“If somebody had said to us back in 1988, ‘You’re going to release a single that will make a bit of money and will allow you to play shows almost 40 years later, our jaws would have just hung open,” says keyboardist Iain Baker, of the English band Jesus Jones. “We would have been gobsmacked. But we didn’t write a song saying, ‘Maybe one day this will sound good in a supermarket’.”
That single of course was “Right Here, Right Now” and yes, Jesus Jones will be playing it at the City Winery on Tuesday. But no, it won’t be the only good song in the set. “We’ve always been thankful for it, but it doesn’t dominate our thinking. We don’t look at the set list and say, ‘There has to be the moment when we unveil the song’ — It’s just another song when we play it. The fact that people may make more noise when they hear it, that’s up to them. If they want to choose one song above all others, that’s their prerogative. As an artist, that decision is taken out of your hands, and I quite like that. Once you do something and you send it out to people, it’s quite right that artists have no further control.”
From the start, Jesus Jones combined a traditional guitar-band sound with heavy use of dance beats and electronics, never going all the way in either direction. “I think we explore a spectrum that goes from dance to rock, and back again. Maybe there was a time when we fired up a guitar and a sampler and said, ‘Hey, these sound really cool together, and nobody else is doing it’.”
After many years without recording, Jesus Jones have released a new single, “Still Smiling” — and in terms of both sound and attitude, it could have been done six months after the hit. “I think it’s genuinely one of the best things we’ve done for quite some time — but here’s the caveat, every band is going to say that. But I do feel that we’ve managed to find again the spirit of what we had back then. It’s quite unapologetic in its determination to be optimistic.”
The band playing the Winery this week is the exact same one that formed in 1988; all five original members (with frontman Mike Edwards, guitarist Jerry DeBorg, bassist Al Doughty and drummer Gen Matthews) are still aboard. They haven’t worked together continuously — Baker had a radio career, and Edwards became a physical trainer — but the band never broke up either.
“It’s quite incredible,” Baker says. “When I look at other bands, they may have members that have passed away, or musical differences may have shot them to pieces. It’s not like we never had our arguments or our disagreements. But one of the advantages of having the success we did very early, is that arguments that we did have, all happened within a year’s time. We had all those fights that would have split most bands apart. But because we were thrown right into the belly of the beast, it all happened in our first year. It was like a fast storm, and we all came out the other side. We’re so close and so used to each other by now, that there’s nothing we can do that would tear us apart again.”
