In Conversation With: Jamie McDermott

Read our extended interview transcript with Jamie McDermott from The Irrepressibles here on the QX blog… 

By Patrick Cash

Tell us a little about yourself and The Irrepressibles

I’m a writer, singer, composer and The Irrepressibles is meant to be a musical project without barriers in terms of genre, high art, low art, those sort of idea, kind of we’re abrasive to the pretty, we have no conceptions and I just love pop music and feel that pop music should be political, as it always should be culturally political and to speak out and be the force of change and that’s what I set out with and it’s been formed now eleven, twelve years now. 2002 was when it started, so twelve years ago.

Where did it first come about then?

Well, I’ve been a singer-songwriter, it’s quite funny being here because I used to perform at the Twelve Bar Club around the corner, just with an acoustic guitar for years, just this kind of gay minstrel really wandering around London. I was walking past and just thinking oh ‘First Out’s gone’ and I used to play at First Out for Pride.

So where do you come from originally?

Scarborough.

What got you into music?

Supposedly I was always fascinated by music as a child and I used to play pots and pans in the kitchen early on, I was obsessed with sound, making sound. And then they got me a keyboard and I was so obsessed with it, they went to the music shop and said ‘what should he do next?’ and they said ‘oh, he should have piano lessons’, I was about ten then. But my Mum, bless her, didn’t have much money, I grew up in a council estate so she couldn’t afford the piano lessons but I so wanted to do it I got a paper round to get the money so I could have piano lessons.

And so from the piano lessons you got into the composing?

Yeah, I was kind of going quite fast through piano lessons and learning some classical music, it was my first introduction to classical music. But then I discovered two things, one I got really heavily into Michael Ford and Tangerine Dream and instrumental music with piano and Jean-Michel Jarre even as well actually, I was really into Jean-Michel Jarre as a kid and Gary Numan, kind of electronic music as well. In the beginnings of certain parts of electronic music, like that prog-rock, but then I kind of fell in love with this boy in school and he needed a singer and he was a guitarist, I started learning guitar and so I joined his band as a singer but I didn’t sing and then I sounded like a drowned cat, like  a dying cat for many years…

So how did you develop your current wonderful voice?

Well, I was rock singer for years and I was in rock bands during my teens, like grunge and rock and punk bands, and then I went to study the black way, like African-American styles of singing, and when I was there my singing teacher was like all the girls are still singing, but you’re still singing, ‘how high can you go?’ and she singled me out, said ‘this is amazing, you can sing soprano, this is really high.’ And she started to teach me about head voice which is this voice that African-American singers use like Jeff Buckley and David McCorman who’s an amazing singer and I started to work with that voice more and more and that brings us to me singing with acoustic guitar like a gay minstrel, that was the beginning of it.

And what brought you down to London?

Well, two reasons: I came down to Guildford to study singing and it was kind of as many gay men at that time, I was coming out to my family at eighteen, you know, it was like either music or death. Let’s just see how things go, I was very depressed. And I kind of went out in London, still not fully out, went to clubs like Heaven and just you know found a place I could be, of my generation up North at that time, it was the time of Section 28 and it wasn’t acceptable to be gay, and I thought London was somewhere I could be myself.

And how did the Irrepressibles come about?

Eventually I went to university, and gigging and being a rock singer and doing session work, and I once did a gig and I met this guy who became a very good friend of mine and he introduced me to this course where I could study music like sociology and the history of music and pop music culture and academia and musicology, sociology and pop music production and the business side of things. And I went and auditioned and I didn’t get in and the following year I did get in and I went to Westminster University and I learnt about KLF and I went to the library and found out, started to watch films like Querrel by Fassbender, and started to read about Vienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren and what they did with the Sex Pistols and all of this stuff was going on in my head and I wanted to do something that wasn’t high-brow because I wanted to communicate to the people I grew up with. I didn’t want to change myself or change my accent or try and become something to be accepted by you know the middle classes, but I wanted to do something that wasn’t just a band with bass and guitar so I started The Irrepressibles and I started to work with orchestral instruments and I couldn’t write for them like scores, but I would sing the parts and create the music and then that initial band gained a certain amount of success and we’re all very good friends but then two of them got married and then it stopped for a bit and then it reformed but as an orchestra and there were all these instruments; people coming in saying ‘I play the oboe’, and I’m like ‘I don’t know what an oboe is but let me hear what it sounds like and I’ll write something for it’ so I started to write for orchestral instruments and that’s how the first album ‘Mirror, Mirror’, came about.

How did you find people?

Arts jobs. And at that time it was if you want to do it then ‘great’, and if people were excited about it then great, and we did performances like in Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club and after that, I think that was our first performance we did with the orchestra and because of the success of the first band we had queues all the way down the road and I started to get more and more into building spectacle work and spectacles.

Is spectacle all part of building up the right atmosphere? I came to see a gig where you and some vocalists were standing in the gymnasium beforehand doing vocal exercises, using the acoustics of the room, is that part of it too?

Absolutely, with that it was, you’re right. That was part of ‘Conversations with Sound’ which is a different project again that started in 2005 as a performance installation piece which is about mundane situations and theatricalising them and I’ve just done something as part of the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus as part of the Arts festival there but for me it’s like really simply when somebody buys a ticket they’ve worked their week earning that money and so it’s like I want to give them an experience, and for me I don’t want it to be something that they really have to think about intellectually to get, I mean I love working like that but for me it isn’t about that. I want it to be emotionally real but I don’t see why that has to be boring, for me it can be really interesting, intellectually fascinating, it can challenge people as well. So with The Irrepressibles the spectacle has always been about the context, what is the context? And when I designed the human music box for the V&A museum it was at this Raphael Cartoons gallery, it’s a square, so I’ll make a cube in the middle of this gallery, I’ll make a human music box, that seems to be the right installation for this context, do you see what I mean? Whereas with this tour we’re just focused on sounds because we’re performing in small churches with real pianos, violins and cellos, octave-pedals and lieu-pedal, and we’re expanding something that’s really minimal, just voice and pedal and that ‘Always on My Mind’ cover that I did an arrangement of, just that and expanding into a sense of time and place and the memories of that person and the times that you had with them, that whole relationship being instrumental and sonic can give you a sense of that memory, so that’s what we’re working with, that and the sense. We’re using fragrances and sound effects to create a sense of emotive connection. It’s very powerful to me, smell, it is to everybody, isn’t it? This project for me, it’s about quantifying and emotionally connecting a wider audience to gay love, for me it’s like trying to kind of be as honest and to try and help a greater understanding of what’s beautiful about that love.

Would you agree that you’re arguing for greater integration of gay and straight communities through art?

Absolutely. And one of the things that’s very interesting in this discussion generally about social and political gay issues and gay equality is that often people say ‘oh, you’re gay, that’s part of you, that’s fine, but there’s more to you than just being gay’ As if everybody having the same genes, that’s the answer. And it’s not. There is as much an aesthetic of feeling a uniqueness of gay expression as there is a black expression, a history of fight and a difference, we are all different and we’re different within the gay community as well, and that complexity and that difference within the gay community needs to be expressed. We’re not all just like Will & Grace characters, though we love it, but we’re not all like that, and there’s a real complexity within the gay community and that can only lead to greater – less clear and less understanding and less stereotypes of what is, and I feel it’s very important that artists are strong and forward with their sexuality because young people in particular need to feel like it’s actually pretty cool to be gay and not ‘oh you’re so gay’ as a cuss at school which still happens now even though the youth of today are so much more open about being gay. If I was at school that would be amazing, that would be great. But it’s still a cuss and I would love there to be a time when people were like ‘oh I’d love to be like that, that’s the coolest thing ever, I wish I was gay’, that would be really cool. Because it is cool, being gay.

So ‘Always on my Mind’, there’s a part of it where you use ‘boy’, and that’s deliberate, because it was originally written for Elvis wasn’t it?

No, it wasn’t actually and that’s the really interesting thing. It would have been originally sung with ‘boy’ or ‘man’, and originally it was written for a female singer, the first singer to ever sing it and Elvis was the second. This is the really interesting thing about this story and it has been sung by many female singers through time as well. So it hasn’t always been ‘girl’.

Do the Pet Shop Boys use ‘boy’?

I wonder, yeah. I haven’t really actually looked at that – it is an interesting thing the difference in being a gay artist, but being heterosexual in private life. And people are like ‘why is it such an issue, why do you have make such an issue of being gay?’ and it’s like ‘I’m not making an issue of being gay, I’m just being honest in the music. What’s the difference between artists who are known to be gay who are actually singing in heterosexual music because they’re saying ‘she’ when they’ve meant ‘he’ and they’ve had to in the past in many instances their gradual push and change has been the fact why I can make my records today, not that it hasn’t been incredibly difficult in getting the last record coming out, I mean it was nearly impossible.

Do LGBT concerns influence your lyric-writing?

Well, they do my default because I’m gay. All the songs are about relationships with men and with ‘Mirror, Mirror’, the first album, it was that, and it was funny because as I said when we did the thing ‘To Russia With Love’, ‘In This Shirt’ was sadly about my ex-partner but when we split up the first time and it says ‘I need Jake to tell you that I love you and it never rests’ and it was used for this commercial in Russia and it became a really big track there in terms of, you know, kids playing football to it, people getting married to it, and it was always honestly gay, the rest of the album is as well but with Nude we made a very definite, I don’t even know if it’s a choice but I wanted to make a very strong gay record, and make videos for the tracks that told a gay story as well. And I’ve been so lucky with making ‘In This Shirt’.

That’s how I found it, through the music put with ‘The Lady is Dead’. It’s incredible, it fits the music perfectly.

Roy Raz is amazing. He heard the track and he has this ability to see an image and create images to what he’s listening and so he’d written this thing and Roy runs a club called Pag in Tel Aviv and as a way of making music videos which he’s very inspired to create he could fund it from this event and use it as a promotional effect, so that’s why it’s called ‘The Lady is Dead’ because it’s the name of that club night but because it built so much momentum online we didn’t want it to post a new video so actually initially universal took it down at one point, so it’s actually been out there – it would have been closer 3 million than 2 million but it just went viral, it had gone viral before they took it down actually, but it eventually went back up again and it was amazing for us for two reasons, number one I wasn’t allowed to make a video – I don’t really know what to say about this, I don’t want to say anything – but basically I wanted a gay video for ‘In This Shirt’, I wanted it to be honest and then all of a sudden Roy Raz made it! It was just there and I remember the word I was sat at the kitchen table and I watched it again and I watched it again and my boyfriend of the time was like ‘that’s amazing’, I just couldn’t believe it, I was rushing. And then Roy came up to me and told me this story that the lady who’s in there, the old lady, she dresses like that every day in Tel Aviv, it’s really real –

I felt it had characters to it! I remember watching it over and over again. That song in particular seems to have had a huge effect, what went into the process of writing ‘In This Shirt’?

Oh, it’s kind of boring really. I just was living on the floor in a council estate at a saxophonist’s house and every night I was, as the lyrics are, they’re exactly as truth. I mean ‘there’s a crane knocking down all those things that we were’, we used to live in this flat and it was knocked down, it’s just the really honest truth and we thought one of the only times we’ve ever done this, I was writing this very quickly, normally I write with the orchestra in the room as this little finale, this programme to score everything, ‘ooh that’s the wrong note’, and then there was incredible production actually done on it, because we recorded it with three mics in a church and then William Teller-Duffer produced it and he did a really cracking job at producing it. It’s really wonderful actually because I mean from that, that was the first time he produced it and he heard it, as a heterosexual man he just sobbed and he’s very, he’s not a very emotional person. I’ll never forget that. And he loved the song so much, he worked so hard to make it what it is in terms of the sound, because how you produce a track is everything. Yeah, it was a letting go of a relationship, basically.

So with the new EP, ‘Nude: Landscapes’, what kind of direction are you taking? If someone had never heard The Irrepressibles before, how would you describe it?

With Nude, the main record, the kind of sum of the whole thing, it was about telling this gay story through songs I’ve written since I was eighteen and even younger, I mean there’s a track coming out called ‘Forbidden Love’ which I wrote when I was fifteen. It was about telling this gay story honestly and then made a series of videos ‘New World’ about gay bullying and finding emancipation, and ‘Arrow’ about the struggle of sexuality and finding acceptance and ‘Two Men in Love’ about long-term love with somebody and the album itself was in some places dark, slightly nu-wave baroque and in some places very orchestral in other places kitsch electronica and with these three EPs that we’re releasing over the next six months the first one is ‘Nude: Landscapes’ and we are basically splitting it into three worlds, so the first record we’re going to release is a minimal symphonic record which is just all acoustic instruments, piano – well, not actually all acoustic instruments, there’s a bit of electric guitar in one song but it’s kind of all focussed on the symphonic and there’s reworks of tracks from the main Sun album ‘Nude’ and doing ‘Arrow’ –

Abba?

Arrow. The version you actually heard live and ‘Two Men in Love’ which is a big electronica track but I play a version that’s just piano and voice. But then there’s other new tracks, ‘The Boy in the Lake’, which is a song that I wrote a long time ago at 19 after reading an Eric Swanson book called ‘The Boy in the Lake’ which is about this boy falling in love with this boy who – quite a wonderful book actually, and then I wrote that about the person who I was in love with at the time so it was a kind of mixture of those two worlds, a bit Kate Bush that innit, doing a song based on a book? And then there was ‘Our World It Fell So Quietly’ which was a song I wrote a long time ago, which has got a very kind of slightly sixties symphonic sound to it. So yeah, that’s the new record and there are a couple of orchestral versions on a track called ‘Needing Release’, it’s all within the minimal symphonic world and of course the cover of ‘Always on My Mind’ is on there as well and so then we’re touring just with violin, cello, and octave-pedal which makes it into a double-bass line and loop-pedal, so we loop up orchestrations for which I’ve written arrangements live and then take it from the minimal to quite large orchestrations like with real pianos wherever we perform, in intimate church spaces and one where we let gaylords like me and guitar, so it’s all slightly dark country, neochestral sounds to the whole thing.

Have you had any trouble with the churches?

One of them wouldn’t allow us.

Have you encountered difficulty from the music industry, being so outspoken about LGBT issues?

Yeah, I have. And then all of a sudden after Nude was released everybody started to really big up on gay issues from Goldfrapp to many different bands out there, it moved into the zeitgeist and it became something that a lot of bands started to – but it was at the time we did make Nude, it was a different time, it was very difficult.

Did you have anybody tell you specifically they wouldn’t support you because of it?

I wouldn’t go into that because I don’t want to get into trouble over it, but it was difficult, that’s all I’d say.

I even saw just now online that Google & Youtube restricted the age on your online videos, then claimed that you’d done it…

It’s dark because when I made the videos for ‘New World’ and ‘Two Men in Love’ and ‘Arrow’, you know, there’s kids that need to see the beauty of being gay and being gay themselves. So for it to be restricted so that you have to be over eighteen to watch it when it has nothing sexually explicit in it is dark. Because what they’re doing is actively making a choice to stop and inflict suffering on these young kids by them not seeing their culture.

That ties in with the Russia debate, doesn’t it?

I think it’s dark, because you know from experience as a child internal – how different it is and also there’s loads of things you can go into about it, you don’t know who you are and whether it’s right to feel this way, where you sit, what kind of a person you’re gonna be because of it, ‘am I gonna become that sort of person?’ and maybe you don’t feel like you’re that sort of person. So maybe you don’t feel that that’s who you want to be, so then you decide that you think you must be straight, actually. You know all this kind of stuff is wrong.

Do you see yourself and The Irrepressibles kind of paving the way for displacing the ‘stereotype’ of the gay man in modern society?

I think lots of people are doing that. They’re coming out, aren’t they? I’m astounded, we’ve had young gay men and women both making videos with us, and the way that people are changing, people are coming out now that weren’t coming out before maybe. I don’t know, they’re just so much more at one with themselves than our generation is really. Really they’re not defined in the same way.

Sorry, if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?

I’m 33.

Okay, so there was still a big onus on the repression of homosexuality in your teens?

Yeah, I mean anyone’s who’s past the abolition of Section 28, who were thirteen or younger at that time, that’s where the big changes go back to, you see being with Thea in ‘Arrow’ and ‘New World’: I mean he was bullied at school but he’s just so liberated and an absolutely gorgeous, liberated young gay man and there’s no – if he was here now he’d be filling the place with joy. Thea is the guy with blonde curly hair that’s in ‘Arrow’ etc.

Okay, is he actually part of the band as well?

No, but he’s involved massively in actually becoming part of this campaign and he was the cameraman on the last music video actually. He’s becoming very impassioned by the message we want to do with these videos and he’s a big fan of the music.

And what was the reaction when you showed ‘Arrow’ to the Russian music festival? Were you worried for yourselves?

As I said we’d been invited really because of that Peugeot commercial, we ended up with a certain level of success in Russia, because you don’t really sell records in Russia unless you’re really big. So the labels don’t put a lot into Russia. But because of that commercial we were invited out to perform to 5,000 people and obviously ‘Nude’ the album and the live shows is very focused on gay politics, and we showed actually two videos, we showed ‘New World’ live and ‘Arrow’, and I have got what you would call allies I think you would say in my band that are very passionate about gay politics and the need for why this is important right now, and two drummers in the band who are not gay, they’re straight, and are hugely passionate about these politics, so they were like ‘yeah, we’ve got to do this.’ And because of the success that we’d had we were then invited onto mainstream television before the festival and at the time we did an American PR campaign and the American PR campaign picked up on the fact we were going to Russia and publicised it and what ‘Two Men in Love’’s video was, it’s out there. Immediately we were withdrawn. So we were being watched I think which would be another reason why. And I was like ‘what’s gonna happen to us?’ And I heard stories about other artists, Madonna, Marc Almond, Elton, loads of artists going out there and they’d been safe. They’d performed and they’d been safe. And nothing was actually put against Madonna when she said stuff about gay rights, she’s a massive artist, she can afford it, she was gonna be charged a load of money but she wasn’t, it was dropped. So we got the visas through and we were travelling out there and I was crying on the plane, not for myself, but for worry for my band. If anything happened to them I don’t know what I’d do, I wouldn’t forgive myself. So we got on the aeroplane, got there, got to the hotel, a very nice hotel actually, we got there the day of the concert in Moscow in Gorky Park – which is the location of many of the protests – but it was an open-air festival, a free festival, anyone could walk in, the National Front could walk in or whatever it is they have there, the Russian Nazi party. And so many people were there in the crowd and we were up on the stage while the technical crew for many reasons we don’t know were just failing in doing anything and eventually we weren’t on the stage at whatever time and the sound wouldn’t turn on. So I had to go in my broadest Northern accent, ‘hang on a minute’, take my ear piece out, ‘turn the sound on!’ But we’ve got all these wonderful fans in the audience, who are really like, they’re been there all day waiting and listening to us sound check and they really want to hear us, and we were full of this good energy, and we did the concert with no sound check, just sitting back stage for eight hours, and then at the end we decided we’d show ‘Arrow’ at the end, we showed ‘Two Men in Love’ and we asked the audience to kiss, and they’re two men in love and I was there on piano whilst I was saying this thinking ‘I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me but I’m gonna say it anyway’ and there was a leading gay rights artist out there who organises different protests, so we met with her the night before and we decided that we were gonna be interested in doing that, so that’s what we did. And then we went to show Arrow, and it didn’t come on, still didn’t come on, so our drummer who’s straight took his drum stick and threw it at the desk and he turned it on.

Fantastic. And what was the reaction?

You can see, there’s some video footage and there’s some people who are looking shocked in disbelief and people who are like ‘nah!’ but generally on the whole, I mean I went to see the crowd after the concert and there was lots of positivity from both gay people and heterosexual people. But there’s a lot of people in Moscow who have no problem at all, there’s lots of gay bars and things like that, it’s not like the young people there are all opposed, but I have had lots of conversations online and on Facebook, I do get involved in conversations with really big fans of The Irrepressibles in Russia, explaining to me why it protects children and this and that, so there is a general consensus of homophobia.

That’s a very brave and admirable act.

It’s so sad though because to have met those people and met the resistance there, to think of their experience now and to know somebody, you know you’ve just had one meeting, because I don’t think we’ll get into the country again because of what we did, it’s difficult to know. I mean actually one of the fans has got in touch with me from the LGBT people, to explain what it’s like and I’d like to get the fangs together to explain what it’s like and do more of these events.

Finally, how do you ideally envisage The Irrepressibles progressing?

At the moment, it’s so crazy because I’ve been doing some focus with electronic artists that is going to be released, I can’t say who, I wrote some music for a big fantasy film, I’ve been singing Britten’s cabaret songs about Auden was in love with Britten, Britten was in love with Peter Piers, at the Southbank and a plan to potentially record some of those tracks, and also I’m off to New York in a couple of weeks because I wrote some music for an opera and we’re recording this opera out in New York, we’ve been touring for the last two years, so there’s that project for release as well, and then there’s these three EPs that we’re releasing, I mean there’s this EP and then we’re going to tour with the second EP as well and we want to tour the last EP which is electronic and that’s taking us all the way up to next year so there’s quite a lot that’s going on. I love to sing and perform, there’s just so much to do; when we did Nude the record, because of that restriction on Youtube, because we’re an indie band, we’re not on a big label, because of the difficulty with the music industry, because of the problems we were facing internationally with people’s prejudice towards the work, we don’t feel that we’ve got the message across strongly enough yet so these three EPs are part of that process of sending across that message more strongly, we can’t leave that second record yet, the second record’s got more to be said, you’re never going to be able to stop that, the video we’ve just made for ‘Forbidden’, that tells the story of – you’ll see, and we’re making another music video as well and there’s so much more to do to put that message across really.

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