Name Mike Edwards
Best known for Singer from Jesus Jones, EMF’s best known side project.
Current city I don’t live in a city, and without referring to Google Maps to see where my nearest cathedral is, I expect my closest qualifying metropolis would be Birmingham.
Really want to be in Most of the time, I would rather be somewhere in Spain, in fact, many places in Spain, because I like blue skies and being warm, particularly if I have my bike with me to ride some of the best cycling in the world, smashing out 88 rpm on the pedals because that matches tempo of the Drum ’n’ Bass soundtrack that enters my head when the road goes upwards.
Excited about I’ve just finished work on a new Jesus Jones album, and the most exciting bit of that is waiting to hear what someone who can actually mix a song will make our work sound like. Before the year ends, we still have a couple of shows to play and, similar to the idea that youth is wasted on the young, we are a far better live band now than we were when we were famous. Practice makes just a few large steps short of perfect, I guess. It’ll be fun, anyway.
My current music collection has a lot of I listen to an awful lot of what I believe its proponents call Bass Music. Vocals occur rarely, the beats come in various flavours, but the unifying theme is an amount of computer-generated bass that can warp car windows from the inside. Very few of these artists create albums, which is a pity given what’s coming up below, but I guess I could create my own compilation based on the works of Essex, Muadeep, Drone, Floret Loret, Pedestrian Tactics, Sixis, Saka and many others.
And a little bit of It’s taken well over a decade but I’ve gradually been getting back into the more alternative side of rock music. So many great bands writing great songs – when people say music was so much better in the old days, I think they’re flat-out wrong.
Preferred format I’ve never understood the retro thing with vinyl. When there was no choice, it was a wretched medium which half the time didn’t work properly and sooner or later sounded terrible anyway. The arrival of CDs was a huge relief but, like the majority of the world, the sheer convenience of streaming has gotten the better of me, speaking as someone who used to have to save up for two weeks, travel for three hours and keep fingers crossed that the one song I wanted to buy from a record store was still in stock. I feel guilty about indulging in the convenience because streaming services in general are the most exploitative medium the music industry has ever known.
5 Albums I Can’t Live Without:
1
Beach Day, Another Sky
The first album I’m going to choose is the first album in decades that, for me, worked as a unified whole and made me think that making an album isn’t largely a waste of time. Beach Day by Another Sky is just superb, one fabulous song after another in so many different styles, as equally fragile in places as it is bruising in others. And all over it is the astonishing voice of Catrin Vincent. I was really saddened when I heard recently that Another Sky have thrown in the towel because this album, in a previous age, should’ve been the album that made them stadium-massive. I’ve tried to get everyone I know to hear this incredible album and as you can see, I’m still trying.
2
Powerage, AC/DC
Many of us purists consider this to be the true fans favorite, not as toweringly epic as its predecessor, Let There Be Rock, but as close to AC/DC pushing their own boundaries as they have ever got. Yes, it’s the same three chords, those same staccato monoliths of guitar courtesy of Malcolm Young, but it’s the bass player Cliff Williams, on his first album with them, that has a profound impact on it (one which they sadly didn’t revive as they gradually descended off this creative high plateau). His playing borders on funky at times—yes, I am still talking about AC/DC—and it lifts many of the tracks out of the band’s usual, starting-to-tarnish approach. It also features some of Angus Young’s best blues playing and as a guitarist I’m adamant that at heart, he is a blues player (even if he did lose that plot for a while in the 1980s). Lastly, I enjoy the irony here of AC/DC being pushed out of their comfort zone at the behest of the record company, and trying in their own way to finally have a hit single (with the Stones-y “Rock ‘n’ Roll Damnation”). Two years later having hit singles ceased to be a problem for them over the next four decades.
3
Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, Peter Gabriel
This is an album I’ve often inadvertently used to ridicule my own lack of abilities, as it’s a stunning work by an incredibly accomplished artist. A proper artist, not a journeyman like me. The fact that it is a film soundtrack takes away nothing from the emotional ebbs and flows, the extraordinary power and subtlety Peter Gabriel uses, helped by a typically eclectic mix of musicians. This is an absolute gem, albeit one I find hard to listen to because I could never hope to achieve something as effortlessly evocative as this.
4
Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth
For me, this is their absolute zenith. All bands have a point at which everything comes sharply into focus; they leap several levels without trying, where they hit the button and accelerate into hyperspace. The first two tracks of the trilogy, “The Wonder” and “Hyperstation,” you can use as a soundtrack to describe the journey of a life, or the narrative of an acid trap, or… You get the idea. It’s epic stuff: brutal, doomy, but also hauntingly melodic and moving. A major influence on the sound of Jesus Jones and an album that’s lodged in my soul forever.
5
Molten Beats, RAM Trilogy
Molten Beats is an immaculate snapshot of a period in time, a time in the mid-to-late ’90s when the feebleness of Britpop was being highlighted by the heavyweight rock ‘n roll of drum ’n’ bass. I’d already come through a period of hearing music the like of which I’ve never heard before, week after week in Techno clubs, but going to Metalheadz at the Blue Note in Hoxton every week, you could experience music that you felt—violently—with bass so massive and tweaked that it would shake your internal organs. For a musician, having a form of music that escaped one dimension and smashed another was mind-boggling, thrilling. This is not to denigrate it, but for me, there is a straight line between being an AC/DC fan and loving drum ’n’ bass from this era: the same beat on almost every track, the same approach that bordered on formulaic—all of which was rendered utterly irrelevant by this tsunami of sound made physical. Molten Beats has track after track after track that nailed this, that featured in those Blue Note nights. And I still hanker after snare drums that sound like dustbin lids.
