Hats off to the space cowboy

Originally published in M8 magazine, December 1994

“I’ve just booked a holiday trip to Hanger 13 for the lot of us!” Whoops. The Space Cowboy’s just come back down to Earth with a bump¹. After a good half-hour of intellectual table-tennis, M8 has just tabled the vexed question of ‘drugs: glorification of’ (the adverts for his last single did feature a huge Jay Kay-shaped spliff after all). And that was his immediate reaction. A bit tasteless, no?

“Er, I suppose it was really,” comes the more sheepish reply. It’s a little unfair, I know, taking one quote from an interview and printing it in isolation, but the above exchange does tell you a lot about Jay Kay AKA Jamiroquai AKA the Space Cowboy. He’s more than willing to shoot his mouth off on any given subject and, though initially given a wide berth by the music mags (hell, it was 1992, we even fawned at the feet of Steptoe from the Stereo MC’s), this rent-a-gob reputation soon gave the doubters ample rope to hang him with.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the sleevenotes of Jamiroquai’s debut album Emergency on Planet Earth could bring on mild nausea in the most self-righteous of bean-eaters. The contradictions were obvious. Here was a guy with an eight-album deal for Sony lambasting “everyone with the maniacal urgency for that paper with the picture of some fantastically generous monarch on one side” (spew). There were backhanded thank yous to all his old labels (“No hard feelings, guys”) and a terrifically naive telling-off to those record companies who let “petty colour issues” get in the way of good music. All of which came wrapped in a painting of Jay Kay at play in the garden of Eden, communing with white doves, hummingbirds and butterflies (there’s a big black BMW parked outside his house, in case you were wondering). And we haven’t even mentioned the S-word yet. Here goes … STEVIE WONDER. Guffaw!

Now, after being on the receiving end of such a consummate kicking from the media last summer for all of the above and more, you might expect our Jay to be somewhat wary of facing the press all over again. Far from it — not only does he invite M8 around to his groovy west London crash pad², but he pulls up a chair at the dining table and gets one of his funky friends to put the kettle on… (Trainer count: Adidas Gazelles 3, Puma States 1). And it’s not just the footwear around here that reveals chez-Jay to be Acid Jazz-loafer-central. There’s the mandatory scattering of beanbags, bass-bins and bodies (chilled, of course).

[embed]Interplanetary good vibe zone … the irrepressible, genial and never knowingly under-opinionated Jay Kay

However, minus the (in)famous headgear, the man himself conforms less readily to type. He’s pale and slim, with slitty eyes and a mischievous Mutley-esque cackle. With his hair in a greasy centre-parting, he actually looks rather like Bobby Gillespie — ironic considering the stellar difference in that particular skinny-white-guy’s critical standing. He taps his fags on the table, maintains eye contact throughout and treats the tape recorder like he’s dictating his epitaph. Can we take it from this, that despite everything printed about him last year, he’s not worried about going a few more rounds with the massed hordes of hackdom?

“No, it’s not particularly intimidating because we’ve come up with the goods, come up with a decent album.” Hmmm, modest too. “If we’d done a crap album,” he sneers, “then I’d be worried about it , you know. But I’m quite ready to go back into battle, I’ve reloaded my guns. All the journalists I’ve met like it and say it’s twice as good as the first one. I reckon it’s twice as good as the first one and everyone I know says that as well, so I reckon we’ve pretty much cracked it again, really.”

‘I’m a white guy who just copies black people … I’m just some naive little turd who crawled out from under a stone … I don’t really give a shit about the environment — rubbish. I’ve never heard such a load of old cobblers’

When asked about the nastiest things people wrote about him, it’s quite clear that some of the more bitchy criticisms have stung a fair bit; he addresses them in list form for God’s sake.

“There were a lot of nasty things said about me last year,” he recounts, taking time to prioritise his angst. “One of them being that I’m a white guy who just copies black people and wants to be a black musician, another being that I’m just some naive little turd who crawled out from under a stone. Another was that I don’t really give a shit about the environment — rubbish. And another was that we make crap music at times and that we copy all our tunes off Stevie Wonder and I’ve never heard such a load of old cobblers in all my life.”

But surely this was partly his fault for being such an unashamedly brazen white fella? He was seen as a bit of a chancer. “I just let them (journalists) shoot their mouths off as much as I shot mine off. Trouble is, they didn’t know that I could deliver the goods, that I had a second album that was cookin’. Some of these guys must have been pretty brave to call us a one-hit wonder because I think I know what I’m doing and I’m not some dicky pop star, I’m not a fuckin’ idiot. I think we do what we do well and to the best of our abilities. All they were doing last year was fuelling the flames, really,” he adds. “I mean, the more they said ‘He can’t do it’, the more I said ‘I can and I will’. And at the end of the day I’ve got a great second album which has done 120,000 pre-sales, meaning that it’ll go gold on the first day of release, so people should just shut the fuck up and let me get on with it. They’ll have to do a lot better if they’re going to put people like me off making music. I’d only be scared if I’d made a crap album and journalists are about as scary as a day at Thorpe Park!”

Indeed, jettison your prejudices for a while (it’s difficult, I know) and you’ll find that Return Of The Space Cowboy is as bracing a record as you’ll hear all year. The opener Just Another Story thumps along in fine style. Similarly Light Years and, ahem, Scam are more Red Hot Chilli Peppers than Roy Ayers. Jay puts this down to the appointment of a new drummer (Derek McKenzie) and top engineering from Al Stone. But as he’s being so generous with his compliments right now, maybe it’s time to ask a rhetorical question. What does he play, exactly? Hur Hur.

There’s a pregnant pause as Jay is deflected momentarily from the sales pitch. He flashes a black look and points to his mouth. “I play that — and it’s the most expressive instrument there is.”

‘I remember we were tripping off our faces one time and someone dropped a window pane and I went like lakka-lakka-boom-lakka-lakka-boom-boom! And people said: Yeah man, you should make music’

What, you just sing all the different parts for the musicians to play? “Yeah. Put it like this; every horn line you hear [on the album] has come out of my mouth. A lot of the basslines like Manifest Destiny — boom bo-bo-bo do daw — Scam, all those strings, the Moog on Half the Man — bee bee bi-bi-bi boo, all out of here, it’s quite simple.”

He goes on to give countless other examples of this unusual musical prowess (some of which look even stranger on paper than those transcribed above) claiming it was inevitable that the tunes should tumble out of him having been exposed to jazz since he was singer Karen Kay’s foetus. “And that song, Half the Man is a one-take song. I’d only just written the lyrics, I had them spread out in front of me as we were recording it.”

He’s really getting into his stride now, detailing how he first got into music… “I never used to go around with a Walkman, I used to go around like this [clasps hands to ears and improvises another badass bassline].”

How it was intrinsically linked with his juvenile drug intake … “I remember we were tripping off our faces one time and someone dropped a window pane and I went like lakka-lakka-boom-lakka-lakka-boom-boom [Superfly-style wah-wah wailing]. And people said, ‘Yeah man, you should make music.’”

Could you imagine if everyone smoked puff? They’d watch the television, watch some political comment programme and say: What the fuck is all this?’

And how he came upon London’s burgeoning Acid Jazz scene … “I was brought up in more places than you’ve had hot dinners. Growing up was sitting in the back of a car with my mother going from gig to gig to gig. I was in Las Vegas when I was two, was in cots when my mum was doing three shows a night, last one finishing at five. Then I moved to Ealing at 13 and at 16 through parties, tripping, whatever, I started bumping into like minds — the [Brand New] Heavies lived down the road, The Young Disciples, Femi and all that. Ha! I remember one time asking the Heavies if I could sing for them and they told me to fuck off. How do you like me now!” he chuckles.

Twenty more minutes of this and it’s difficult not to end up liking our Jay. Quite simply, he’s an infectious character, a conceptualist, a doer and a born star. Far from the apathetic stoner of myth, the Space Cowboy is an example of someone who has used drugs positively to unlock their creative potential. Which is where we came in, wasn’t it?

“What it is, is a very subtle and long played/out game of mind control,” he asserts. “You have a system where people can work from nine-to-five and then have a nice drink at the end of it to forget all about it, to dull their minds. But could you imagine if everyone smoked puff? They’d watch the television, watch some political comment programme and say, ‘What the fuck is all this?’ They’d look for the whole truth.”

Careful kids, the instant gratification of rave culture could be seen to serve exactly the same purpose for the powers that be; ever wonder why it’s not been banned up here, unruly Scots? Hanger 13 might seem a million miles from the sexy streets of boho Soho, but the choice is yours, cheesy quaver. Do you want to be a spaceman?³

Footnotes

1. Hanger 13 was the Euro hardcore club in Paisley, scene of three ecstasy-related deaths in the autumn of 1994. You may remember it from keeping my Kylie interview off the cover of M8.
2. I’ve wracked my brains for years trying to remember where Jay Kay’s flat was. It might have been Belgravia, it may have been Maida Vale or Notting Hill. We met in a pub on the main road and then walked for five minutes down a secluded mews to his groovy crash pad. The whole scene seemed impossibly glamorous, although it could of course have belonged to his record company. It definitely wasn’t the Virtual Insanity hitmaker’s Scottish bolt hole, which made headlines when it was trashed by a pine marten.
3. It’s a little gauche but this Jamiroquai piece is probably the best thing I had written up to this point. I remember the whole experience as one good-natured argument lasting what seemed like a couple of hours. Of course it helps when an interviewee is so willing to talk. Given that M8 would have paid me about £15 for something of this length, this is probably about the time I should have begun approaching grownup London magazines again. Not quite so sure why I was down on the rave scene, mind. It was probably a mixture of high-mindedness and a feeling of my patch being under threat from too much dance music. I remember Billy Graham from M8 magazine suggesting that Oasis were the last roll of the dice for rock’n’roll. It may have taken 30 intermittently entertaining years, but we’re probably at that point again.