MUSIC

It’s taken a while for Big Joan to release new long-player ‘The Long Slow Death of …’, but it’s been worth the wait, says Julian Owen.

“I was bored out of my mind in Southampton, pinned Adam Burrows against a wall and told him we were going to form a band,” says Annette Berlin. The singer had her guitarist, who in turn knew a bassist, Simon Jarvis, and later a drummer, Keith Hall. “We had to play a gig within a week of forming because Annette wanted to play,” says Adam. “And what Annette wants, Annette gets.” From small, violently planted acorns...

That was 1999. Since then, the Big Joan tree has grown branches (each member has at least one Little Joan at home) and matured into something deep rooted and, with the release of their new album, altogether rare: at a stage of career when most bands struggle even to tread creative water, ‘The Long, Slow Death Of Big Joan’ is, by a distance, the best thing they’ve done. Venue wonders whether the band – gathered early evening around a Llandoger table – agree, and is met by a chorus of firm yeses. “I was amazed when it came back and I heard it,” says Annette.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we need to go back and retrieve the band from Southampton, where three boys were gelling around “both alternative rock and dance music – it’s the reason we formed a band together”, and a self-confessed rock chick girl was largely leaving them to it: “Even though I grew up in Berlin I was never into techno. They went clubbing a lot, sometimes I’d pop in, but I do love some of the beats that come out of jungle.”

If early Big Joan’s ferocious breakbeat undercarriage was largely conceived in Southampton, the 2000 move to Bristol brought its own influence, says Simon: “We got more into rock music from knowing bands like Geisha and Ivory Springer.” As prime movers of the nascent Choke collective, he and Adam would also be bringing to town – and drawing inspiration from – bands like Mugstar. Above all, there was the “close kinship” of fellow rock/dance splicers Mooz.

Though you’d never mistake them for being prolific, by 2006 Big Joan had nevertheless released a couple of EPs and an album. And from then ’til the new album? Precisely one minute of new music: ‘Bozone’, from Choke’s free ‘Minutiae’ compilation. But let’s not feel short-changed, for today we reap a splendid dividend, as Adam explains: “We’ve collected songs over several years and only recorded the best ones – some we’ve played for a year and a half at gigs didn’t make the cut. We might have made three albums by now, but none as good as this.”

Recorded with regular collaborator Ali Chant at Toybox, mixing duties were handed – without any pointers – to Anton Maiof in Berlin. “When Anton was in Bristol,” says Adam, “he was a noise musician and in Geisha, that’s how we know him. He wasn’t doing the fun Italo disco he’s doing now.” “So we expected it all in the red,” says Simon, “but it wasn’t like that at all.”

Indeed not. It’s still recognisably Big Joan – venomous rhythms dissected by guitar slashes and woven together by Annette’s extraordinary vocal fury – but the balance is new. “We were always skewing the sound, had loads of bass and drums,” says Adam. “Whereas Tony’s just gone ‘What does this song need?’” “The vocals are in the front, the synths are loud, it sounds contemporary,” says Simon. On tracks like ‘The Creature’ there’s a quietness – delicacy, even – that’s wholly new. “The beauty with the vocals is he’s made it sound so lovely,” says Annette. “I couldn’t believe what he’d done – I’ve not heard myself like that before.”

It’s truly a splendid thing to witness a band, so many years down the line, rapt in near-wonder at what they’ve just achieved. But perhaps it couldn’t have come any sooner. Because, says Adam, in those intervening years they’ve kept “going down this idiosyncratic road of becoming more ourselves. It’s a cliché to say bands have a gang mentality, but there is a certain comfort. If you come up with something but no one else gets it, it’s dropped; if everyone loves it, that’s validation for what you’re doing, and gives you confidence to be able to keep doing it. It makes you immune to what anybody outside the band thinks.”

The songwriting process is fully collective, says Keith, “could just come from a drum beat, or a bassline, or hinge on rearrangement of a lyric”. “If every person in the band is a songwriter,” says Adam, “you have a combined personality. No one of us could listen to a Big Joan track and say ‘That’s my song’.”

To varying degrees, each member is involved in different musical projects. They learn from these, they say, but Keith sums up the general mood: “Big Joan feels like home to me. Whenever I come back I think ‘Oh, yes!’”

“I’m very proud of that,” says Annette. “That’s probably why we’re still going. The same line-up, the same people. There’s no ego or infighting. There’s no leader, it just gels.”

‘THE LONG, SLOW DEATH OF BIG JOAN’ WAS OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED AT THE LOUISIANA, BRISTOL ON FRI 10 FEB, WITH SUPPORT FROM THE LIFTMEN AND TBC. FFI: BIGJOAN.BANDCAMP.COM

Copyright Julian Owen 2012