My Mates Are Awesome 02: JP Young

This piece is part of a '5 albums I'm loving right now' article I guest-wrote for Simon Sweetman's blog Off The Tracks.  You can find the whole thing here.

Anniversary Day is Awesome

Full disclosure – while I was not involved in the writing and recording of this album, I do play in the JP Young live band occasionally.  But surely a man can Love This Album Right Now, even if he’s been known to take some of the tunes out of the house of a weekend.
Anniversary Day is that most common of things – a Hidden New Zealand Classic.  If I told you I’d been listening to a concept album based on the story of Wellington’s only recorded fatal shark attack, you would probably treat me to some combination of polite nodding and glaze-eyed smiling.  But this unassuming monster succeeds with aplomb where Neutral Milk Hotel did a brilliant job of something rather different.

The balancing act in writing a pop concept album is that every song has to be a worthy stand-alone pop tune, while still clinging tenaciously to the Concept.  The temptation to slip in a thoroughly banging tune which is completely off-topic is only outweighed by the possibility of writing a total clanger in order to flesh out the story.  And here we have twelve songs which build to a coherent story while still having enough bone structure and sinew to be great tunes in their own right.  It’s a feat.
There’s more though.  In choosing a historical topic and giving it the pop treatment, Young asks and answers some big questions about songwriting in the 21st century.  For the last 50 years or so, musicians and writers alike have been urged to ‘write from life’, to ‘write what you know’.  And because most musicians start writing early in life, when they don’t know much, we are treated to millions of songs about being a confused teenager.  About trying to make sense of life, the universe, and everything.  About riding around in a van playing gigs.  About getting and spending, loving and losing, trying and failing.  About (o god this is the worst) trying to find things to write songs about.
But as Tom Wolfe points out in his kick-arse preface to Bonfire of the Vanities, writing from life needn’t mean writing exclusively about your shitty life; writing what you know needn’t mean displaying your ignorance – you can learn stuff, about the world outside your mouldy practice-room, and you can write about that.  If you’re good enough.

So it’s not just twelve great songs, which move and inspire all by themselves.  And it’s not just twelve great songs that fit together into a great story.  It’s also a kind of manifesto – a demonstration of what pop songwriting can be, if we’re good enough, and we try hard enough.  A suggestion that The Album can still be a worthwhile conceit, even in this age when no one actually buys Albums any more. In short: Genius.  Bastard.

My Mates Are Awesome 01 - Chris Sproutt

Every now and then you hear a band and you realise that there has been a great gaping hole in music, just waiting to be filled. As if all music were a jigsaw puzzle, and right below your nose there was this gap, just this size, just this shape, and here, before you even knew it existed, is the exact band to fill it.

The Sproutts are one of those bands. The signature sound is so simple, so immediately familiar, and so obvious that it's a shock to realise you've never heard anything like it. How silly of you not to have thought of it. Their press releases described the music as 'what people in the sixties thought music would sound like in the future', and it's this element of retro-futurism that makes their appeal so instant. The guts of these songs are pure sixties sunshine pop, the guitar tones and the whirly organ sounds are straight out of Brian Wilson's California, but then - the electric violin, the optical theremin, the casiomanic synth glitches; someone somehow has slipped Brian Wilson into the space programme.

I first heard the Sproutts at a gig at the Southern Cross a few years ago. I was playing in Dangerpin at the time, and we had rather rudely shoehorned ourselves onto the bill more-or-less uninvited. It was of vital importance that we not suck, given that we weren't supposed to be playing, really, and it was only our second gig or so, so the entire thing was kind of nerve-wracking. And then The Sproutts played, and I fell in love.

I danced like a goon, with a dumb indie grin plastered all over my face, in one of those three-person moshpits which are the bread and butter of New Zealand Live Music. Here at last was the antidote to the late-90s' winky-nudgy record-store ironism, and the early 00s' obsession with po-facedly reproducing New Wave and No Wave and 70s Rock note for pedantic note. Sci-Fi singalongs. Philosophy you can dance to. So what if there's nothing new under the sun? There is still sun. There are still endless ways of combining and recombining the sounds of the past to create the sound of the future, without slavishly carbon-copying your musical forebears, or cheapening their work with your tongue in your cheek and nothing of your own to add.

There and then The Sproutts became my favourite New Zealand band, ever. Five years on, Flying Out of the Washing Machine is still as fresh and crisp as if it had just popped out of the dryer. "Short skinny men/Make the cruelest leaders", Sproutt sings on If I Were A Mothman, but it's all just so damned charming that you're willing to take your chances.

So when, a couple of years later, The Sproutts were short of a Bassplaying Keyboardist, and asked me to join, it was like being asked to join The Pixies. I got to add a few bits to Plutons, and did Bass, Organ, and Accordion on Woman, Man, and Machine, and so joined a select group of people who have played on their favourite albums.

Working with Chris Sproutt was a pleasure and an education. The band was so devoid of the usual band tensions and dramas as to be nearly unnerving, which I put down to the unswerving good nature of the man and his tunes. He is a storehouse of classic guitar licks, a closet shredder, a scholar both of Pop Music and Pop Culture, and an almost-annoyingly, genuinely nice guy.

Which is, I guess, why I plumped for Chris as the subject of the first My Mates Are Awesome post. The standard rock-journalist schtick holds that to be a genius, you have to be tortured, or mad, or on drugs, or a complete arsehole, or preferably, all of the above. From Phil Spector through John Lennon to that tiresome Brian Jonestown twatacre, the conventional narrative doesn't seem to have room for the idea that incredibly bright people are often bright enough not to act like wankers. Which just makes it all the more satisfying to work with someone who is living proof that geniuses are people too.

My Mates Are Awesome - Intro

My Mates Are Awesome is a series of posts about inspiring musicians I've been lucky enough to know and work with. The aim is to fill a gap I see in music journalism. There are heaps of journalists and DJs writing about and playing the work of their friends already, but generally they tend not to mention that the fat new single they're spinning, or the album they're giving five stars to, was recorded by their flatmate. Which is dumb, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, nepotism isn't necessarily a bad thing of which you should automatically be ashamed: maybe your flatmate's album is really awesome. Why not mention she's your flatmate? It doesn't make it less awesome; in fact it makes you kind of cooler by association, surely?

Conversely, if the work is crap, people are going to see through it anyway - so you've given this album five stars, but it's rubbish, I wonder wh- oh, look, she's your flatmate. This is nepotism of which you probably should be ashamed. But if you're open about it, at least you won't look like a dick.

But the main thing to my mind is this - musicians generally know a lot of other musicians. Among their musician friends, it's almost certain there will be one or two whose work they genuinely admire, not just because they're friends, but because they are great performers or composers. Too often it's seen as uncool to be a fan of a friend - "Ringo? Yeah, nice guy, play poker with him Tuesdays. Band? He was in a band? Oh, yeah, I think someone did mention that once". This is tosh. It's great to have friends who are geniuseses. It's great to admire them, and to brag about knowing them. It's fine to write gushing screeds of purple prose about the beauty of their oeuvre, as well as playing poker with them Tuesdays. Why be coy about it?

So welcome to My Mates Are Awesome. Where I will unabashedly talk up the work of my associates, and openly boast that I am proud to associate with them. Allegations of nepotism can be referred to the moderators...