jinja safari
Lion Kings
After meeting at a beach party on the central coast, MARCUS AZON and Pepa Knight formed the nucleus of what would become Jinja Safari. Over the past two years, the five-piece has enjoyed much love from Triple J, and graced Big Day Out, Splendour in the Grass and Falls Festival stages. JAMIE NELSON spoke to Azon about on-stage accidents, playing the music game, and being a wayward grandson. The terms jungle pop and forest rock get thrown around when your music is described. How would you describe it? It’s such a cliché for a band not to want to be categorised… but I guess people need that. It’s just a part of human nature isn’t it? I really wouldn’t know because there are so many musical genres and styles and tastes that we all love. Afro beat is definitely a part of what we do but it’s just one element. The fact that we’ve got two drummers is always going to push us into a more rhythmic jungle beat kind of groove because we’ve got the djembé and conga which gives us the old Lion King sound straight away. When you and Pepa Knight (vocals, multi-instrumentalist) first started jamming, where did you think the project would go? We were just recording songs to have fun. It was a nice way to meet a new person because I had just met Pepa and he’s a guy that I see eye to eye with, musically. Then by adding the two drummers into the mix it became a lot more of a group dynamic and it became something other than just the folk duo [a la]
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Simon and Garfunkel. The way we all perform live, particularly our percussionist - it just became something a bit more manic. You’ve recently been to Uganda. What did you discover there? I’ve made a lot of discoveries. It was a bit of a last minute decision – I got a good tax return and I found a cheap ticket to Uganda and just went straight to Jinja. It was to meet my grandma and get to know her. I’d met her before but now it was in her environment. One thing I discovered was that we don’t get along at all. She asked, “are you having sexual relations with your girlfriend?” and I said, “well, I guess you could say that I am”. From then on, I think she saw me as the wayward grandson… but that’s probably an overstatement. You have an incredibly energetic live set. How do you avoid running into each other with your wild dancing on stage? Oh, no no, we don’t avoid it - it happens often. I used to get told off for jumping and climbing the scaffolding but now it’s sort of become part of what we do. The rest
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of the boys are finally in on it. Some in the band are less sure-footed than others. You’ve got someone with long limbs and [a higher] centre of gravity like Pepa, and he has axed himself in some horrible ways. In Brighton, he fell face first off one of the barricades between the [stage and the] audience and then he just lay there. You never want to see someone go down that hard, in front of that many people, but it happens. It’s part of the fun. What is something you find absurd about the contemporary music industry? I don’t think it’s absurd, but it’s interesting that as a young band in Australia, the [only] way to get a leg up on your career is through Triple J. I think that community radio stations have a responsibility to support young bands, and even commercial radio stations should play more Australian music. FBI radio in Sydney do a fantastic job at that and I think more stations at that level could take a page out of FBI’s book. How have you found the response of ‘Toothless Grin’ so far? We’ve been releasing a few singles
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since we started and they’ve been well received. We follow the guidance of our managers almost blindly. So when they hear something they like in a song and think “well that will fit the mould of what a radio station needs to have high rotation”, or whatever, we just follow their lead. We are also working with this producer Chris Zane, a really cool guy. He restructured that song slightly — some very small moves to make it more of a pop structure. It sounds dirty but we are playing the game with some really great coaches, I guess you might say. You’re playing with Opossum and White Arrows on your next tour. What are you expecting? It’s a blind date. We are all fans of Kody Nielsen (Opossom) and his brother Ruban’s band Unknown Mortal Orchestra. It’s going to be a lovely thing. We’ve been throwing around the idea of all getting on-stage together at the end of the night, if we get along. Jinja Safari performs at Bar On The Hill, Newcastle Uni, on Thursday August 16.
reverb magazine issue #072 — Aug 2012 21