Jetplane Landing - Part 2

Where did JPL’s funk obsession originate? It seems to have come from nowhere for a band previously lauded as one of the pioneers of UK Hardcore.
When started off we were a three-piece heavily influenced by John Spencer Blues Explosion, and John himself as an amazing, enigmatic, speechmaker. They were the archetypal white funk/blues three-piece but we kind of moved away from that. We got coloured by our peers and the people that we played with. We’re not into stuff like that, I hate all those bands we supported. They’re nice people, but I hate their records. To get lumped into that sort of audience by default as a result of an aggregate search on Amazon or Last.fm annoyed the shit out of us because that’s not who we are. So we wanted to return to why we kicked the band off in the first place. The very first song that we put out on our first album is called ‘Tiny Bombs’ and it’s pretty funky and bluesy. That was more of a blueprint of what Jetplane Landing are about than something like ‘I Opt Out’. I’m not dismissing any of our material nor the scene or the kids that are into that, or the people who buy our records or wear our t-shirts, but this album is much more us than ‘Once Like A Spark’.

‘Once Like A Spark’ is still a great album, but it’s more ‘of its time’ than ‘Backlash Cop’, which doesn’t really contemporary. How do you feel about this move forward?
We’re confident about the strides we’ve taken, but we haven’t divorced ourselves from ‘Once Like A Spark’. I love some of the tracks off the album and I’m really proud of the production. It was made in the living room of a house in Bognor Regis, recorded by ourselves with a ProTools rig outside a kitchen hatch. It was all paid for by ourselves and sold far more records than it ever deserved to from those beginnings. We were playlisted on MTV, recorded MTV and Radio 1 sessions, played Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds – all as a result of that album. But we’ve moved on. In terms of commercial success, maybe we’ve stepped backwards, but we hope that people who are into Jetplane Landing as a theory will really love and fall in love with these songs, because we do. It’s our most timeless record yet and that has a lot to do with how it was recorded and the research that went into it. It was two years of listening to funk records and programming NWA drum beats on a shitty drum machine to work out how they did it so we could translate that into live drums. You can hear loads of historical and musical references. If you dig deep into all the drumbeats you’ll spot where we’ve taken all the ideas from. It’s a world of study, and if you’re into ‘Backlash Cop’ you can read about the people featured in the songs. Try and discover where we’ve taken our influences from and it will open up a beautiful record collection for you. It’ll be a wonderful and really nice thing to spend a year buying.

Did you have a starting point of inspiration or idea as to how you were going to incorporate this funk direction into your music?
The easiest to doff a cap to is Rage Against The Machine. Why were they so good? Why did they have a bang and bounce appeal? Why were RATM fundamentally fucking lethal? Why were they the best rock band of the last decade? Because their roots lie in people like The Meters, Funkadelic, Parliament and Bootsy Collins, Sam Cooke, Miles Davis and MC5. We started looking at that and it was weird because we started drawing all this connective tissue around the dots. The deeper we dug into people like Fugazi’s heritage and what they are into you find they’re heavily influenced by James Brown, the whole GOGO scene and all the other music we just discussed, You start to go ‘they’re just doing that with their own thing bolted on’. It gave us loads of confidence because we were always into that kind of music. We started joining the dots and became convinced we were doing the right thing.

Did you try anything particularly different recording-wise?
We tried hard to make the songs as enjoyable as possible. It’s so hard to squeeze energy onto tape and CD. Every single second of this has record has been designed to squeeze four people’s energy into that bit of non-biodegradable plastic. Cahir’s guitar playing on this record is his best work so far we feel. It’s really virtuosic. He said, ‘I’m not going to plan any guitar solos. Just put me in there and I’ll bust ‘em’. He gave them all names. The guitar solo on ‘Why Do They Never Play Les Savy Fav On The Radio?’ is called the Disco Spectre, another one is called The Sparrow Hawk. He invented characters and brought life to his guitar playing and the chords he used. I don’t play any guitar on this record, I just sing and rap. It was a conscious decision to have that three-piece thing, so I could just rap and transfer energy.

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