Janice Graham Band (Interview)

Musical trends are generally defined by reactions and recycling. The angry kick back and the moulding of something used into something new. Transposing a level of rage that would make the Daily Mail proud (if it wasn’t all so jolly rude). Punk tore a hole in the pomp of prog rock, and new wave recycled the stripped down approach into something new, something arty. The dominant trend of popular rock in the previous decade tapped into the post-punk era. The spectre of Joy Division, Gang of Four, The Clash, and Television haunt The Strokes, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and The Libertines.

Now, it’s not as if Janice Graham are devoid of such influences to their sound one way or the other, but on listening to them you can’t help but wonder where their ska, jazz and soul heavy, but swaggeringly modern sound came from.
They tap into an era you instinctively miss though you were never there, and you wouldn’t know where to put it. This is music from an era that knows the world was in black and white before the 50’s (except The Wizard of Oz, that was a prototype).
It’s a smoky world they inhabit but we’re not talking Billy Holiday doing ‘Gloomy Sunday’, Janice Graham make music to get your proverbial groove on to.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Tom (drums/backing vocals) and Joe (bass/vocals) deal with something they’re probably sick of talking about, the name of the band.

“Just let people make their own fucking mind up about it. There’s no secret meaning behind the name, it’s no one’s gran, it’s no one’s aunty, and it’s no historical being that we thought ‘Yeah, let’s name it after her’”.

This is shortly before adding it’s a prostitute from round the corner with two broken legs that specialises in cast fetishes. I mean, it’s not exactly ‘Paul McCartney is dead’ scale mythologizing, but it’s a start.

On a decidedly more sober note Joe adds, “We didn’t want any pretence, any false pretence, but it’s actually gone the other way now ‘cause people think we’re trying to be pretentious by giving it a shit name when really it was to avoid all that.”
On the metamorphosis of influences to the Janice Graham Band sound Tom mentions his love of hip-hop whilst Joe offers a certain disdain for the majority of contemporary music, “[Music] that shakes you up, I can’t find any after 1985, because now it’s shite.” They concur the brass does a lot to change the sound, “It resonates, it just sounds cool,”

“Plus when you’ve got a trumpet player that looks like Barry Manilow people remember him, that band with that weird looking guy who plays the trumpet. You can say what you want, you can call him whatever you want cause he’s not here [at the interview] and he probably won‘t even read this so it‘s alright,” interjects Tom, “Everything’s just as important, sometimes you do get like ‘the trumpet player!’, but you go ‘shut up’, no one wants to hear a trumpet on it’s own, he’s not Miles Davis.”
It’s probably worth mentioning Tom’s comment that “It’s worked out pretty well actually, I didn‘t think we’d get out of the garage to be honest with you” alongside Joe’s “When you learn together you gel together”.

A genuine camaraderie underlies their description of the band, despite relentlessly beration of Josh, the absent trumpet player. This carries to the effortless blend of sounds within their music, it’s not something as easily picked apart and boxed into influences as you might expect. Having a trumpet doesn’t mean you’re trying to masquerade as The Specials, singing with a regional Northern accent doesn’t mean you pay royalties to Alex Turner, and sticking feathers up your arse does not make you a chicken. There’s nothing forced going on here, perhaps not the first analogy they would go for but Janice Graham are a tightly knitted jumper in terms of the construction of their sound.

In the short time of being a band they’ve already managed to get an anecdote or two under their collective belt. The live story of Janice Graham began in a garage on Halloween 2008 playing to 20 or 30 people.

“We all had make up on and top hats. We were like, let’s make it big. We had eighty year old men quivering in a corner about to die, but still trying to clap. We thought we better invite some of the neighbours around the house, try to make a bit of peace, but only one of them turned up and he was a World War II survivor” says Tom.

“He’d been on holiday to Brazil and said we sounded like this weird street band, and he and his wife were getting all excited, think it was taking them back to their youth,” Joe adds, again bringing some gravity to the postmodern Mardi Gras in a Manchester garage this first performance must’ve been.

The idea to break into an office and film the gig came shortly after on the advice of a friend. Most bands start to graduate their live performances purely through Night & Day, The Bay Horse et al, but you know, why not? Though Joe explains “I thought she meant crowbar into this SU [Student Union] thing, but she got the code out, knew everyone there. We had to stand in an elevator for twenty minutes with all this equipment.”

“We brought massive model trees and they were looking for us to sneak in. We brought little toy birds, six foot trees, cause the trumpeter’s mum directs pantomime, so we had pantomime sets going into this office, all make up again,” Joe explains.

“That was probably the most rock ‘n roll thing we’ve done.”

A trip to their myspace page (myspace.com/janicegrahamband) will offer you a handful of eclectic but seamlessly crafted songs, professional but not too polished or cluttered. When the chorus of ‘Cinnimon’ kicks in it brings to mind American blues rock act Morphine as much as The Specials (who will probably continue to be their closest point of comparison). Particular highlight ‘Bitch’ creeps with dub-influenced menace carrying Joe’s distinctive regional croon, before getting rhythmically interesting later, convincingly incorporating ska and becoming a brief tour of the history of reggae and its surround genres in three minutes.

Don’t take my word, they’re doing a handful of gigs in and around Manchester over the next couple of months, drop in and see if it takes you somewhere.

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