Dead Dads Club
When Chilli Jesson was 14 years old, he lost his father to drug addiction. A grieving teenage boy, he did what most grieving teenage boys would do in that situation: he acted out, battered by the unfairness of the world and its cold hard realities, and then he buried his feelings down deep.
However then, with the arrival of his band Palma Violets, his life took a very atypical turn. At 19, Jesson found himself plastered on the cover of the NME and hailed as the most exciting new British group since The Libertines. Palma Violets’ first ever single was Radio One’s Hottest Record in the World; their incendiary clarion call ‘Best of Friends’ ended 2012 as NME’s Track of the Year. For a boy who’d not long had his life turned entirely upside down, it was all a very good way to pretend that nothing was wrong… “It was all just pushed away and I think, for me, it was about shutting it all off,” he recalls. “But then, when Palmas finished… I mean, I thought that would be forever. I was so positive about it. So when it’s taken away or it runs its course, it becomes very empty on the other side…”
Still only in his early twenties when his first band called time, Jesson set about trying to carve out something new. He started a second outfit Crewel Intentions, and then, struggling for money and feeling “spat out by the industry”, answered a call from someone looking to hire an indie-minded songwriter to work on a pop project. “I was working behind the bar and I thought, fuck it. And it turned out I was good at it, which was surprising to me, so I started to write a bunch of my own stuff that was more pop,” he recalls of his then-third musical foray under his own name. “When you’re skint and you wanna be in music you think, maybe this is who I am? And it was brilliant – I signed again for the first time since Rough Trade with Palma Violets, which made me think I was definitely on the right road. And then the A&R who believed in me as this pop star left, and it all shattered again.”
Dead Dads Club is, from its knowing title outwards, a place for anyone who needs it. The first rule of Dead Dads Club is you can talk about whatever you want. Inspired by The Flaming Lips and their ability to write a truly narrative-driven concept record, Jesson wanted to put it all out there: no mystery, no metaphor. The MO was that it would be “very clear and direct. I didn’t want to hide behind anything. I just wanted it to be on the nose.”
The album, written alongside bandmate Rupert and produced by Fontaines DC’s Carlos O’Connell, maps a chronology of the years directly around Jesson’s father’s passing: from the open letter to his 13-year-old self of ‘Only Just Begun’ to the final, euphoric paean to survival of ‘That’s Life’. In between are some of the most musically vibrant, vital songs that he’s penned in his career to date: as sonically inspired and robust as they are lyrically open and vulnerable. His two creative foils were hugely important in bringing these tracks to life. Rupert takes the vocal lead on ‘Junkyard Radiator’ and ‘Hospital Pillow’ – the former, a deceptively melodic yet suitably disorientating meditation on drug dependency; the latter, a short and sweet memory built around a Beck-like swagger.
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