the would-be-goods!

peter momtchiloff talked to jessica griffin in september 1999. as we go to press she is applying the finishing touches to the third would-be-goods album, provisionally entitled brief lives.

chickfactor: what is your earliest musical memory?
jessica: reading babar while listening to maestro's all-steel band playing "quando quando quando," when I was about 4. and then I actually saw maestro's all-steel band in southampton high street, which rather destroyed the exotic image.
cf: do you remember other particular records your parents used to play?
jessica: yes: the temperance seven. I did of course model my vocal style on whispering paul mcdowell. I don't think my parents listened to the beatles, and definitely not the stones. they did like françoise hardy and sergio mendes, the mamas and the papas, burt bacharach, nancy sinatra, and simon and garfunkel.
cf: what was your first taste of show business?
jessica: I was an angel in a nativity play in singapore: we had to sing "silent night" and raise and lower our wings in alternate verses. I stood out because I had my wings up when everyone else had their wings down.
cf: when you started discovering music for yourself, or through your friends, what was it?
jessica: I was an enormous david bowie fan from the age of about fifteen. and next came the monochrome set: I heard "espresso" on the radio and something instantly clicked.
cf: so how did your first single come about?
jessica: well, I met mike alway backstage at a monochrome set gig -- I think it was kingston polytechnic, I can't tell you which year. at the end of the gig I was standing by the edge of the stage and somebody gave me a watch and said "can you give this to bid?" and so, having a sense of adventure, I thought well why not, and I managed to get past the bouncer by explaining I was on a mission. I ended up backstage; there wasn't a lot of wild rock & roll behaviour going on there, I think people were drinking cups of tea. I met mike; I can't particularly remember what we talked about, but he must have got my telephone number somehow because he rang me up the next day. at that time he was the A&R man for cherry red. I knew him for a very long time before there was any suggestion of my making a record. I went to oxford, and I think it was a few years later after I started working in london that he had this idea of getting me to make a record. initially mike just got me to write sleeve-notes. some of the most pretentious él sleeve notes were by me. I'm not particularly proud of them so I won't tell you which ones they were, apart from the would-be-goods', of course. I remember mike asking me to write a fantasy about being locked in a sweet-shop overnight. he commissioned an awful lot of songs about sweets or cream cakes. very bizarre.
cf: so did you feel like you were involved in él, before you actually made a record, or were you more like a spectator?
jessica: right through my whole time at university mike had been sending me tapes, almost on a weekly basis, of stuff he liked -- varese, ennio morricone, robyn hitchcock, and lots of stuff by bands or people who later popped up on él, like louis philippe, but there was really never any explanation of who these people were. he talked a lot about what was happening with blanco y negro, then setting up él, and what he planned to do with it.
cf: so él had been going for a while when you did your record. did you think that this was the start of something big, or did it feel more like a one-off adventure?
jessica: it seemed so unreal, I had no expectations at all.
cf: had you previously displayed any desire to make a record?
jessica: quite early on in my friendship with mike there was the germ of an idea that I would quite like to try making a record, but it was something that I never ever mentioned because I thought nothing would ever come of it and mike had never asked if I could sing or if I was interested in it or anything like that.
cf: so was it an odd experience making the record? perhaps you can't even remember it?
jessica: mike persuaded louis philippe and his wife to invite me round to dinner. the other guest was the king of luxemburg. after a wonderful and extremely alcoholic dinner, they suggested singing some songs while louis played the guitar. apparently they reported to mike the next day that I could just about sing, so he asked simon turner to write a couple of songs for my first single. several weeks later I got a tape through the post, of simon and his co-writer, colin lloyd tucker, singing "the hanging gardens of reigate" and "fruit paradise" in a pub. it sounded as if other customers were joining in on the chorus. I was slightly bemused by it all. my first experience of recording wasn't particularly enjoyable -- I was so uptight about singing in front of other people that they had to take me to the nearest pub and get me drunk. simon actually had to hold me up while I sang, and it didn't work out at all well. I re-recorded "fruit paradise" some time later -- the producer richard preston kept asking me to try and sound sexy, "like marilyn monroe". as you can hear, I could only manage julie andrews. but the single came out [1987] and, surprisingly, received quite a lot of reviews and got played on the radio. some colleagues of mine at work heard it and forced me to admit that I was the singer of the mysterious would-be-goods. my boss was furious and said "either you give up the music, or... it's not respectable and it's going to give our company a bad name"; and then a japanese client of ours rang up and said "I've just heard miss griffin's record, I think it's fantastic", and my boss totally changed tack, went out and bought the lot, and gave them to all his clients.
cf: so that was why it did better than expected. that was probably the beginning of the great japanese interest in él. so did you say that you thought you could write songs for an album?
jessica: yes, and mike said, well, do it.
cf: what was the first song you wrote for the camera loves me [1988]?
jessica: "marvellous boy".
cf: so when you had some more songs, you and your sister got together with the monochrome set...
jessica: yes, after a few rehearsals we went into the studio with them. keith west, the producer, was the frightfully trendy teacher, and we were the sulky adolescent class who didn't miss an opportunity to play tricks behind his back. in retrospect I think he did a pretty good job and was very good-natured about it all. he did not know how he was supposed to take this stuff, and I think a lot of people would have been in the same position.
cf: did you enjoy making the record?
jessica: I hugely enjoyed the creative side of it, yes.
cf: were you pleased with it when you'd finished it?
jessica: no, I think after it was mixed I stopped being interested.
cf: what, because you thought it was done, or because it was an anticlimax, or what?
jessica: I liked the way it sounded in the studio, and then once it was actually an artefact, I think it lost something. I can't really explain that. then it seemed take on a bizarre life of its own: the whole idea of people reviewing it and so on was very strange. there was something slightly unreal, slightly preposterous about it.
cf: and was it well reviewed?
jessica: well, nobody treated it terribly seriously; a lot of people said that it was charming, that it was good in its own way. I think a lot of people weren't quite sure what to make of él records at the time.
cf: how did you feel at the time: was it an exciting thing to be part of?
jessica: yes, it was, but at the same time I think I was very much on the fringes of the label... I think some of the other people on él definitely saw me as someone who was not a serious artist, not a musician, and they were. also they all seemed to know each other very well: they were very charming and friendly to me and so on, but I didn't really have a lot to do with them outside the studio. so I don't feel I was part of the él scene.
cf: were you involved in the way the record was presented to the world?
jessica: very much so. I'm especially proud of the back cover -- a photograph of a fruit punch, which came from a west indian cookery book of mine.
cf: so how do you feel about the association that people still make now, between your stuff and él; would you rather that it was a bit less strong?
jessica: yes, I would, because I'm really tired of people assuming that mike was this sort of svengali figure and we were just a series of disposable personalities. unfortunately that was something that I didn't do much to dispel at the time in interviews. I'd go along in a very flippant way with the idea that mike was this sort of puppet master, but people didn't necessarily see that I wasn't serious.
cf: and did you think that it was good stuff that was coming out on él? were you pleased to be associated with the other music on the label, the look of the records, and so on?
jessica: I thought the quality of the records was mixed. the records all looked brilliant, but the music itself was sometimes excellent, sometimes disappointing.
cf: did you feel the records weren't widely enough appreciated?
jessica: yes, there was actually quite a lot of hostility. people saw it as a class thing. every review of the camera loves me concentrated on what they imagined my social standing to be, my background, all getting it laughably wrong. maybe this was something mike encouraged, because it was a sort of fascination of his. it really irritated me after a while, because it had nothing to do with the music, and made it seem nothing more than a novelty record.
cf: so you were pleased that it got attention, but you felt that it didn't get very serious attention?
jessica: at the time, and in the UK, no. I don't think the él records sold in huge quantities, but the label has attracted an unusual degree of interest in recent years.
cf: why do you think that is?
jessica: it's partly because the rest of the world has caught up with what él was all about and, of course, the amazing marketing and self-promotion of mike alway, which gave the label such a strong image.
cf: so was mike often the person who a journalist would talk to first?
jessica: yes, and he was actually interviewed quite a lot himself. he really was a good self-publicist. I guess he'd been working in the record industry for a while, and he had a good idea of how to establish a brand, as we would now say.
cf: some time elapsed before your next record. a very long time. why was that?
jessica: partly because no one asked me; I can be remarkably lazy. but largely because of personal politics. and lots of other things were happening in my life: between the two albums I got married, changed jobs. I couldn't imagine the circumstances under which I'd want to make another record.
cf: so did you think that was the end of your musical career?
jessica: I hoped it wasn't, but it's very difficult to do anything in a vacuum. I scarcely saw any of the people I'd worked with before, and I felt as if that were all in the past.
cf: so how did it come about that you started again? how many years elapsed?
jessica: probably five. mike got in touch again, and said that polystar, this japanese record company he was working with, had asked him to ask me if I was interested in making another record. I'm not sure if that was the truth, or if mike was just presenting it in a flattering light, but it went on quite quickly from there. I wrote the songs in a remarkably short space of time, as I tend to do. I don't generally sit there writing stuff for a rainy day, but I can write things quickly when I've got a deadline. there is an idea to the album, as expressed in the title, mondo [1993].
cf: mondo is a record which was scarcely known outside japan until its reissue by cherry red this year, though it is in fact even better than the camera loves me, in my view. did you consciously take a different approach to making this record?
jessica: no, I realized that the songs were coming out differently, but I cannot say why. they were less archly humorous -- indeed, I now think that the least successful songs on mondo are the ones where I have tried to be humorous.
cf: what is your favourite song, at the moment, on the camera loves me?
jessica: "cecil beaton's scrapbook". I hardly ever listen to the record, though I play the songs on the guitar often.
cf: and on mondo?
jessica: "gigi geographic", possibly, or "dream lover".
cf: is there anything that you recorded at those sessions which isn't released?
jessica: there were two songs for mondo which never saw the light of day: one called "the gourmet's love song" and one called "the cool mikado". either through lack of time or lack of inclination, neither got recorded.
cf: you haven't recorded anything since the four extra songs for the CD reissue of the camera loves me; but recently you have hit a rich new vein of songwriting. how has your songwriting changed?
jessica: what I usually used to do was to work from a title: I would have a long list of titles, from films, quotations, snippets, whatever, and I would unleash my imagination. but now the process is much more (to use a pretentious word) organic. the big difference is that now I play the guitar, and so I write in a different way. now I often write the music first, which makes lyric-writing harder but I think results in more interesting tunes.
cf: when did you take the guitar up?
jessica: about three years ago, but it's only in the last year and a half that I've played it regularly and written songs on it.
cf: so now you have a system which works?
jessica: yes, and it's much more liberating, not having to get someone to work out the chords with me on a guitar. I always knew what chord I wanted but couldn't necessarily convince my accompanist.
cf: I'm surprised you didn't try to accompany yourself on the piano, just to pick out the chords.
jessica: I hated writing songs with the piano, because everything came out sounding like an elton john ballad.
cf: why have the would-be-goods never performed live?
jessica: because mike alway very strongly vetoed it. I think he just thought it would be a hugely embarrassing experience.
cf: because it wouldn't live up to...
jessica: I think he just thought that I would not be up to it.
cf: lack of confidence in your abilities?
jessica: yes, and lack of confidence in my confidence.
cf: I imagined it might be a kind of "don't dispel the mystique" thing.
jessica: that was not the way he put it to me!
cf: have you ever performed with any other combos?
jessica: yes, twice, and at very short notice, I appeared onstage with simon turner, as a backing vocalist. once at the limelight in a yellow silk flamenco dress, and once in japan, when we were immortalized on celluloid by derek jarman. derek jarman was a friend of simon turner, and he just happened to be there that night because he was over there with the pet shop boys. I shudder to think of the film ever turning up.
cf: who would you most like to have been out of francoise hardy, astrud gilberto, peggy lee, or marlene dietrich?
jessica: definitely not marlene dietrich -- too predatory! peggy lee I'm a great admirer of, but I don't see myself as at all like her. astrud gilberto sang with very little art but a lot of charm. probably francoise hardy.
cf: who would you most like to have been out of byron, shelley, and rimbaud?
jessica: byron, without a shadow of a doubt.
cf: who would you most like to have been out of percy shelley, mary wollstonecraft, and mary shelley?
jessica: mary shelley. mary wollstonecraft was admirable, but a bit forbidding.
cf: at what time would you have liked to be young?
jessica: maybe the 1950s, but without the smug morality.
cf: what would you have liked about it?
jessica: only the superficial things -- I like 1950s fashion, and the obsession with elegance.
cf: do you have a favourite book?
jessica: the death of the heart by elizabeth bowen. and the uncle books by j.p. martin -- absolutely extraordinary!
cf: would you have liked to be a turn-of-the-century decadent?
jessica: I'm the least decadent person I know!
cf: which actress would you like to play you in a film?
jessica: oh dear, I don't really see myself like that at all.
cf: I'll scrap the leading man question then as well.
jessica: my mother and I were talking about this the other day, but we came up with really obscure people like gerard philipe. I adore dirk bogarde. I admire audrey hepburn, but while she was beautiful to look at, her terribly mannered voice gets on my nerves. leslie caron perhaps.
cf: in the 19th century, would you have rather been a composer, a poet, a painter, or a dancer?
jessica: a dancer. preferably russian.
cf: in the 20th century, would you have rather been a great success as: an architect, an arbiter of fashion, a business tycoon, or a film star?
jessica: possibly a film star, but a very shy and reclusive one.
cf: which would you consider the most risky marital prospect: a fire-eater, a magician, a jockey, or a professional poker player?
jessica: a magician.
cf: if you had to earn your living by a manual or physical skill, what would it be?
jessica: calligraphy or palmistry.
cf: what would you say if your daughter wanted to run off and join the circus?
jessica: I've already made her a bareback rider's costume!
cf: what is your favourite fruit?
jessica: mango.
cf: what is your favourite drink?
jessica: coffee.
cf: alcoholic?
jessica: vermouth.
cf: favourite colour?
jessica: lapis lazuli!
cf: favourite word?
jessica: ampersand.
cf: whose films do you prefer out of jacques tati, federico fellini, and alfred hitchcock?
jessica: jacques tati. mon oncle is my favourite.
cf: would you like to be famous?
jessica: I'd love someone to say "are you the jessica griffin?", but I'd hate to have people camping out on my doorstep. CF