The New Cue #495 May 27: These New Puritans' Jack Barnett
"Music is a place where there are no problems."
Good morning,
Today we’ve got a rare Tuesday delivery for a rare band, a Life & Times interview with Jack Barnett, frontman and musical ringleader of These New Puritans. The Southend duo, made up of Jack and his twin brother George, released their fifth album Crooked Wing last week, a record I (hello, Niall here) can safely say will probably be my album of the year come December. A brilliant distillation of everything they’ve done up to this point, it’s a masterful meld of rhythmic menace, serene ambience, industrial atmospherics, hypnotic organ patterns, beatific piano ballads and euphoric post-rock. Have a listen, I promise it will improve both your day and life in general:
I spoke to fellow Westcliff-on-sea resident Jack a few weeks ago. There is quite a lot of their hometown on Crooked Wing, which features a soprano vocal from a member of Southend Boys Choir on its first and last song and organs recorded in a church in Stambridge, a village on the outskirts of the city.
“I like that we’ve done the photos and stuff in Essex because it’s good to have a backdrop to what you do, it gives people more of a clue what’s going on,” says Jack. “It’s like Captain Beefheart always has the Mojave Desert, they’re all these kids from the desert, and our equivalent is the marshes.”
It's been six years since their previous record, 2019’s Inside The Rose, which also arrived six years after 2013’s Field Of Reeds. But every album always feels like it’s picking up the thread from before, connected to each other in the same way they feel detached from anything else going on outside the studio walls. “I try not to think too much about the outside world,” says Jack. “Music is a place where there are no problems. You have to keep it pure and not sully it with the complications of the world.”
It's not intended to be such a slow-moving process, he says. “I’d love to do a quick turnaround but events seem to intervene. I’m always really looking for simplicity and that’s the hardest thing to achieve. It feels like a lifetime ago starting this. There’s been several lives and deaths and births all around me.”
It could well be another six years until the next one, then, but that’s fine. There’s enough TNP music to keep fans and newcomers nourished. They’ve released some of my favourite music over the past near-20 years and here’s a playlist of my choice TNP cuts to enjoy whilst you read:
And here it is for the Apple Music crew.
This edition is free but if you’d like to support The New Cue in the form of a monthly £5 subscription which will give you full access to every edition and our archive, then you can do that here. It would be much appreciated:
See you on Friday,
Ted and Niall
The Life & Times Of… Jack Barnett
What was the first record you loved?
To this day I don’t know what it’s called but I loved a George Michael one that my mum had on tape, I remember playing that on a tape machine and dancing round to that. It had the second version of Freedom on it. I also remember loving Velvet Underground & Nico as a kid because I had an older brother and he introduced us to good music. I remember being in the car listening to that on my Walkman.
What was the last record you loved?
It becomes a rarer thing to find stuff you really love as time goes on but I loved Elis & Tom by Elis Regina and Antônio Carlos Jobim. It’s not very well known in Europe but it’s a meeting of these two giants of Brazilian music, Antônio Carlos Jobim being one of the great bossa nova composers and Elis Regina, an incredible singer of Brazilian popular music. It’s quite something, amazing, very direct songs with these incredible chords and orchestral arrangements. All the lyrics are written by Brazilian poets.
What’s your daily domestic routine?
I don’t really have one. You hear about these things, ‘I rise at 4am with an ice bath, meditation for three hours, martial arts training…’. But I don’t do that, I just blunder and bumble my way through the day. I’m waking up very early these days, it’s a disturbing development. I do work quite a lot. I think I have a guilt at being a musician. I see people in my family with proper jobs and feel a bit ridiculous thinking this is hard work. My dad is building a house on his own, single-handedly, somewhere in Norfolk. He’s almost 70. That’s work.
What’s your worst habit?
Do people answer this kind of thing honestly? Has anyone ever said picking their nose or public masturbation?
No-one’s said public masturbation, no. But Mike Scott from The Waterboys chose picking the skin off his fingers and offered up quite a gruesome description of it.
I think I’d need some kind of outside observer to find it out… but maybe I need to stop giving so much to charity.
When were you most creatively satisfied?
Probably when I was about ten years old, coming home from school and writing songs. I’d write three or four songs a week. The best times of writing music are when I feel like I’m back in that mind-frame. I still remember them, they wouldn’t have words but they’d have melodies that I’d sing, I wouldn’t bother with words. One was called Midnight Blue. They’re probably some of the best things I’ve ever written. Waves was a good one. I wrote a song about basketball called Basketball. There was a song called Bubbles and a song about Homer Simpson. These were my preoccupations, aged nine. It’s a funny thing, being able to access this past version of yourself.
What’s your desert island disc?
Probably Captain Beefheart’s Doc At The Radar Station. I remember my dad gave me money for my birthday and I could buy as many CDs as a I wanted and I went into HMV in Southend and bought all of the Captain Beefheart CDs that were there and one of them was Doc At The Radar Station. I think it’s a perfect album, it's so consistently out of this world. It’s one of the late 70s ones so it’s the reconstituted band, the younger generation of musicians, not the old guard. John French came back on drums for it. He must be the greatest drummer I’ve heard.
Has anyone you’ve ever met made you feel starstruck?
John French, actually. I’m not really one for being starstruck or worshipping people. I worship people’s work but not the people themselves. But I think John French is the only person I’ve ever got the autograph of. It was at one of their gigs, at the Garage in Highbury. They had an intermission and he went to the merch stand and was selling merch so I went up to buy some and I bought a CD and I told him I’d been to the Antelope Valley, which is where all the Beefheart members are from, and he just said, ‘Why?’. To him I suppose it was like someone saying, ‘I’ve been to Southend High Street!’. It’s probably quite a lower middle-class place, the Antelope Valley, it’s where a lot of the aeronautical and military industry is based there so there’s all these kids of all the people who’ve made bombers and stuff. We went there when we were doing Inside The Rose. We had one day off when we were mixing the album in LA and me and George went driving on the outskirts of LA and I started recognising the names of these places cos at points in my life, I’ve been obsessed with Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band, so we just drove and did an improvised tour of these trailer parks and compounds and little, unremarkable streets that to me were very, very remarkable.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
It could be my older brother because he played me so much music when I was a kid.
What’s your pet peeve?
People who were socks and slippery-type things, like flip-flops. Very strange.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
Probably how much of my time is occupied by football, watching it. I support Arsenal. By rights, I should be a West Ham fan cos my dad is but my uncle is an obsessive season ticket holder for Arsenal. Often when I meet people and reveal my dark secret, they’re like, ‘Oh, really?’ and seem a bit disappointed. It’s like a religion isn’t it? You carry it with you and there’s not much you can do about it.
What are you scared of?
My fears are quite pragmatic, practical and realistic. The death of people I love. But also those people with flip-flops and socks.
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
I could probably recommend him a decent hairdresser.
What book would you recommend our readers read?
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol. He has this ability to make the ordinary strange and the strange ordinary. He’s great. I’m a real Russophile when it comes to music and books.
What’s your favourite film and why?
I love Naked Gun. A bit of slapstick humour can’t be beaten.
What talent would you most like to have?
I’d like to be able to speak more languages.
Do you have a temper? If so, how does it manifest?
Not really. I don’t have that. I think it’s a really valuable thing to have it, to have people around you who get angry about things, I’m just not one of them.
What’s your temperament like when you’re making records?
I become obsessed with it. I think probably everyone does when they’re making an album. It’s a necessity. This record is probably the kind of album that, if it had been made in the 60s or 70s, there would have been about 30 people doing the jobs that we’re doing amongst two or three people, a lot of the time it would just be me and then Graham (Sutton, co-producer and Bark Psychosis ringleader) and George at various points. It requires you to be obsessed with it in a way, to make up the shortfall in terms of bodies and manpower, you’ve got to do it by voice of will instead.
What’s the best advice you’ve been given?
My dear old nan used to say, ‘Why stand if you can sit? Why sit if you can lie down?’.
What was the home you grew up in like?
Fantastic, really good. We had a good balance because my mum was an art teacher, so we’d go off with her at the weekend, she’d be off teaching art classes at a community centre and me and George would be sat there, drawing, then the next weekend we’d be off with our dad to his mate’s scrapyard and be playing there and driving diggers and that kind of thing. It had a good balance to it, I realise now. Especially in music, you have a lot of people where one of their parents is a psychologist and one’s an academic or something. I think that maybe isn’t the most useful surroundings to influence music or writing or whatever you do.
How do you spark creativity?
Just by doing it and not over-complicating things too much.
Can you cook? If so, what’s your signature dish?
I’m alright but really I just assemble ingredients. I think I just can’t be bothered, especially if I’m just cooking for myself. It’s minimalist cooking. I’ve got my Columbo cookbook here somewhere, it’s the only one I own. Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Probably just surviving. I think it’s incredible human bodies last as long as they do. It feels like a miracle. Sometimes I think that to myself as I’m walking along.