In the second part of our exclusive I Am Kloot interview, Pete Jobson discusses the band’s life on the road, the importance of local support before their Mercury Prize breakthrough, while he also goes into more detail on the new album.
How was the recent Islington showcase gig? I hear they gave you the ‘deluxe suite’ dressing room..
The assembly hall was absolutely palatial; I think we’re going to use it for more gigs, superb. The gig was great, went down really well. To be honest with you, you play these showcase gigs and you get as many people as will come down and journalists and media and you get judged and hung in the balance. If you’re any good you might get a review or might get on Jools Holland or something. You’re always shitting yourself basically but you don’t want to let anybody down, you’ve got everybody you work with there. So with that in mind it was actually really good and I asked our manager afterwards ‘was the job done?’ and he said ‘yeah the job was done’ so I said that’s all I need to know, I’m off for a fucking drink – because I was shitting myself. And the older you get the worse it gets but you’ve always got to do these gigs. There’s a lot to be said for being on tour and getting a load of gigs under your belt and being a bit semi-knackered so you don’t get too nervous. The standalone London showcase gigs are always the kinda of ‘the arse-quake’.
So has touring changed at all since you first started?
Not really, not for us. We’ve always had a really tight crew of people. Our tour manager and sound engineer, Richard Knowles, he’s absolutely superb front of house sound engineer and tour manager. And I used to go to college with him, I’ve been friends with him for years, and he manages a company called STS up in Manchester and they hire out PA and lights and amplifiers, everything you need. So Richard is like, he is the Maestro, everything. From driving, tour managing to doing the sounds so if we have more musicians sometimes it’s on a big posh tour bus or in the back of a van and stay in hotels but it’s always been keep it as small and as tight as you can and make sure you can play what you’re meant to be playing. It’s always kinda been the same. But I’ve seen, for instance, my friends Elbow, and they’ve gone from being from quite a popular band to being an astonishing popular fucking band and they’re driving around with like 75 people and trucks and all kinds of stuff.
Back to the album, you said recently that ‘Hold Back The Night’ defines I Am Kloot as a band. Can you expand on that?
Well as I was saying earlier, it really shows our hand. It shows all the influences of the things we are into. You’ve got that trip-hop laid back drumming that Andy’s doing, the E minor descending chords which are all kinda Nina Simon-ish and it also got that ‘London’s Calling’, The Clash, in it. Dynamically it jumps in between Led Zeppelin or Muse or fucking Queen even. If anybody was to say to us ‘what’s your music like?’ I’d say ‘listen to that, that’s what we’re about’. You can see into our past, our heritage, more so with that song than any other song we’ve done.
Is that your favourite track on the album then?
It’s hard to say which one is but every fucker would say that wouldn’t they? I’ve got a personal favourite which is ‘Shoeless’ because it’s about Johnny’s daughter. I just love the breeziness and the honesty of the lyrics and the story of it. It’s really quite touching – ‘Shoeless’ is a song that makes people cry.
We have a tradition of me and Guy and my friend Rachel Davies that every time we finish an LP we will sit at one of our houses and listen to it together and have a few beers – the first time we did it was with ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’. Now Rachel’s gorgeous, proper Manc and she’s ace but she had a tear in her eye.
The whole album seems quite reflective is this a sign of maturity?
I think it comes with age, I mean we’re not kids any more, we’re all 40-somethings. We got a lot of confidence from the success we had with the ‘Sky At Night’ LP and so you kinda feel more confident about doing your own thing, writing about your life and what’s in front of you. It’s what I think proper artists do, you get a picture of them out of what they write or what they paint or whatever it is.
I mean we’ve never really chased the fashion of the day; we’ve actively tried to avoid it if anything. So as it goes on with time we feel a bit more confident about being open about things. But I think in all of Johnny’s lyrics there’s a very personal, almost heart-on-your-sleeve boldness about them. When he’s singing about ‘you’ or ‘them’ what he’s actually singing about is ‘me’. Obviously there’s a little bit of drama in there, a little bit dressed up but that’s what he’s singing about and I suppose that’s the thing, the communication. You want to communicate with your audience, it’s like ‘are you like me?’, there’s a similarity there somewhere, a connection.
John seems to be something of an underrated or at least underappreciated songwriter..
He is. I’ll tell you, the first time I saw Johnny, when I first came to Manchester to college and there was an open air gig on at the Castlefield Arena in town. It was a free gig and it was a Manchester Busker Festival, poets and comedians and singers and bands on and it was the day that the IRA bomb went off in the centre of Manchester and so it was like ‘shit, is this gig gonna happen?’. Anyway it went on and me and my mate sat at this outdoor arena at the top of the hill and this fella came on stage and he borrowed a guitar and he grabbed a beer crate and put his foot on it cos the guitar had no strap and he sang three of the most incredible songs. It was like hearing Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen for the first time. It was like ‘fucking hell, who is this?!’ and that was Johnny.
For me he’s always been one of the best songwriters going bar none. I can genuinely say I’m a fan. There’s nothing more exciting than when John comes running round your house, knocks on the door and says ‘don’t say a fucking word just go upstairs and press record on the recording machine’ and he sits down and plays a song that he’s got in his head; if somebody says anything to him it’ll disappear so he’s obviously quite flustered. And he’ll just sit there and he’ll just do it. It’s like all the songs we’ve recorded they’re first or second takes of John recording them and it’s just amazing, miraculous. I always say to him afterwards ‘fucking hell Johnny that’s amazing, is that one of yours?’ and he’ll be like ‘yeah, I think so..’
Ah, the fear that you’ve nicked it…
Well you never know, cos a lot of John’s songs for me, they have depth. They last but when you hear them it’s almost like a lot of them you’ve heard them before; they’re quite immediate and that’s the art of brilliant songwriting. But there’s always that question ‘is that you?’ you know, it sounds like it already existed kinda thing. That’s one of the most exciting things that I get to do– John coming in and saying ‘what do you think of this?’- it’s a good place to be.
What’s your take on the changing music industry, digital radio, MP3 versus vinyl?
Well I’m a record collector. In my front room I have my stereo and all my records set up, beautiful comfy chair, sit in there with nice bottle on the way in and stick something like Gil Scott-Heron’s last LP on on vinyl – which is fucking amazing! But music is music you know, however people get it I don’t mind.
There are certain things, the whole MP3 thing, everybody listening on iPhones and stuff and a lot of music gets produced in a way where it’s super loud so it doesn’t have any dynamics. It’s a recording process, they master it so loud that they cook it up to fuck and it’s only because you’re listening to it on tiny little earphoney things. To me there is a hell of a lot of emotion lost in that way of producing music but I don’t really read any music magazines and I very rarely listen to the radio apart from Radio 4 or 6 Music…
Which we almost lost…
I think it’s fantastic that 6Music didn’t get the chop from the BBC because that, to me, is doing what John Peel did and that’s where everyone from my generation got their music from – so long may that last. The music scene seems in a hell of a healthy state because of 6Music.
The eclectic mix of the likes of Gilles Peterson..
Yeah, you gotta throw some curveballs in there. I like the idea that it’s a platform for new bands and old stuff and at the weekend all the musicians get to choose what they want to play and it’s what it should be, when everybody else is shining a light on manufactured bullshit or nostalgia and that’s not helping anybody.
The reason I moved to Manchester was to play music and join a band – I’m from Newcastle – cos there was no clubs up there; nowhere a new band could get a gig unless they had a record deal and all that. But Manchester has got loads of these clubs and it’s because of John Peel and punk, independent music, Factory Records etc. that’s why you get a lot of bands coming out of Manchester, it’s not rocket science. If you take the infrastructure away there’s nothing there.
It’s why people like Mark Riley, him to me is like John Peel. He supports and constantly finds new bands that are brilliant and it’s almost as if that played into our hands as I Am Kloot never got played on the radio in this country. We did a couple of Peel sessions but that was it. But now because of 6Music they’re really supporting us. When they started they specifically named us as ‘these are the kind of bands we want to be playing, the kind of bands we want people to hear’ which is great for us but also for a new band. The way the record industry is now they’re all fucked; nobody’s buying records, they ain’t got no money so they can’t do what they used to do to develop bands and stuff so I think it’s tougher now to start off as a band. 10 years ago we were lucky enough to get the last of the old fashioned record deals but 6Music and other stations they’re playing our kind of thing, they’re playing older bands after all these fucking years of plugging away at it it’s actually coming round more than it ever was.
So is the moral to the tale to never give up?
With most of the bands that I know that last like The Fall, and Elbow is a classic example, you do it because you have to. The idea of not doing it is just totally alien, you never give up. It’s a thing you need to do and you always find a way.
We’ve got an independent company set up with Elbow that we put some music out sometimes if we like it. We set it up so that if all goes tits up for Elbow or Kloot then we would be on this label. We’ve put a out a few of our LPs out on this label so you kinda find a way but as long as you keep playing live and people keep coming to see you, the live thing has always been there and that’s the lifeblood. If you can cut it live people will always keep coming back to see you. We noticed that as soon as Kloot started we realised we’d found our own voice as soon as John and Andy and I started playing together. It was like ‘wow nobody is doing anything like this, it sounds a bit different’ and then from the early gig s that we did there was more people coming back every time and it was like ‘Ah! A-ha! This is fucking working, we’ve happened on a good recipe here!’. You can be playing and you can be working hard, you can be doing everything right but if people aren’t having it they aren’t fucking having it and there’s nothing you can do about that.
So what’s John’s take on the new album?
Well, when we were playing in Holland the other night we had a brilliant gig at The Hague and I was very amused but really quite happy as the first thing that Johnny said when he got on stage was “you know, we’ve just recorded an LP, it’s coming out next year and I think it’s the best thing we’ve ever fucking done – I’ll tell you what, I think it’s the best thing anybody’s ever done…”. I just burst out laughing thinking ‘well that’s confidence for you’ and then he says “…by the way, we’re not playing any of those songs tonight”. So, we’re in a pretty good place at the moment.
