the beach

Rip It Up, Issue 187, 1 February 1993, Page 15

the beach

Dave Y: "Part of the reason why we never used overdriven guitar, for instance, was because we didn't know how to get those sounds. When we started we were totally ignorant of that side of things. We couldn't work out why, when we'd get a guitar and play it into a Roland Cube, it wouldn't sound like a big Marshall stack. Also, it gives more variation in our sound by putting in louder songs while keeping songs like 'Block' or 'Still Can't Be Seen' (from Bleeding Star) which are still quiet, dreamy, floaty songs."

The visual element is an important part of the JPS experience. From live shows to video to publicity photos, including some rather unfortunate shots taken around the time of 'Precious' which had the band wearing silver boiler suits. "That was our Devo look," Dave Y cryptically explains. There's an obvious interest taken by the band in the image they present to the public. Dave M: "We have pretty definite ideas about what we'd like to be perceived as and we strive for that. We don't want to come across as a cliched image. Sometimes that's really hard to achieve in a pretty restricted format. Everyone's very keen on the visual aspect of the band. It's not something we just want to throw away." Talk inevitably drifts to the future and what it holds in store for the band. A busy year is in prospect — a NZ album tour in April and then across the Tasman for more touring on the back of the Australian release of Bleeding Star. In July the New Music Seminar in New York beckons . . .

Dave Y: "It's exciting because we've already had quite a lot of interest from America and American labels who have heard

the Breathe EP. They haven't heard Bleeding Star as yet but they're showing real signs of interest.

"The band now feel they're at a peak where they can turn that interest into something more concrete. As Dave Y says "how they react to us is speculation, but as far as where we are at, we're definitely ready to be there ..."

Dave M: “Bleeding Starts the best recorded work we've done."

Dave Y: "I think Bleeding Star has a real potency to it. The ultimate in masturbation is what I've been doing which is putting the album on my Walkman and wandering about the countryside and I still get a kick out of it."

Dave M: "To me it sounds like one of those albums that I still listen to that came out ten years ago." Has it got longevity? DaveY: "There's something dreadfully wrong if it doesn't. When I think of the record I get a tingle up my spine. It's got something on there — the essence of what the band is. Quite what that is I don't know but it's there somewhere.

Dave M: "It's something that moves all the time. In different moods you pick up on different things."

Dave Y: "You have a love affair with a record when you first buy it and you play it heaps. And then maybe you don't play it for five or six years and when you play it again you get those feelings back. You realise what a really good record it is. It's outlived trends and passing fads in music — men in bicycle shorts and silver hats. It transcends all that crap and the music is still standing there as a really potent thing. That's what it's all about."

MARTIN BELL