ve got the new album out.
Pete: I mean it was almost sort of a necessity as well; so many bands had split up and audiences were generally getting smaller in the UK, and it wasn’t necessarily as viable to tour as much as we’d been doing before (which was loads and loads and loads) and I don’t know if any of us really wanted to as much anymore either but …
Ben: I do! I do! I want to do that again!
Pete: Well, Ben kinda missed out on a lot of that stuff, because he went to live in Albuquerque…
If the logistics of dealing with a seven piece band wasn’t a big enough task, the mention of Ben’s departure to Albuquerque highlights some of the many comings-and-goings that the band has seen. That must surely be difficult?
Dko: Well, I think it happens a lot less than people imagine really; I mean, Ben’s come and gone a few times, but, when he joined the band he always said, ‘I’m going to university in Albuquerque, I’ll be coming and going a few times!’ And Pony (aka Paul) is the newest member, he’s been here two and a half years, so the line-up hasn’t changed in two-and-a-half, three years now. It was just at the beginning, things happened for us very fast and bands take a little while to settle in.
Pete: I think we’ve found our feet more at this stage than at any point in the past in terms of getting a band that can just get on stage and do a show with the minimum amount of fuss… we’re just together. Rehearsals are just ridiculous these days because when we get together and play through some tunes a couple of times a year it always ends up just like, drinking beer and sitting in a room making jokes for three hours and then…
Ben: And then go on tour! [laughs]
Dko: We do a lot of rehearsing in sound checks!
Pete: The whole of this album, and bits of the last, were pretty much written and rehearsed in sound checks! [all laugh]
Aside from their particularly laid-back attitude, what sets Jesse James apart from most other bands is their really quite original sound, and despite the assumptions you might make when you realize that they have a brass section, they’re definitely not a ska band:
Dko: We’re rock’n’roll band!
Ben: I’m trying to think what the new material is… it sounds a bit… a bit old school.
Dko: A rock band with a horn section.
Pete: It’s difficult with there being seven people in the band, there are a lot of different influences.
Dko: Four different people writing songs, a lot of different things come out.
Pete: It doesn’t make it complicated though, I mean, it’s quite straight forward, they’re just songs.
Ben: They’re not trendy songs, either.
Pete: No, it’s just music.
Dko: We’ve an aversion to being trendy!
Pete: Yeah, where a lot of people sort of pander to particular things going on at a particular time…
Ben: …We’ve been making the same boring old things for years! [all laugh]
Pete: We just like, made enough tunes for a record, then made a record, and then made enough tunes for a record and made the next record! I mean, without getting too pretentious about it, it does make the albums quite an honest progression, because we’re not particularly trying to do anything other than write songs I don’t think.
Ben: We’re not ‘down with the kids’ enough to be writing trendy songs.
Pete: Nah, we haven’t got trendy enough haircuts!
Tonight marks the first date of their extended tour, and the band are keen to emphasize how important touring and playing live is to them, ‘more so with us than a lot of other bands,’ explains Ben, ‘because we are totally different live than we are on record.’ To which Pete nods emphatically, ‘these days definitely. It’s much more fun playing live; lots of finger-pointing and singing along!’
Ben: It’s all about the live shows. That’s why we put two live B-sides on our new single.
Dko: It was a bit pointless putting live tracks on a CD, because, making a live album’s like, ‘what are you gonna do, make a record or play a show?’ – It’s a compromise.
Pete: Nobody’s live album is anybody’s favourite album of that band, is it? [laughs]
Dko: Ooh, I don’t know, The Rammones, ‘Its’s Alive’
Pete: Yeah, that’s a bit different…
Dko: The Who, ‘Live At Leeds’!
Ben: Jimi Hendrix, Isle of Wight…
Pete: Yeah, but they’re not like your favourite records of those bands…
Dko: Led Zeppelin, ‘The Song Remains The Same’… [laughs]
Pete: Yeah, but it’s not Led Zeppelin ‘One’, is it?
Dko: It would be fun to do one, I think, because if a live album’s good it captures the actual show.
Pete: Yeah, especially if you do some cover versions that you would never record in the studio.
Ben: I just like all the shit that goes on in between the songs!
Dko: Oh god yeah. Though, we’re not as bad as we used to be.
Pete: No, these days we have trouble bull-shitting; we used to be able to do it for hours on end on stage… actually, we’re rambling a bit now, aren’t we? For me, my favourite stuff has been when we used to go out for quite extended periods with Lightyear and play together every night. It was quite a blast.
‘I think it’s going to be fun with Failsafe,’ says Dko, ‘we’ve never toured with them before,’ which sends Ben into a slight frenzy:
‘FAILSAFE! FAILSAFE! FAILSAFE! FAILSAFE…!’
Pete explains, ‘Ben got their name wrong!’
Ben: I’d like to take this opportunity to say, that I accidentally thanked (in the linear notes of our album) the wrong band; they might be good, I’m not saying they’re bad, I’ve never met them, I’ve never heard them, but, the band I meant to name- check was FAILSAFE!
Pete: Who are very, very good! [laughs] It’s really nice actually to go on a whole tour with a band as well; we’ve done quite a lot of things in the last couple of years where we haven’t had a fixed support, and it kinda means your turning up and a-bit-getting-to-know-someone just for one gig.
Dko: It takes so long to remember everyone in bands’ names! Especially with us!
The new album, ‘Assassination Of…’ is expected for release on the 8th May. And whilst keeping their own unique sound, there seem to have been a lot of developments to the classic Jesse James sound, ‘it’s the first album that we’ve had two guitarists on, and there’s a lot less brass on it,’ reveals Dko, ‘on all the other albums there was brass on all the songs; we’ve only ever put out one song without brass before, and that was “Dear Jesus”, our last single.
Pete: It was getting to the stage were the brass parts were almost quite tokenistic on some of the songs and it was like, ‘right, we’ve written this song, it sounds alright, where can we squeeze the brass into it?’ [laughs]
Dko: Yeah, I think it came out in the end as, ‘where does it need the brass?’ If a song was down and it didn’t actually really need any brass then we didn’t bother putting any on.
Pete: It balances as a record a bit more than the ones in the past; there are some different speeds and different sounds and different volumes, whereas before they just tended to rock along at their own pace and then sort of finish after half-an-hour. Now we’re a little more varied, I think.
Dko: I reckon it’s a lot to do with the song writing being divided much more evenly; now there are three guys writing, whereas I used to write eighty-per-cent of it, so now it’s got less of my sound, and there’s a much more varied sound between the songs. But it’s still us playing it, so it always comes out sounding like Jesse James.
So, their new single, ‘Everything’ has sold twice as many copies in its first week than the record label expected and is on heavy rotation in all the Topshops (‘how surreal is that?!’ laughs Dko), but what would the band like to see happening for them in the rest of 2006 and beyond?
Pete: It would be nice to do quite a lot of gigs.
Dko: We’re doing a few small festivals; somewhere in the Czech Rebublic…
Pete: And one in Spain…
Dko: We’d like to prove our old record label wrong and sell more of this album. We’ve already started getting more press and more publicity on this album than we had for the last one.
Pete: Yeah, I think things are quite well set up to be a bit bigger on this record. It would be nice if loads of people bought the record! That would probably decide things for us a bit more…!
Jesse James’ new single ‘Everything’ is out now, and their album ‘The Assassination Of…’ is due for release on 8th May. Their official website can be found at www.jessejames.co.uk You can also check out their MySpace page at www.myspace.com/jessejames