Kacey-O'Neill: Modesty Blaise Interview

"Modesty Blaise - The Least Hard Working Band In Show Business?"

One of the longest friendships anyone can have is an old school friend and I have one or two friends who have stuck with me through life. However one of the longest friendships is with Jonathan Collins, lead singer with Bristol pop group "Modesty Blaise".

My first memory of him was in the school playground where he was clowning about with Steven Perks and a camera. I really don't know why that has stuck in my mind and never will but we were in Infants School.

Jonathan had this fascination with long hair and in particular my pony tail! He sat at the desk behind me and gave it a tug every now and again. When we lined up for assembly he was there standing behind me. Gave my pony tail a tug and would say "Ding ding fares please. Off we go!" as we began walking down the corridor to assembly. We also sang in the school choir, both of us soloists. Junior School, Senior School, Saturday jobs and my Dad determined to wind up Jon at every opportunity when he went into the Co-op on a Saturday. And despite going off to do our own things in life we still remained friends. Some friendships are meant to be and those friendships are valued for life.

And yet this old school friend is famous, in fact successful in Europe with his band "Modesty Blaise". Germany, Spain, Scandinavia and everywhere else, but the UK is a different matter. It's not for want of trying, it's just the UK music industry wants to mould or manufacture bands/artists and they have little time for natural raw talent to develop. It's as if music is on a conveyor belt churning out the next fashion trend and not paying attention to those out there giving their all. The music industry in Europe has far more flexibility hence the reason why so many British bands find fame there rather than here.

Today he is known as Johnny Collins, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter with "Modesty Blaise". He is joined by David W. Brown who plays base guitar, Gregory Jones on guitars and Mark Bradley on drums. With several single releases, three album releases - "Modern Guitars with Amplification", "A Beginners Guide to Modesty Blaise" and "Melancholia" - and concerts booked every year for the band, I may know his music history but you don't and I wanted Johnny to tell it as it is in his own words.

As we were both in the School Choir did that have any influence on his music career? "Absolutely!" says Johnny "I would say School choirs and music lessons and all of those things were very important. And I need to make a point about the current education system. Music needs to be more firmly integrated into the School curriculum so it's not just something that is added on, it is something that is central." he says with his parent hat on. "Actually being in School choirs and Church choir as well, even though there was no God, they teach an awful lot about harmonies, although these days everybody seems to do hip hop songs so you don't learn about harmonies."

We both had music lessons with different teachers. I for one play the piano and just cannot sight read music. In fact I am terrible at it but what was Johnny like with his piano lessons at the time? "I had piano lessons for years and I was absolutely rubbish! I now discover that was actually quite useful because I now know how chords relate to other chords but I'm still useless. I can play stuff with the right hand, I can play stuff with the left hand but I can't play the two together which luckily together with today's recording technology is no disadvantage." A fair point made by him.

"I also played the violin. And if my piano playing was bad then my violin playing was absolutely appalling until I chopped the top of my finger off and then I had a fantastic excuse for giving up the violin but frankly it had given up on me anyway" Johnny says laughing

So when did he start playing the guitar because it wasn't at School and did it improve his musical ability? "I was at college and I was going to form a band, by which point I knew I couldn't play any instruments. I'd played the piano and violin for years and another thing about me is that I have no idea when to give up. This doesn't apply to musical stuff, it's everything in general. So when I came to form a band the idea was that I was going to be a singer in a band and I wasn't going to play any instrument, but I was a bit concerned about feeling incredibly exposed on the stage so I thought I'd get a guitar, a huge great semi-acoustic essentially to hide behind. I wasn't even going to plug it in! But when I did plug it in and turn it up I realised it actually plays itself, it's remarkably easy." he says proudly.

The idea of forming a band whilst at College led to another strong friendship bond with David W. Brown who is bass guitarist with "Modesty Blaise" and again Johnny made a lasting impression. "We were at the same college, Swansea, and on the same course but curiously we had no common lectures at all so I managed to go two years without meeting him at all which is amazing! And then when it was put about that I was putting a band together. Various people who did know him knew that he wanted to be in a band and so a meeting between the two of us was engineered, whereby he came round to my flat."

"I really didn't know who he was but he knew who I was and he tells a story about me whereby there were two incidents that made him decide to join a band with me. Firstly, he claims he met me at a party of a mutual friend which was in a three story house with the bottom storey as the kitchen, the middle storey was the living room upon which there were a lot of people smoking illegal substances, being off their faces and sort of listening to Gong or various other rubbish like that. Dave had no interest in that and he wandered up to the third storey where he found me." says Johnny laughing. "I don't recall this, but he found me jumping up and down on someone's bed to a distorting cassette player playing 'Velvet Underground'. He came into the room and I carried on jumping up and down, he was there for five minutes, he went away and I was still jumping up and down! That's the first story he tells of how we met. I have no reason to disbelieve him."

"The second one was when he came round to my flat to decide whether he was going to join the band or not. It was 1986 or something like that. At the time of Jesus and Mary Chain had released their first single 'Upside Down' and I had a poster from the 'Mary Chain's' Upside Down on my wall and it was hung upside down at which point Dave decided he was going to join the band."

The name of Johnny's first band was 'Boats Not Ships' and the explanation of how that came about is just as bizarre. "The idea behind it was things that are small rather than things that were big. It wasn't much of an idea, a philosophy as such. It was just one of those things from the British comedies of the 40's and 50's. It's like 'I say sir I like your boat' ' That's not a boat it's a ship' grumble grumble. I saw it in a film recently and laughed much to the dismay of other people." he explained.

The band's first demo back in the day's when everything was stuck on audio cassette was called "Give Elvis The Crumbs" and it contained three songs. "One Of These Fine Days", "Shift The Sky" and "Caprice" and I still have it in my music collection. What I do remember is that at the end of the tape there is a clip of Elvis Presley talking and I did wonder why call it "Give Elvis The Crumbs" and add the man himself at the end of the tape.

"There was a stray dog and as people in colleges tend to live in groups, we had a stray dog named Elvis. It just came at the end of one of those conversations. 'What are we going to feed Elvis?' 'Oh I don't know give Elvis the crumbs'. And then we found some tape of Elvis Presley saying he hadn't had that many sandwiches and that everybody else had eaten them, so we nicked that and shoved it on the end of the recording" said Johnny

But that wasn't the only performance for 'Boats Not Ships' whilst Jon was studying at College. "We managed to get to play a John Peel Road Show which for an indie band was a great possible leap forward. We played with 'The Three Wise Men' who were a rap group." At this point Johnny starts laughing. "And I remember walking into their dressing room and them saying 'yo what ya jive to' and me saying 'we're a pop group thank you very much'. It was very strange. But we played the John Peel Road Show and we were the worst we'd ever been, we were absolutely appalling. The guitarist was so out of it he started the wrong song every time. The drummer had no idea what he was doing. Dave and I tried to hold it together, failed dismally, absolute shambles, broken guitar, always broken guitar strings anyway, but broken guitars, broken amplifiers and everything. It was a total shambles. It was unlistenable. Typically Peel loved it!" said Johnny laughing out loud.

"We met John Peel and he said he loved it and 'please send me in a tape with all your contact details and we'll book up a session'. That was brilliant. Seemed like a fantastic step forward. Typically I then messed that up by going into a studio and recording properly. So I had all these ideas about recording, what it should sound like and used them all. I over produced it and tried to make it sound as good as I could but it ended up as a light weight pop record which is what we were interested in doing, but played live it was an absolute shambles. John Peel liked it when we were an absolute shambles and obviously loathed it when we weren't."

So in between finishing College, disbanding 'Boats Not Ships' because only half the band moved back to Bristol, Dave and Johnny continued with their musical aspirations and attempted to find new members to join a new band putting adverts in music magazines but whoever turned up just wasn't right for what they had in mind. They played around with names and at one point 'The Heartache Express' was used all but briefly. In between Dave and Johnny took day jobs and continued their search. However time wasn't wasted. "I used to concentrate on song writing a lot of the time. I did do quite a few songs in those days and I threw away an awful lot." says Johnny.

I reminded him of one song he had written during that time where the lyric went "I can't wait for it to snow again 'cause you can't make footprints in the rain". "That song still exists." he says. "That had a really good hook in it actually. We recorded that in a studio in Oxfordshire with some fantastic session musicians. I'll dig that out one day and see what that sounds like. We'd actually played that as 'Boats Not Ships'. We played that for the first time in Port Talbot once and we played there with The Bodenes." Johnny recalls

Another song I remembered was called "February Forever Girl" which had some sort of connection with Susanna Hoffs from The Bangles at the time. "Yes Susanna Hoffs. Somebody gave me a Bangles calendar and obviously it just stayed on February all year. It was February forever! But I've come to realise that songs are rarely about one thing and although they have starting points they don't end up being like that. I can rarely sustain an idea beyond the verse. Certainly the idea 'February Forever Girl' was an interesting concept because you have February which is a fixed time thing, twenty-eight or twenty-nine days and then you just suppose that with forever which is something that is obviously infinite. I thought that was interesting." Johnny says thoughtfully

In that case I wanted to know how he structured a song and how he went about song writing. "I don't think there is any one way to write a song. If I find something that I think is interesting then I will write about it. I have in the past written from titles and do tend to work an awful lot on lyrics and they will go around and around until I get them exactly right. I've written from melodies too." he says pausing for thought.

"In terms of structure I think that I've had a tendency to do quite linear songs in the past. Quite often I'll find a song where the structure is interesting and then I'll use that structure to see what I can put into that particular rhyming scheme or that particular way it's set up. But the chief thing about writing songs is that you need to have a reason and I realised that I just can't write them now for writing's sake. Certainly there is a lot to be said for having the habit of writing something every day but the ways of writing songs are many and varied. I've never done the playing with loops and that sort of thing though" he says.

I ask Johnny who influences him with his song writing? "An awful lot of influence comes from the golden age of popular song. Cole Porter, Jerome Kerr, that sort of thing. The structures of some of the Cole Porter songs are absolutely outrageous, so complicated. I used to know all this stuff, I used to know what influenced me. I now realise that I probably didn't know and probably don't know. I am certainly somebody who analyzes things so if you went through song by song I can certainly tell you which bits came from where, which bits I ripped off. Which bits I changed"

So I ask about his song 'Carol Mountain'. "The influence there was the Steven Gains book entitled "Heroes and Villains" which is about The Beach Boys. The stories and the song are taken from that. I read the book and wrote a song about it. Musically for 'Carol Mountain' I had a lot of songs that progressed whereby the chords dropped one note each time and I reversed it. So the chords pick up one note each time and that's all I did. Rather like the 'Four Tops' and Holland Dozier Holland with 'I Can't Help Myself'. They then needed a follow up hit to that and that was 'The Same Old Song'. Holland, Dozier and Holland took the melody and reversed it and it was the same old song".

Another song I saw the band play live recently is a new track called "Girls Just Wanna Dance". What was the influence there? "We haven't finished the recording of that song yet but Gregory, a noted 'Modesty Blaise' guitarist is a dancer. He likes going out to night clubs and dancing. I don't dance and Dave and I and Gregory had a spate where we would put on the most stupidest of flares we could and went out to crappy night clubs. We were '70's vigilantes, we had huge flares on and went out looking for trouble and it just came from a few ideas out of that. The lyrics came from just a few things that happened when we went out to night clubs and behaved stupidly. I remember the songs gestation period was very long and I'm pretty pleased with the final lyrics on that. I'm very pleased with it in general actually. There's this idea you know the bit 'You dancin' you asking, I'm asking, I'm dancing' thing. I've got some idea where I'm going to put that into the middle somewhere. It used to be from off the front of The Liver Birds theme".

'Modesty Blaise' formed in 1993 with Johnny Collins and David W. Brown as the nucleus of the band. Other musicians have come and gone over the years. I even remember their first gig at The Mauritania in Bristol that same year but are 'Modesty Blaise' bad for business because the Mauritania no longer exists? "An awful lot of places we have played have closed down or been demolished after we play there! The George and Railway, we played there, that's gone now. All sorts of places. Not just here, but other countries as well. We go and tour abroad and if we go back to places we've been before we often find ourselves driving past an open space where the night club we'd previously played had been." says Johnny. "We're getting large parts of central Europe demolished! I've no idea why that is. It does seem to happen an awful lot. Places where we have played then go out of business which is excellent!" at which point Johnny is laughing at the jinx the band must have on venues. - Well 'Modesty Blaise' played The Cooler in Park Street earlier this year and that is still open so maybe the jinx has been broken?

So why call the band 'Modesty Blaise' as the name is associated with a cartoon character. "I know." says Johnny "The interesting thing about that was that we spent ages looking for a name and there was this time limit on it as we were recording for a label in Birmingham. They were going to release a single and we had to plump for something. We rejected Belle and Sebastian as a name which I still think was probably right and I remember the day when the labels were being printed up for the single or the day the artwork had to be submitted, phoning Dave up and saying, 'why aren't we called Modesty Blaise?' We couldn't think of a reason and it just seemed like a great name because it was a name that didn't really mean anything. However Modesty Blaise is a 1960's cartoon character and people ended up thinking we were a real '60s band. And of course the Evening Post used to have the cartoons for Bristow and Modesty Blaise from the days when my folks used to get the paper. I just want to say in retrospect that 'Modesty Blaise' is a dreadful choice for a name because of those very same reasons that people think we are a '60s group and I loathe that now."

'Modesty Blaise' are signed to a record company in Germany and yet their album and singles sell by the truck load throughout Europe. They've even sold records in Japan and recently Johnny found out the band were selling in Mexico as well after meeting their Mexican radio plugger at a Music Industry event. Yet they are still to break into the UK market. "The way that I explain that to people abroad and that question gets asked everytime we go there, is that the British music industry is significantly more sophisticated than the music industries in the rest of Europe. I don't know though if it is more sophisticated than the US music industry or not but it's certainly more sophisticated. It's more fashioned based. So if I want to get on Radio 1 in the UK I'd have to be on a playlist and in order to get on that playlist I'd have to employ a plugger to try and get my record played or something like that. To get on Radio 1 in Germany the person from the record company calls up and says we are in Berlin, do you want them in and radio will say 'Oh yes but we'll play their record a couple weeks before hand to promote it'. It's less sophisticated. I'm not saying it's worse or better. I think it's better obviously and easier to get heard. Music is a very much DIY ethic now" explains Johnny. "It didn't take me long to realise that record companies are mainly banks and marketing departments. They lend you the money and market your product and then they take the money back. It's actually that marketing expertise that you need. And the British music industry is fashion led".

Johnny has crossed paths with many musicians and Edwyn Collins, formerly of 'Orange Juice' worked with 'Modesty Blaise' on some of their recording sessions. "Edwyn produced, what turned out to be our first single (Christina Terrace) as a practice for recording 'Gorgeous George." Johnny explains "He had a studio which we christened New River Studio on account of the fact that New River was next to it in North London. He was preparing to record his album 'Gorgeous George' whence a 'Girl Like You' was released, and he just wanted some practice before he did it so we went and recorded a single there which he produced. He played on some of our tracks as well. He is a quite astounding guitarist and it was a difficult time actually. I remember at the time saying 'I'm never going to have anyone else produce me again I'm going to do it myself from now on' because I found it very difficult. If you listen to 'Gorgeous George' or if you listen to 'A Girl Like You' and then 'Christina Terrace' you'll find they have an awful lot in common. A lot of the sounds are the same. It's the same instruments we used."

And talking of the song 'Christina Terrace' I remember the promotional video to that. "It was recorded in and around Bristol and of course Bristol Airport. I bet you wouldn't be allowed to do that now, film at airports!" Johnny says proudly as at the time that was a real coup.

The video itself was sort of James Bond-ish in a way. "Ummm yes" and he starts laughing. "At this point people thought we were this 1960's band thing, so the idea was we would shove as many '60s cliches in three minutes as we could possibly think of to get them the hell out of the way so people would realise we were taking the piss and that we're not a 1960's band at all. Nobody went poor by under estimating the general public. But the video was just entirely misunderstood. We threw in stuff like running along the station platform at Temple Meads by the train in black and white and it was supposed to look a little bit like 'Hard Day's Night' and Icaress files bit. My friend Ashton was in a role along the lines of James Bond Oddjob type thing. All of these sixties cliches, waving from the plane, riding scooters and then playing on the tarmac that was meant to look like the scene from 'I am the Walrus' from The Beatles 'Magical Mystery Tour' and various things like that. It didn't work at all. Everybody just thought 'oh look they're a '60s band and they are doing all that.' 'No, no they're taking piss, honest'." Johnny says frustratingly.

It was a fun video and formed part of a HTV documentary that Johnny was doing at the time. "The very first time I saw it was at HTV on a forty foot video wall in front of everybody else, and the first minute of the video, well it seemed like twenty minutes, is a huge great close up of my head which I saw on a forty foot screen and it looks like I've got no teeth! Oh god I hated that. But I quite like it when it starts cutting about. There are a few things I said at the time, no speeded up film because we don't want to look like 'The Monkees', no this, no that and virtually everything I said I don't want in it ended up in it. And so that has actually become the template for things that we have done ever since because we do things that we think are going to perceived in some way and they are perceived in exactly the opposite way. We do things that are funny but are taken as serious and we do things we think are serious and they are taken as jokes. That is a pretty good way of working out what's happened to us in terms of what we've done and that's been the way of the world for us" he says

'Modesty Blaise' have been referred to as the least hard working band in show business and I wondered why. "It's a James Brown thing" says Jon casually. "James Brown. Most hard working man in show business. I yearn for the day when bands and artistes have phrases like that after their name such as 'soul brother number one'. 'The most hard working man in show business'. And then 'Modesty Blaise. The least hard working band in show business'. It's not far from the truth. When was my last record released?" he asks. Well quite sometime ago but another album is in the pipeline.

The band are also referred to as 'purveyors of fine pop music since the mid the mid 20th century' and Johnny doesn't know why. "You have to write something and it doesn't really matter what you say it's just that we have a certain turn of phrase and it's the way we tend to use it But I don't take that stuff seriously. It's very much tongue in cheek" he says. "We are defined as different things in different countries. It always comes as a surprise to me. In Spain we were signed to a punk label called Animal but we were regarded as a Mod band. I don't know where this came from, I don't know what a mod band is but that is how we are regarded in Spain. In Germany we are regarded as a Brit Pop band. That's fine, you understand something from that but Brit Pop in Germany means a completely different thing. Radiohead are Brit Pop in Germany and it means you are a pop group from Britain I think but then they lump it all together. It's hard to define to have a genre that encompasses Blur, Oasis and Pulp. Three very different sounding bands and yet they are all classed as being of the same genre and we are too, a Brit Pop band."

But back to that album that is in the pipeline. What can we expect from 'Modesty Blaise' in the future? After all they showcased some new songs recently and the fans loved them. "I need to finish the songs we have, but we've come to the end of our contract with Apricot Records now and I need to work out what we are going to do, because they are quite keen to re-sign us but I'm not so sure. So I don't know what record label we'll be with or if we'll be with a record label. Who knows. The music industry is changing so rapidly." Obviously a lot to think about.

But fans want to know when the they can get their sticky hands on new 'Modesty Blaise' material. "We are probably a third of the way through recording the next album but we've been a third of the way of recording it for quite a while now. Part of the problem is I need to do the horns and the strings and for me to do that I need time and I don't have any time at the moment. But a third of it is done and finished and the final third I haven't started on yet. Eventually we will get something out to the fans but when and what format, it will be announced on our web sites." says Johnny

So would Jon consider going the same way as Prince with an album release? "What give my records away with ....... the Sunday Mail?! I don't think that is going to sell many more papers is it? I think the idea that he is not going to make any money in the UK is completely bizarre but it was a very clever move. The music industry has changed somewhat. It always used to be you lost a fortune by playing live but you did because it promoted your record sales. It's becoming kind of the other way round. You are losing money on recordings but they are the things that attract people into the halls to see you playing live and the ticket prices are higher than they were before." he says.

So how would he like to see his music released in the future, afterall I am a bit of a vinyl junkie and prefer that or CD to downloads. "I do like a physical format, but I suspect it will be both. It very much depends on how long I take to actually perfecting the rest of the material I've got to do and it isn't as if I've been working constantly" says the musical perfectionist. "Some of the songs for the new album have been around for a while, but I've been through all sorts of weird personal stuff which has meant we didn't do anything for several years. It's very easy to be in 'Modesty Blaise' because we don't do anything!"

But sometime ago Johnny mentioned doing some sort of Country and Western tribute or project.

What happened to that idea? "I still want to make a Country and Western album and I want to make a bossa nova album. I've got an album cover and a title for the Country album. But you never know we may well get around to it." -'Modesty Blaise' do Country and Western, now that would be an interesting concept and major change of direction for the band. - "I don't like tribute bands or if tribute bands have to exist then it has to be in some kind of parallel world. You just look down the listings of any venue and you'll find a couple 'Led Zeppelin tribute bands, a couple of Jam tribute bands, and you think oh what's the point?"

With another album release on it's way but no release date set yet, there is one thing Johnny would like the group to be remembered for and he concludes this in his own words "The least hard working band in showbusiness!"

Official Web Site: http://www.modestyblaise.co.uk/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/themodestyblaise

Kathryn Courtney-O'Neill