Lemon Jelly Interview

It took just three limited edition vinyl EPs to secure Fred Deakin (cartoon left) and Nick Franglen (cartoon right) a record deal with XL Recordings.

Since then, Lemon Jelly have recorded three full-length albums in little over four years, acquiring glowing compliments from the music press, and a reputation as one of the most popular leftfield downtempo acts around.

In 2000, their 3 EP's were amalgamated into one blissful debut album, Lemonjelly.ky, choc-full of playful samples and gorgeous melodies. Their second full-length album, Lost Horizons (2002), delivered more chillout instrumentals.

A sell-out tour swiftly followed, as did nominations for both a Brit Award and a Mercury Music Award in 2003.

Fast-forward to 2005, and another new album, '64-95'. This time Deakin and Franglen have dipped into their huge record collections to contrive a more varied batch of songs, featuring blended samples from more than a few choice cuts. Fred Deakin fills in the gaps...

You’re probably used to this question, but I thought I’d ask it anyway? Where did you choose the name Lemon Jelly from? It was a smell in my kitchen. And Nick (Franglen) came in and said “It smells like Lemon Jelly in here”, and I said “THAT’S THE NAME”. So that’s the long and short of it.

What were your influences as a young(er) man? Well me and Nick [Franglen] used to bump into eachother at 23 Skidoo concerts and that sort of music was what we first got into. And then, nice pictures, graphic stuff. I was into Marvel comics. The first gig was the Buzzcocks, and the first bands that I really got into were XTC and ACR (A Certain Ratio).

Quite rocky bands? Yeah, ACR were quite funky, that was the first time I really got into Dance music. And then from there I very quickly got into Hip Hop, and then just casted the net as wide as possible. I used to run a lot of clubs in Edinburgh, and I’m a Londoner born and bred, I basically started off seeing what was happening in London and then did it in Edinburgh six months later. It was just a bit easy, a bit obvious and boring, so I started trying to do something a little different, a bit more eclectic. I don’t think we were really that interested in what’s cool, that’s quite restrictive I think.

So did you work with Nick in those days? No I didn’t. We kind of grew up with the same bunch of friends without knowing each other particularly. He once took my sister on a date, on a late night motorcycle ride… famously. But then I went away to Edinburgh for 10 years, and that’s where I did my club running and my DJ-ing, and it developed these core values that Nick was kind of sharing.

So to somebody who had never heard Lemon Jelly’s music, how would you describe it? I dunno… experiential. Multilayered.

Are you against words like ‘downtempo’ and 'chill-out’? I would like them if I though they were applicable, but I don’t think they’re particularly applicable.

I heard the new album ’64-95’, in what way would you say it’s different to Lost Horizons and Lemonjelly.ky? Well, I think it is a bit more eclectic. I think it’s a progression, I mean we’re not doing the same thing so it has definitely changed. It’s probably a bit more in-your-face. Basically, each record we’ve done we’ve tried to take a very different approach. The first album was discovering we could make music together, and with this album the whole sample idea is what we’re exploring this time around. Who knows where we’ll go next time, but the difference is that the core idea at the heart of it is very specific and very particular.

How pleased were you with the final product? Very pleased, we don’t really let anything out the door unless we really like it. I’m sure the same is true with most people.

It sounds a little bit darker doesn’t it? Maybe less juvenile, if I can say that? Yeah, why not. We’re both kind of looking at different stuff I guess. It was almost a love letter to our record collections this album. They’re not even our favourites or anything like that, its just random glimpses into the words and music that we’ve been rummaging through most of our lives. That’s the focus, kind of getting our hands dirty and really digging the musical pit.

Did you deliberately avoid using obvious samples that people might immediately recognise? I don’t think we’d ever do that to be honest with you. If you know of a sample that’s been used before, then you go somewhere else. Having said that, there are a couple of big hits we’ve sampled on there, like on Stay With You, but I think we’ve done something very different with them, and hopefully they’ve turned into samples that you wouldn’t recognise.

Was there a pressure to move away from the first two albums? We wanted to do that certainly. I think the first two albums are very different themselves as well, so I think as far as I’m concerned, any artist worth their salt has to develop every record they make, so you have to have some kind of difference. If there was any pressure it was from ourselves, we were very concious that we didn’t want to repeat ourselves.

There’s a sample on there from William Shatner as well. Yes, indeed.

Was that from TJ Hooker? Um, no, it was recorded especially for us, which was very nice. We did a track on his album and he did a track on ours. He's just had an album out a few months ago, called Has Been. It’s very good actually, I recommend it highly.

It’s not electronic-related is it? Well, we’ve got a track on it and ours is very electronic. Ben Folds produced it, and it’s very varied. Check it our, it’s good, you can download it on I Tunes.

I heard there’s a DVD version of you new album, can you tell me a bit about the graphics side of that? Well, it’s quite hard to describe. It’s very eclectic, it’s nine original styles, definitely intended to be an alternative format of the album.

Is it cartoon-like? Not all of it, it’s all animated. There’s one track that’s very cartoony, there’s another track that’s much more minimal and abstract. There’s one that’s got some live footage in it, there’s one that’s very hand drawn. The whole album’s meant to be nine very varied tracks, we almost tried to push the music as far apart as we could without losing some sort of flow, and the same is true of the DVD.

Was this multimedia approach the record company’s idea or something you wanted to do in particular? Well I think it was natural progression from our packaging really, we’ve always had a very strong aesthetic, and our attitude has always been that me and Nick aren’t necessarily the personality in the band. We’re not traditional front people, we don’t do lead vocals – neither of us is Mick Jagger (laughs), so instead of that, given that there’s that kind of space, we intend the rich, graphic world that we create around these records to take that place and be the personality of the music. So to make that move was a strong opportunity.

Also, the music business is actually in a state of flux at the moment, it’s really up in the air, because we did two videos for the last record and the record company hasn’t got infinitely deep pockets, so it was a question of whether we actually want to make 3-minute videos that are gonna get shown on MTV twice - and we’re gonna have to compete with Britney Spears with a quarter of the budget - or shall we actually try and make something that stands up on its own and is a different piece of product. It’s something new and different, and although Super Furry Animals did it, it’s very rare that you get a DVD that’s all new footage.

It’s quite surprising that it hasn’t been done much before? It’s even rarer that you have a DVD where the visuals were basically created by the artists themselves. So given our position it seemed like a very natural and exciting thing to do.