Larry Heath talks to former The Masters Apprentices front man Jim Keays about his new record.
We’re here to talk about the new record, Dirty Dirty
We are. Have you heard it?
I have. I jammed out the first half this morning, played it very loud.
Good. That’s how it should be played. Loud and obnoxious. It’s rock and roll. It’s sort of retro, but at the same time it’s sort of modern as well. Funny that, it wasn’t designed that way, but it turned out that way.
Well you achieved it then, so congratulations. How long had it been since you’d been in the recording studio?
Only a couple of years. I did one of those Liberation Blue acoustic series albums, that a lot of people did. And then I did an album before that, called Pressure Makes Diamonds, which came out late 90s. So not that long between drinks. But I believe in the body of work, whether it’s a hit or not, that doesn’t really bother me. It’s just really important to have a continual body of work. When you stop doing it and you’re out of the loop, you’re gone. A lot of friends of mine I’ve seen doing that: “Oh it’s not working out so well, I’ll just get a day job for a while and see what happens.” And then they never come back. So I’ve always believed in the body of work being important, and it’s what I do. I’ve already started compliling work for the next one, and I haven’t even released this one yet!
I can imagine you having stacks of unreleased material…
Yeah you get that. And then you have a spate of churning them out… and then you don’t do anything for six months or nine months and you can’t write a song. You can’t force it. Some people say “every Tuesday I’m going to write a song”, but that doesn’t happen, not for me at least. I couldn’t be that regimented. I find with songwriting, you’ve got to absorb a whole bunch of things – most of them subliminally – things you see or read in the paper or hear people saying, whatever it may be, and it all goes in there. And then when it seems to be ready, it comes out… but you’ve got to wait for that to happen. I’m just talking about myself though. I have to get the ingredients over a period of time.
So when it comes to the new record, how long were these tracks gestating?
Well this is a whole different thing for me, because all my career; with every single thing that I’ve recorded, I’ve written it or been a part of the band that wrote it. But this album is just a cover album, not many people know that. It’s very unusual for me to do that. There’s a label in Melbourne called Aztec records, they specialise in releasing obscure Australian bands that were only ever on Vinyl, so they release them now and they package them really well. One of the albums they did was the Masters Apprentice’s first album on CD. And they also decided to have a concert featuring some of that acts that came out on their label. It was at the Crown Casino in Melbourne and MastersApprentice was one of that bands to play in the concert because we were on their label. The label manager loved the performance. He said to a friend of his: “I’d like to get Jim to record a garage punk album”. When he approached me about it, my first response to this idea was “are you serious?! You’ve got to be joking! I’ve never written those sort of songs.” He said: “I’ll find the songs, I’ll fins the players, I’ll find you everything.” I honestly thought it was just an idea that wouldn’t really go any further. He came to me a few weeks later with a CD with about twenty-five tracks on it of obscure no-hit wonders and strange sixties stuff that he’d dug up. When I listened to it, I thought I could actually do a few of these, they sounded like it could be really fun! He told me he knew I’d like it and said he’d find me a band. He got me a few young guys- I glad about that, I didn’t want mature players, they’re too good. I didn’t want good, I wanted bad. I find, once a player matures and gets better at, it’s no longer naive, it’s too over-thought and garage punk is not like that. When we rehearsed, it sounded fantastic! After we recorded it I was quite amazed myself! The label manager told me that he thought I’d be able to get a record deal with this. I said: “A record deal? No one my age gets a record deal! I know so many fantastic people who weren’t able to get a record deal!” The label manager took it over to Shock records and plays it for the guy there and the guy there told him to record the rest of the tracks and we’ll do an album. So that’s how it came about. I basically just did it for fun and anything bigger is just a bonus. It’s turned into this big thing now and anyone that’s heard it has really liked it. We stuck with the naivity of a 60’s garage punk band, a few of the songs on the album have different flavours but we let it flow it’s own way; we didn’t force it to sound like garage punk. A few of them sounded like it was fromt he early 70’s rolling stones.
Well, that whole genre is a grey area, anyway. Garage punk is a label that’s taken on in more recent times. When you think about the perception- it might just be purely linguistics in terms of the way we describe the music- do you feel that the perception of the music that you were playing in the 60’s and 70’s has changed alongside of what the scene was then?
Yes, it did. And technology had a lot to do with that. and the proficiency of players. In the mid-sixties there wasn’t really anyone before us. We were pioneers. There wasn;t anything to go by. But as the years passed, there was, people went by us and people weny by the people that went by us and so on. It developed in that way and by the 80’s it was a whole different production technique, it was huge, people had huge lightshows and everything and then people brought it back to reality and then it got huge again. It’s a cycle, in that reguard it’s changed but in another reguard, nothing’s changed. I was listening to the radio the other day and I was thinking that withthe kind of music that they played, they could play something off of my album after it and there wouldn’t be any difference, it would fit in with some of the stuff. There’s a very popular song- The Black keys- Lonely Boy, if you listen to it, it’s very garage and very raw and it’s not unlike some of the songs on my album. If someone in 1965 told me I’d be doingthis in 2012, I wouldn’t believe them, I’d think there’d be a whole new style of music, like rock and roll became a new thing after the 40’s. So lots has changed and nothing has changed.
Even with electronic music now, the most popular touring electronic musicians are the ones actually playing their guitars. And it’s still has that electronic feel to it, and then you look to some songs in the 80’s and it’s the same thing with the disco fever and then that moved into disco rock and the hip hop became big and then hip hop and rock joined together. It always goes back to rock.
It does, and I think at the moment there’s a very healthy rock conciousness at the moment.I know there’s other forms of music at the moment. People listen to stuff like the Jim Jones Review at the moment, and I find Jim Jones is like a modern version of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Louis, which is incredible. That’s the thing about me, too. If I said to my peers something about Lonely Boy, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I have to keep up with it, because by nature I’m not really nastalgic. i honour the past and the hits we had when I was in the Masters days, which you’ve got to do, it was a big part of my life and it put me where I am today, but I like to look forward as well, I like to do new things, see what’s out there, whereas a lot of my peers have stopped doing that. I think it’s healthy to do that, but everybody is different. Iike to move on. I earn a living, I do 100 gigs a year with Cotton Keays and Morris, we appeal to the baby boomer market because they grew up with those hits we had. And we do very well, virtually every gig we do is a sell out for that market and we’ve got to do it on our own because there’s nobody else alive to do it. so I’ve got a living out of doing those songs and I can’t deny that I do, but at the same time it’s not my sole thing, as I said, I like to look forward and do new things but I do still do the songs that people loved and it’s good. I’ve got an enormous amount of preassure out of doing those Masters songs because the crowd give feedback when you’re selling the merchendise to them. They say that they loved it and they’ll never forget those songs. It was a part of their youth and it gives people happiness and a sense of joy and I love doing that. but, as much as I enjoy that, I have to look ahead.
And I understand you’ll be playing some shows next month?
Yes, with this album I will be doing a showcase gig in Melbourne and one here in Sydney with the players from the record and we’ll see how that goes. I’m a realist and I know that the album won’t sell very well because that’s the nature of the market, but that wasn’t the focus when I started, because I know it won’t get commercial airplay. If you didn’t say that those songs weren’t played by me and played by a young artist instead, they’d play it. But because they know that it’s sung by me, they won’t because I’m old and it’s not a part of their demographic audience. A 40 year old could write a song like that, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s driven by money anyway. That’s the problem with the radio.
Well, thank you for your time and I look forward to listening to the second half when I get back to the office.
