Because It’s Real: Q & A with Jont

Popshifter: How has Unlit evolved over the years? Do you have any particular favorite participants through those years? I know there’ve been some pretty great performances from a pretty wide variety of artists: Derek Meins and Joan Wasser spring to mind.

Unlit: Photo © Sasha

Jont: Yeah, Joan As Police Woman was great. I saw her play at Sin-e in New York and asked her to come down and she came and played it on a Wurlitzer with her drummer. . . . this is before we’d started doing it in people’s houses. Tom Baxter did some amazing performances back in the day, as did the fantastic Leila who you would know as the front woman for The Duke Spirit. . . the band was called Solomon then, and she was absolutely stunning. They were definite Unlit faves.

Then in L.A. when we started doing it in my room, one of my good friends I’d met out there, Sam Sparro, used to play at almost all of them. There are even a couple of songs from his new album I remember him busting out for the first time at Unlit in my bedroom.

Most extraordinary performance? I reckon it has to go to Gulla, a trained opera singer and alternative kind of performer from Iceland who made every jaw in the room drop with the completely unique performance she did at the Brighton Unlit.

Popshifter: Okay then. So the new record, Supernatural, is available for download now and comes out in full physical form in May on Unlit records. What can you tell me about the circumstances of the making of it and/or about starting your own label?

Jont: Well, having met you guys on the first Unlit tour, which went across the States in 2006, I got back and there was a lot of interest in making those online films in to a full-blown TV show on a major network. That and [there was] a big record deal on the table. Due to the nature of these sorts of shenanigans it all fell through, so I felt it was time to just get on with making my album, the album I had been waiting so long to make, so I did.

Obviously, doing it on my own, there were pretty severe budget constraints. However, there was a sense of purpose and release behind the whole thing too, a sense of getting on with it, a sense of finally being able to put these songs down. And all I wanted to come up with was something which I was happy with. No longer was I harbouring these pipe dreams of acceptance and fame which can play with your head when you’re coming up with songs and singing them to yourself in the kitchen and hearing how mighty and huge they might be, allied to a crowd of 20,000 singing along.

So I went in to the studio to record some demos of my new songs actually, and at the end of the day I realised that they weren’t demos at all. I had never heard my voice sound like this before. So I decided I was making an album and I thought actually that it was just gonna be 12 or so tracks that I recorded live in front of two mikes, with maybe a little overdubbed colour from cello or piano to make the listener’s path an easier and more enjoyable one.

But then—you know how it is—the project evolved and before I knew it. . . well, actually it took a little longer than that, but by the end of the summer I was getting ready to mix an album which had full-blown arrangements including drums, bass, keys, and strings, even the odd flute and banjo thrown in for good measure. I hadn’t recorded with a click, and the vocal and guitar takes all bled into each other, so there were certain inconveniences sonically when it came to mixing, but restraints can keep you on the straight and narrow and it meant that I couldn’t mess with the original live takes. So the album has a live and personal feel, which I love, something I’d never been able to capture before when I’d recorded track-by-track.

Click to read more from Jont on. . .

Evolution of Unlit and Supernatural
An encounter with Allen Ginsberg

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