Be sure to use the link below to suggest topics you’d like to see us cover.
I had done a video on the british band EMF and I noticed several comments suggesting I do a
video on the band Jesus Jones so here we are. Best known for the early 90’s hit Right Here Right Now,
the song wasn’t really representative of the type of music Jesus Jones made. The group
combined dance rhythms and guitars with a new way of sampling. Frontman Mike Edwards would
tell loudersound “Back in those days, putting dance beats on rock music wasn’t really done.
So it meant that you had a wide open field in front of you to carve your own niche.
Like EMF, Jesus Jones was hailed as the next big thing, but they seemed
to fade away after a few albums. Let’s explore what happened in today’s video.
Jesus Jones frontman Mike Edwards would grow up in Bradford on Avon (pronounced A-vin) in the early
80’s. Edwards would reveal to Loudersound “It was difficult. Now if you want to hear a song,
you can go online and hear it in 20 seconds. Back then, I’d have to save up my money, and get on the
bus to Bath to buy one record, and then it’d be another hour back home. Getting hold of music was
really, really difficult. Going to see bands was difficult. The access to music was really
tricky and you relied a lot on the music press and the radio in a way that people don’t now.”
Some of those early bands he was exposed to didn’t really shape the music he’d go on to make
with Jesus Jones telling loudersound thathe saw early incarnations of iron maiden and whitesnake.
It wasn’t until he moved to London in 1985 that he discovered a whole new world of music including
groups like Pop Will Eat Itself and The Shaman (pronounced shay-men). Couple this with access
to the music weeklies like New Musical Express and Melody Maker who touted bands like Public Enemy,
Big Black and Sonic Youth and the blueprint for the type of music Edwards wanted to make was born.
Edwards would tell Loudersound about his influences “The music they made was modern
and unique without ever sounding difficult or avant garde. “To be honest, that was exactly
what I was aiming to do from 1988 onwards,”. “That was pretty much our modus operandi. I
didn’t want our influences to be blinding obvious, I didn’t want them to over-shadow what we did. “
Prior to forming Jesus Jones, Edwards and his future bandmates played in a lot of
top 40 cover bands. . While the gigs paid well, Edwards wasn’t creatively satisfied
telling the Orlando Sentinel "They were guitar bands with no fixed direction,
going nowhere,". "The music had no identity, no strength of its own - it was music just for
the sake of it rather than music with a direction, music with an attitude."
Prior to the formation of Jesus jones, Edwards had known the group’s drummer Simon Matthews from
when they were kids and they met in school. The group’s other members -- guitarist Jerry De Borg
and bassist Al Jaworski --met through friends, and through the back pages in Melody Maker.
Keyboardist Barry D worked at a skateboard shop and Edwards would admit to the washington post
"The reason he joined the band was so I could get free skateboard clothing,". "But it was
senseless because about two months after he joined, we had to go full time" with the band.
"He's useless as a keyboard player,". "Luckily, he only has to play samples.
He's very proud of his non-musicality." The band’s sound would incorporate,rap,
house music, '70s disco rhythms, art-rock and many other styles. The group’s name
would come about two ways. One, it represented a musical rebirth for the musicians and second
they met a lot of people while vacationing in spain named Jesus (Spanish pronunciation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3asROGFE7Q) . It was now 1988 and Jesus Jones was born. .
The band’s success was almost instantaneous with Edwards telling the orlando sentinel
"Within three weeks of the idea, I had a band; within two months, we got interest from a record
company. Two months after that, we got a deal, and a further two months later, we had a single
just outside the British Top 40." It would be a demo of the song info freako that landed them a
deal with food records. "Info Freako," a grungy, guitar-driven dance single made the yearly Top
10 in readers poll in three of the most popular music magazines in britain. Soon enough Edwards,
the band’s principal songwriter was being compared to Pete Townshend (pronunciation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldli9i_Mwpk) and Paul Mccartney by the british music press.
The band’s debut record liquidizer would be put out in 1989. On the strength of this
record the band soon developed a cult following. Edwards would tell spin magazine “a third of our
music is dance music whether it involves house or rap or an amalgamation of both.
A third of it is pop music ..The other third is completely different avant garde
maybe even an avant garde approach to sampling.”
While sampling was becoming more popular in the 80’s and 90’s it was pretty common for artists
to use a lifted groove or guitar riff that was easily recognizable. But for jesus jones they
would transform that sample to the point that it was unrecognizable or choose obscure material
with edwards teling the new york times "I do things like take a woman's voice,
play it three octaves below the original pitch and make it loop backward until it
sounds like nothing else on earth," he said. "Everything is perverted,
distorted and changed around so that it becomes part of my record and not just a collage of
other people's records. Many of my samples are taken from pirate radio stations around London.
A lot of them come from traditional Indian instrumental music and African stuff."
Being at the forefront of a new movement,t he band didn’t count themselves as cynics,
like the punk movement that preceded them nearly 10 years prior. Edwards would tell the LA Times
“Ten years ago there was the nihilism of punk..Now the house scene is tied in with the hippie thing,”
“It’s got far more positive attitudes which ultimately are more human than nihilism.
No one likes to smash and destroy things rather than create, or smash and re-create.
The band would return in 1991 with their follow up record ‘Doubt’. The album’s
name took inspiration from Edwards battle with depression with him telling the new york times
"The reason our second LP is called 'Doubt' is partly because when our first
LP Liquidizer was released, I was doing my first heavy duty interviews,
with people questioning me about everything the band and I had done and were doing.
“After my initial spell of super confidence which followed the album first coming out,
it started to turn into self-examination, doubt and a lack of self-confidence.
I looked around at what we'd done and thought 'Have we just fooled everybody?
Are we really that good?' I mean, I've always thought we were good and everything, but all that
constant self-searching can really knock you back. Even though contemporary issues are discussed on
the group’s second record with songs "Are You Satisfied?," "Two and Two" and "Welcome Back
Victoria" there was also more positive songs including the biggest hit of the band’s career
"Right Here, Right Now," Edwards would tell the new york times the inspiration behind the song
revealing “I wrote it early in 1990, at the beginning of a new year and a new decade,"
"It was partly inspired by the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the removal of the Berlin wall.
Six months later, the song was completely out of date. But a year later, I think optimism is
back in vogue." Right Here Right Now was the most played song on US college radio in 1991.
The Orlando Sentinel would write that despite the song’s success on MTV
and college radio some rock stations refused to play the song due to the band’s name.
The band didn’t get pressured from their record label with Edwards telling the Orlando Sentinel
"We went ahead and made the album exactly what we wanted . . . a reaction against
the first album. The first album had one single direction as a first album should have. I think
what we've done on the second one is, we've shown people we can do anything we want to.
If we really want to be a jazz band, a rock band, we can do it. Now we can go ahead and do exactly
what we want to do, making a strong statement about what rock music should be about in the '90s,
which I think has less to do with the dance-rock sound than the influence
of dance music on rock music, the techniques of dance music."
Surprisingly, Edwards would admit that the band’s second record was made for less money
than their first and done in only a week’s time with Edwards telling the Orlando Sentinel
"We're signed indirectly to EMI with 'an unlimited supply,' as the Sex Pistols would have put it.
We have as much money as we want. The choice was mine, to make it in a much cheaper studio than the
first one, using a fraction of the time. We spent more on mixing the album and the remixes later.
We spent more on one video than we did on the recording of the album."
The band’s second album topped the album charts in the UK and the record went
platinum in America.The band would win best new artist at the 1991 mtv video music awards.
By 1992 then presidential candidate Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton
was running for president used the song Right Here Right Now at campaign rallies,
before switching to Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop. Side note guys I’ve done a video on the Fleetwood
Mac reunion at Clinton’s 1993 inauguration. Despite the band’s success Edwards became jaded
with fame and while the band was loved by the press they also ridiculed his behavior on stage.
Edwards became known for having a strict no drink or drugs policy onstage with some in
the press referring to him as and i quote the “cliff Richard of Indie’ telling loudersound
"I dislike excess,” he said. “it's the worst form of conformity there is,
a cartoon idea of what rock stars should be. I loathe and detest rock-star bullshit,
because it doesn't achieve anything. With the band’s success came a lot of
comparisons to groups like EMF and other groups they influenced.. But the band wasn’t a huge
fan of being influences on other groups. Edwards would tell teh orlando sentinel
"We're seeing bands claim us as an influence," "We were in Japan recently,
and an article in one of the more respected newspapers claimed amongst new Japanese bands,
the biggest influence was our band, Jesus Jones. I've heard Australians as well copying us.""We
don't want to see pale imitations of my band. We'd rather people took our ideas
and approach and did something their own way - that's what I did with Public Enemy."
By 1993 the group would release their third record perverse and musical tastes had now changed.
Even though the album peaked at number 6 in the UK, it never even went gold
stateside. Soon enough those music critics who supported the band and put them on a pedestal
during their early years had no interest in them. As spin magazine wuld sum it up in 1993
“the british invasion was washed away by a tidal wave of flannel and fuzz guitars and the red hot
chili peppers provided ample proof that barriers between dance and rock are there for a reason.”
Spin magazine would carry out an interview with the group’s frontman who now seemed bitter with
the music business and industry. By this point Perverse had underperformed He would tell the
magazine ‘rock music in the past reflected the society we lived in. It’s stopped doing that now.
For me that’s why rock is dwindling artistically and commercially..adding “This slacker mentality
is the way people want to be. I find it really depressing that this apathetic miserabilism
is all we can expect from the new generation.” Despite the album’s lack of success Edwards
would claim he thought it was the band’s best work telling Loudersound “Particularly at that
time – everyone was going back to the early 70s [for inspiration] and I felt there was still quite
a lot to be said about the early 90s. It’s called Perverse because I was swimming against the tide.
Week in, week out, I was hearing sounds that I’d never heard before
and yet everything around us was re-treds of Black Sabbath songs. And that seemed kind of
depressing when just a few years before we’d seen a new way forward - and retreated from that.”
Four years would pass until the band released their follow up album Already. Rather than going
top 5 it charted in the upper echelons of the top 200 back home.. Loudersoud would interview Mike
Edwards who attributed the band’s downfall to changing musical trends and the lack of
media coverage. He would tell the publication. “We felt at the time that the music press could
actually get away with ignoring us,” he says. “Whereas in 93 they couldn’t - if we had an
album out and they didn’t report on it, they would have looked daft. I remember the press
schedule for that album: we were lucky to get the gardening pages of the Sheffield Gazette.
We had virtually no music press whatsoever. We had the record company going out to the
likes of the NME and saying, ‘What do you reckon?’ and they just got a flat ’no’.
They just wouldn’t even mention it. No one knew we had an album out. The reasons why they felt
they could ignore us was there had been, what, three years between albums. That album, under
the record company’s direction, was made and then remade, which I think was a big mistake. It took
so long that by the time we came out we seemed to be in a different place from the rest of music.”
In 1998 Jesus Jones would sign to an indie start up named Combustion Records in the US
but lost their deal with EMI at this point., despite the fact that edwards had a solo deal
wit the label. In 2001 the band released another album in London, which shared a similar fate.
It was a few years later that Rolling Stone published an article on the lucrative trend
of band’s doing corporate or private gigs. They would interview Jesus Jones writing Jesus Jones’
Mike Edwards recalls the time his band, a decade after its heyday, was flown from the U.K. to the
States to play a corporate conference — and all they had to do was play their lone hit,
“Right Here, Right Now,” at the beginning of the event. “The host said, ‘Welcome, everyone,
hope you have a good time, and here’s Jesus Jones,’ ” Edwards recalls. “We played 360 seconds,
and the costs were minimal.. … There was always the subtle undertone of ‘You’re
dancing with the devil,’ or somehow you’re a corporate whore. But we got to play a song of
ours that we quite liked and come home with a load of money. You think, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ ”
From 2001 onwards the band continued to tour and would most recently in 2018 put out their latest
album Passages that struck a more pessimistic tone with the song Where are all the dreams
“People who voted for Brexit,” he says bluntly. “That song is actually the polar opposite of Right
Here, Right Now. While it captured the giddy optimism of the Berlin wall coming down – what
a time to be alive – we’ve moved to the other end of the spectrum. I mean: Where Are All The
Dreams? The point is in the title, really.” That does it for today’s video. Thanks for
watching and be sure to hit the like button and subscribe.