Page 19 - Black Velvet Issue 89

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the album is very faithful to the sort of music
that we generally listen to ourselves. So I’ve
learnt not to worry about pleasing everybody
all the time ‘cause you can’t do it.” JD’s first
band at age 14 was called Hoax. Jonny R
laughs and tells us, “The name of my first
band was Bocadillo, which is Spanish for
sandwich!”

oy Jumps Ship recently won a grant
Bfrom the PRS For Music Foundation,
which we’re not sure they would have done if
they were called Bocadillo. “For those who
don’t know, the PRS collect money for royal-
ties for bands on behalf of bands, so if your
music gets played in a shop or you play your
music live, if you’re registered with them you
are rightfully owed money because your
music’s being played to the public,” Jonny R
explains. “A lot of people know about it, but
some people don’t, so there’s quite a bit of
money that gets uncollected by bands, and
that goes into a fund and if you’re a band or
an artist you can apply for a grant from that
fund and that’s what we’ve done. You can put
it towards anything, like an art project, to-
wards making an album, like we did, to buy
new gear, whatever’s going to help you get to
the next level of your progression as a band.
It took two or three attempts, it’s quite a diffi-
cult process and they don’t just give anyone
lots of money, you know you have to be in the
right place in terms of your band’s develop-
ment and thankfully we were. So that’s how we
ended up getting that and it meant we could
go and record ‘Wake Up’, which was great.”
“Going in, I’d say our hopes were to
record something that reflects what we do
live,” JD says, talking about ‘Wake Up’. “We’ve
always predominantly been a live band, we
love playing live and everyone’s always com-
ing to us saying that as a live unit we work re-
ally well, we’re tight, yada yada. So we’ve
always wanted to reflect that on a record, and
luckily we became friends with the producer
of the album, Larry Hibbitt, about a year prior
to recording it and he was very keen to get
that sound on the album. Plus his way of pro-
ducing is, you know, you want to turn stuff up
and you want to record it loud and raw, and
that’s exactly what we wanted.”
As it was Boy Jumps Ship’s first time
recording a full album, it was a whole new ex-
perience for them as a band. “We were really
here’s a point in every musician’s life known, tells us that he’s woken up to a few
pleased with the fact that over the space of the
Twhere music stops becoming a hobby, things since being in a band. “We’ve played in
and starts becoming something you want to bands since we were 14/15 years old. We were twelve songs on the album we could almost
pursue as a career. “Listening to this type of just cracking on playing music, but I’ve learnt spread our wings a little bit, in terms of
music and discovering rock music as a that you can’t please everybody when you’re arrangements and timbres and things that
youngster was what got me to start playing an playing live and you’ve got to accept that what we’ve never done before, because before we’d
only be able to put four or five big hitters on
instrument,” Jonny Rob tells us. “Music you’re doing has got to be as faithful to what
turned from something that was a bit of a you want it to be as much as possible,” he ex- an EP to try and grab people’s attention, so
hobby to something that I loved and I wanted plains. “There’s no point in seeing a trend having the twelve songs at our disposal meant
to do as a job, that’s when I really realised that that’s happening in music and trying to follow that we could sort of explore new avenues on
it was what I wanted to do.” it if that’s not what you want to be doing. the album, so there’s slightly more melodic
parts, slow parts, quiet parts, there are heavier
Boy Jumps Ship’s debut album was re- There’s no point in trying to disguise yourself
leased this year, and is called ‘Wake Up’. as something that you're not in music and I parts than there used to be, it’s just like an ac-
Jonathan Douglas, or JD as he’s sometimes think the music that we play and the music on cumulation of everything that we’ve wanted to
do over the period of being in our band, on
BOY JUMPS SHIP