JPSE hit

Rip It Up, Issue 187, 1 February 1993, Page 14

JPSE hit

of the beach feel and put it on the album because life's more like a balance of the two and not weighted towards the depressing and the angry. Sometimes when I look at all the songs we've written, it seems as if we're all grossly depressed and depressing people." Depression, I suppose, is a relative term. JPS Experience have always struck me as being uplifting in a melancholy sort of way, but then I've been known to play Lou Reed's Berlin at parties. There is, however, a certain lilting grandeur to Bleeding Star— an underlying mood which ties the album together as opposed to 1989's The Size of Food which stood as more of a bundled collection of songs.

Dave Y: "That's what I like about Bleeding Star. It's got a definite mood. That was a conscious decision right at the start. We sat down and picked songs which we thought would work well together. We listed the songs and put ticks and crosses by songs according to a sort of formula — so many upbeat and so many floating and moody, and we constructed it according to that."

DaveM: "Very calculating.: It's evident that a great deal of time and careful thought has gone into creating Bleeding Star. This is borne out by Dave Y's comments.

"We really thought about what we were going to do and what we wanted to come out of the other end with, which we've never done before. And I think that's why it's worked so well, because we always had this idea of what we were going to get at the end of it rather than getting lost along the way. It's very easy when you're working on something for six or eight weeks to lose track of it half-way through. We were all very

focussed on it and it never felt as if it was losing control." The recording of the album over six weeks at Airforce Studios was preceded by pre-pro-duction: three weeks spent deconstructing and reconstructing songs with producer Mark Tierney and as Dave Y adds, "drinking and eating copious amounts of Pepsi and hamburgers." Pre-production then is a valuable part of'the creative process behind Bleeding Star.

Dave M: "We've done it once before with 'Preious' and realised it was worth it. Dave Y: "It's a chance to look at the songs and how they work. It was a really good situation because we went into recording wi th a shortlist of about 20 or 25 songs. As it was we didn't get the chance to record all the ones we would have liked to but there was no shortage of material or ideas."

In terms of input, is it an equal say from everyone within the band?

Dave Y: "Fuck yeah! We're never at any loss for opinions from everybody. Everyone we work with is shocked and surprised at the fact that all four of us [the other members being guitarist Jim Laing and drummer Gary Sullivan] are interested and care about it enough to have, a definite opinion. Sometimes that can get confusing. We have our own internal process for working out how things happen. Generally we haven't got wildly diverging opinions." It's probably this surfeit of opinion that's responsible for the evolving sound of JPS Experience. If Bleeding Star is radically different in tone to the comparative lightness of, say, 'I Like Rain', the band have still retained an identity that's very recognisable as their own.