Jamie
Lidell, the bespectacled, soul-belting, noise-sampling connoisseur,
has travelled back and forth across the world while blowing into coconuts
to bring you his funky third studio album, Jim.
Self-taught with a little help from the “dodgy guy around town,”
Lidell honed his talents across East Anglia before jetting off to chilly
Berlin. He’s about to tour with a full band for the first time,
and some new lamé outfits no doubt, but where did Britain’s
brightest harmonious kid start out? In an ice-rink with The Prodigy,
obviously. “It was my first big gig,” he says. “So
that was a major learning experience for me.”
Lidell met a guy
in Brampton, when he was still playing rave tracks, who he says - in
his best cockney accent - pinned him down with an “Oi mate, you
got a sampler? We’re gonna make tracks ok?” and the rest
is glittering history. “He showed me the ropes - how to sample,
get some breaks in, and he put me on his stage. He was running a dodgy
party and The Prodigy were playing.”
Only 16 years-old at the time, Lidell had managed to combine his first
rave with playing one. “I hadn’t been to a rave so I was
like ‘Why is everyone so into this music? Ecstasy? Ah. You mean
people will dance to any old crap?’” Clearly happy to joke
about himself, Lidell constantly drops odd phrases into the conversation
and references a superfluous schizophrenia. But beneath the laughter
and mischievous eyes is a man that takes his music extremely seriously.
“I just want what’s best for the music and I try to stay
focused on that as a priority.”
But back in the
day music was still a hobby for Lidell. He didn’t have a band,
he didn’t play gigs, and he didn’t have that much motivation.
“I just had a laugh playing my guitar with my mates. Some of them
wanted to sing and I’d do a beat for them, you know? I was really
into it as a relaxing hobby, something I could get my head into when
everything else was shit.”
It was only when
he sent a tape to his friend, who proceeded to play it to an A&R
guy in London that Lidell began falling into the techno scene and embarked
on his journey to Jim. He fled to Brighton to work with Christian Vogel
on their rave project, Super Collider, before tiring of the “bunch
of lay about punks” that inhabit the south sea and landed in Berlin
to be with his girlfriend and work with Mocky (Peaches, Feist). Together,
they started taking a more melodic route compared to Lidell’s
electronic past. “I’m one of those guys who just falls into
a crew. Here in Berlin my crew is Mocky and a bunch of musicians. The
best way I can integrate myself and expand and grow with those people
is to make more musical orientated stuff rather than electronic stuff
because I feel like I’d be isolated if I did that.”
Despite Germany’s
experimental vibe, with such luminaries as Kraftwerk and Can, Lidell
ended up producing some of his most soulful music there. But now he’s
bored again and is on the cusp of moving to Paris. “I’m
a little bit sick of Berlin. It’s had too much activity and I
think it’s past its prime for me.” Plus, he also favours
the more traditional studios of Paris compared to the cold Berlin ones.
He just doesn’t want to fall into the trap of making cheesy pop
music.
“The French have awful Chanson [corny French ballads] that’s
just fucking terrible and they insist on filling the radio with it.
It’s like their national pride. I’ll probably fall in with
some of the electronic players and try to make some kind of hybrid funk.”
But it’s hard to imagine how more hybrid he can go, when he’s
already mixed a variety of disco-funk noise into Jim and glazed it with
exploding harmonies that James Brown would be proud of.
Three songs recorded
in Paris, tracked in LA and polished off in Berlin; Jim took over three
different countries to match Lidell’s spontaneous personality,
and of course his pernickety approach to production. “I don’t
have a great studio here [Berlin]. I have a nice post-production space
and a pre-production space. And while doing the tour in 2006 with Beck,
I met Justin Stanley, who I got along with really great and he always
said that I was welcome to go to his studio and have a play. So I did
that once and I loved it. It’s a really small, approachable place
in LA. It’s like a home studio - nicely equipped with a good sound.
It really beats Berlin in terms of the sheer amount of Vitamin C in
the air, or Vitamin D or whatever you get. The vitamin-enriched mind-state
from being in an organic LA setting - I needed that to infuse these
songs I’d been writing with Mocky.”
And it wasn’t just countries that were in abundance with Jim.
Lidell and Mocky produced it, but Stanley played executive producer
because according to Lidell, when you work on something as a co-producer,
you have a financial investment to make it work, and this enforces a
trust between you.
“It’s
the slightly darker side of record production,” he states earnestly.
“The fact that people are getting something out of it financially,
it’s a very practical thing. I’ve had to learn that over
the last few years as things have become more successful, but you have
to look out for the balance between business and friendship.”
Lidell is known
someway for his fondness of elaborate costumes and glittering props.
So it’s unsurprising that he also likes to play with some weird
and wonderful instruments. He has incorporated sounds in some strange
ways with Jim; a talk-box, a Moroccan coconut flute and an auto-harp
all take pride of place on the record.
“Don’t
know if you know the auto-harp?” He drops in. “It’s
a kind of guitar that has all the chords on it and you just press them
down and strum, and it’s got about 20 strings on it. Anyway, there’s
a digital version of that, which is a fun instrument.”
And for album track
‘Rope of Sand’ he ended up running around the studio with
a speaker under each arm. “You get the sense of the sound actually
in the air - moving around as if it was a little preacher flying by.
It seemed to set the ambience for that song nicely, emulating something
outside. There was a bit of scene setting in the studio for a while.
I love that shit. I really like the idea of sourcing sounds from interesting
places.”
One of the most
interesting is the coconut flute. “It’s basically a really
cheap instrument,” he enthuses. “It’s just a wood
pipe shoved into a coconut and then the coconut acts as a kind of sound
bell and amplifies tone and then you blow into it with this crude reed.
It’s a really cool way of sounding like a saxophone without having
the might of the saxophone, like a little kid’s sound. It’s
basically a duck lost in the undergrowth.”
The success that
Lidell has encountered is partly due to his refusal to make anything
seem dull. From his outfits to his instruments to his explanations -
there’s not an inch of his career that he hasn’t donned-up
with excitement. Even the reason for album title Jim is so intriguing
that you need a minute to mull it over. “I am Jim. Jim is a part
of me.” He declares quite matter-of-factly.
“I didn’t want to call it Jamie Lidell. I can’t really
justify calling it that because it’s not all of me, it’s
just a very selective part of my schizophrenic outpouring.” If
you’re still following, Jim is the nicer side of Lidell.
“People do
call me Jim, and they seem happy to call me that. I’ve never heard
anyone say ‘Jim you owe me money’. It’s always ‘Jim,
hey. How’s it going Jim? Do you wanna hang out?’ So Jim
is the nice me.” And although it has a confusing concept, Jim
is more focused than Lidell’s previous album Multiply. Perhaps
it’s because of the Californian vitamins, or the numerous collaborations
(Gonzales, Peaches, Alex Acuña), or even the greater range of
tones.
“It’s just a much more focused production in general,”
says Lidell. “Basically I’ve taken everything I’ve
learnt with Multiply and tried to learn from all the lessons I’ve
gleaned. I held back in terms of the electronics.
There are not as many synthesizers. I held back the urge to add a lot
of synthetic elements to it because I felt it wasn’t really helping
the songs, but it does take a little constraint because obviously that’s
the kind of background I’m coming from, I’m an electronic
artist essentially.” You could say that Multiply is one side of
Lidell’s quirky personality and Jim is another. Or “one
foot in the dandy,” as he likes to call it. “Jim is definitely
on the dandious occasion of music. It’s half way there isn’t
it, Multiply? If you took a song like ‘Multiply’, or ‘What’s
the Use?’, or ‘What is it This Time?’ they could fit
on the album Jim. There’re a few strong deviations, stylistically.
There’re a few things that could fit and a few things that couldn’t,
which is why I said it’s one foot into the world of Jim. Jim is
a dandy, so it’s one foot into the world of dandy.”
As for the live
shows, they will be stepping up a level with four more members and absolutely
no cut corners. “It’ll be lights, camera, action from Pablo
Fiasco,” booms Lidell.
“There’ll
be bass and drums, guitar and bass, keyboards and vocals and a guy who
plays two saxophones at the same time. And me of course, with various
vocal acrobatics and electronic instruments and samplers and shenanigans
that were going on in my solo shows, beautifully woven into the mix
with the traditional band format.” He announces all this with
the smoothness of a door-to-door salesman or a circus ring master. He
speaks with confidence, never faltering or thinking too long about what
he’s saying. But what we really want to know, is what he’s
going to be dressing up as. “Oooh there’ll be a bit of dress
up I’m sure. I can’t help but to wear something a little
bit elaborate,” he coos, poised as ever and refusing to give anything
away. There’s no alternative but to catch him on his upcoming
month-long glam-fest.
by Danielle
Goldstein
