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By Britte Kramer Photography: Dan Wilton
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Jungle When enigmatic pop-art outfit Jungle appeared on the scene in 2013 with funk-dance hybrid The Heat, we knew nothing about them but their logo and their über-stylized press shots—invariably of other people. Their sound may be large, but in fact Jungle consists of just two guys from Shepherd’s Bush, London, who are known only by their initials, T and J. But it turns out there’s no great mystery intended, as Tom McFarland and Joshua Lloyd-Watson tell us. It’s just their childhood nicknames for each other. Their eponymous debut album sees T and J on a hectic touring schedule, playing all the big festivals to both critical and popular acclaim. They took some time, though, to tell Glamcult about writing songs with monkeys on motorbikes in mind and nightmares about crowd-surfing keyboards.
Tom McFarland and Joshua LloydWatson have known each other since they were ten years old. T was playing in the garden with his brother and a few neighbours when J jumped over the back wall. He said, “Hi,” they played football together, and soon their musical connection started to develop. By recording sounds of—for example— cigarette lighters, the experimental tone was set. Nowadays, you’ll see them rocking coke bottles on stage, and in the studio they use basically anything they can get their hands on. Pencils drumming on a desk, snapping fingers, beatbox snares and hi-hats sounds: it all ended up on their debut album. T: “Once we were working on a track and the door creaked, and J was just like: ‘Wait! Come back! We’ve got to record that!’ And that’s the fun of it. It makes it unpredictable and exciting. It also makes you realize you don’t have to do things a certain way, that you’re not limited by what others have done before you—you can just make music. It’s easy to be influenced, but I think that becomes an issue with creativity. Being free in the way you express yourself is the most important thing. You shouldn’t be handcuffing yourself, you know what I mean? Whenever we’re not having fun, we stop, we take a time out and walk away from the situation.”
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It doesn’t seem that the time outs are especially necessary, though. J: “A lot of what’s on the record is stuff that came up first time. When you try too hard, you’re not being true and honest. It all becomes a bit forced, and whenever it’s forced, it sounds wrong. What we do, though, is we love to make environments. We tend to put ourselves in those places before we write the songs. So, for example, I’ll have a drum beat and T will be playing some organs, and I’ll be like, ‘Meh, the chords are so good, but where are you, man? Where are you? I don’t want you to be in Shepherd’s Bush, I want you to be standing on the beach at this festival and there are hundreds of thousands of people. And sharks. And people surfing. And little monkeys on motorbikes.’ You’ve got to play it like you’re there, you know? That’s how you get that feeling. We don’t like to listen to other songs while we’re writing, because we’d end up becoming thieves. The best place to steal from is your own visual imagination.” When on stage, Jungle is a band, but in the studio it’s just the two producers, building on those experimental sounds they discovered at ten years old. T: “Our music is quite heavily electronic, but underneath we have a completely natural starting point. A lot of what we do in the studio is sampling ourselves. We record
parts, cut them up and loop them. That’s really fun, actually. It means that there are endless possibilities to what we can do, and it makes the creative process much less predictable. But then when you go live you have to form a band around you. That was a big challenge, but it’s been really fun. They’re great musicians and they’re all our friends— we even grew up with a couple of them. My relationship with J is very tight, so it made sense to surround ourselves with even more friends and spread the love, I guess.” With a show almost daily, and only a single album out, it could quite easily get boring. But not for Jungle. They do a lot of on-stage improvisation, completely in line with the spontaneity in the studio. T: “We’ve got to make the most of the great musicians we have around us. When the drummer or the percussionist tries something new on stage, it almost makes us the audience, because we don’t know what they’re gonna do next. But we trust them to put all their heart into it. On stage it’s about having fun, looking around you, smiling. When we were growing up we went to a lot of concerts and you know when you’re at a concert and there’s so much energy that you take from the stage? As a 14-year-old kid you digest it, you use it. Now we have the opportunity to
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give that back to people. It’s like giving people a gift, almost.” J: “It’s great. It’s just that energy that we feed off and then recycle back into the room. The audience becomes one, and the people become like other members of the project.” But despite the number of shows they’re doing, things can—and do—still go wrong: J and T both have nightmares about performing every now and then. T: “I think that’s part of the job, really; expecting things to go wrong. It keeps you on your toes. I had a dream once where I walked on stage, and the whole band was playing, and I got to the front of the stage and my keyboard wasn’t there. I had to shout through my microphone, ‘Where’s my keyboard? Where’s my keyboard?’” J: “You sang it!” T: “Yeah, I sang! [Singing] ‘Where’s my keyboard?’ And then I just saw it being passed through the crowd.” J: “I know that feeling, man, I fucking know that feeling! You dream that you go on, and everybody else in the band is fine, but all your shit is broken and fucked up.” T: “I guess this shows how much faith we have in our friends, when in those dreams we’re always messing up and they’re the ones doing it right…” www.junglejunglejungle.com
Gc Interview