Jagwar Ma: ‘We’re The Young Guns’

They’ve been gushed over by Noel Gallagher and Foals and touted by the overseas press. Yet Jagwar Ma still feel like an endearing kid brother, even after their big-event debut album. DOUG WALLEN talks to Gabriel Winterfield, half of the Sydney duo.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] For a record inviting plenty of hype – especially in the UK – Jagwar Ma’s Howlin isn’t grandiose or over-the-top. It’s actually fairly mild-mannered, revisiting danceable Madchester tropes and Beatles-y psych-pop with a quiet studiousness. It’s body-moving music that doesn’t dumb it down, tickling the brain on the way to prompting the limbs.

In flux behind Sydney and London right now, the duo of Jono Ma and Gabriel Winterfield have well earned their day in the sun, following individual past brushes with near-fame (with Lost Valentinos and Ghostwood, respectively). Sounding all too easy and yet wisely structured at every turn, Howlin is swimming in feel-good hooks and expansive with cross-genre nostalgia. It’s telling that, while Noel Gallagher was commenting on its massive pre-release buzz over in England, the album was being included on Pitchfork’s mid-year Overlooked Records list. They’re the rare buzz band that you want to nurture instead of tearing down.

In between a high-profile conquest of Glastonbury and their first Australian headline tour, Winterfield discussed this strange moment in time with the same kind of steady grace.

So you guys are based in London now, right?
Yeah, I think so. I’ve been living here for the past few months, but I still don’t have a fixed address. So I don’t really have a home in Sydney or in London.

And you’re alright with being a little in flux?
Yeah. it’s alright. It doesn’t matter too much; it’s kind of fun. But I would like to be based somewhere; I’m not sure where yet.

You guys played Glastonbury recently, and by all reports conquered it. How does it feel to go from being pretty much unknown two years ago to having all this success?
It feels amazing to have played that show. I definitely feel like it was a great moment for myself personally, and I think for Jono personally, and for the band. We really felt like we had reached something; a big point in our lives. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – he writes about finding your own personal legend, and Glastonbury felt like it for me. It was really amazing.

How long have you been playing live?
Not very long. Probably a little less than a year; around nine months. We played at the Midi Festival in [France] in July last year.

So it really started just as a recording project?
Well, we were recording the album, and halfway through recording we had booked this show, so that we could use this show as a way of informing how the rest of the album would sound.

And how did the show shape it? Did you use the crowd response a bit?
I think it was like when they do a TV pilot episode, and they tell the audience to press a red button for the parts you don’t like and a green button for the parts you like. And when certain characters come on screen that’s how they rate the popularity of those characters. It sort of felt like that when we were playing the shows, because there were certain songs that really worked and other songs had parts that people just didn’t seem interested in. So I guess we cut those bits out and embellished the bits that the people liked.

How long did it take to make the album?
The amount of time I was in the studio would probably be about six months. The writing of the songs didn’t take very long at all; I know for example I wrote the chorus for ‘The Throw’ in an afternoon, and I know Jono did the beats for it in another afternoon. We moved quite quickly.

Is that quick approach unique to this project for you two?
Well, I’ve always been pretty prolific as a songwriter. That might seem a little cocky or whatever, and I don’t mean it in that way. But I’ve never really found writing songs that difficult. Not all of them are necessarily good – actually a lot of them are really bad – but I’m happy to keep on moving and keep writing until I find something I really enjoy.

“I’m very much an output person; I just put out, out, out, and Jono will strip it back.”

An important part of the process is knowing what to jettison.
Yeah, definitely. Everything is just as creative as creating. I think some people are better at creating, and some people are better at editing, and some people are better at arranging. I’m very much an output person; I just put out, out, out, and Jono will cut things back a lot of the time, strip it back. And neither is more creative; it’s very much a ying and yang thing between the two of us.

The songs on the record sound like they’re from a similar time period. What’s the oldest song?
I think ‘Let Her Go’ is probably the oldest. That was a song I wrote about two or three years ago, but the original sounds very different to what it sounds like now. And then the second oldest would probably be ‘Come Save Me’. But again, the earlier stages of that song were quite different to what they are on the album. It’s sort of like when you hear the earlier version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, which was recorded two years before Nevermind came out, and it sounds quite different.

When did you guys first realise you were making this worldwide impact? I know ‘Come Save Me’ got attention, and then so did ‘The Throw’. Was it sometime around then?
I still think that we’re not really that sure. To use that metaphor of the eye of the storm; in a hurricane there’s all this turmoil and chaos going on around you, but in the middle it’s completely calm and normal. That’s how I feel a lot of the time; I don’t actually know unless my mum or somebody emails me and says. “You’re on the front cover of something,” and I’m like “Really?” And they say, “Yeah, you turned up on my TV today.” So I don’t actually know but I kind of like that; I prefer not to know.

“You know when you have a corkboard? I feel like I have one of those in my head; there are a lot of things I want to do.”

Have you been working on new songs since the album was released?
Yeah, we’ve been doing some stuff. We’ve got a piano here and I’m always writing stuff, pulling up songs and things I want to sample. You know when you have a corkboard? I feel like I have one of those in my head at the moment; there are a lot of things that I want to do.

Are you able to write on the road?
Yeah, I write songs in my head a lot; I sort of sit down and imagine what the song will be like. Luckily I’m at the stage now where I think I’ve got quite good pitch, so I can imagine a piano in my head, or a guitar. And I can just hear the notes.

Recently I was listening to ‘[I Heard it Through the] Grapevine’ by Marvin Gaye when it came on the radio. And I love how that song is just all about that one [title] phrase, and then I was thinking “What’s a similar phrase to that?” Then I was thinking “A little bird told me,” and I started singing a little song with that lyric, and I was imagining this Sam Cooke-style song, with this swung beat and this clicking and stuff like that. And that’s sometimes how I write songs as well.

Are you able to remember something like that? Or do you need to sing it into a phone or write it down?
It’s funny; a lot of people think that I don’t have a very good memory because I’m quite vague in recalling what happened today, or what happened yesterday. And I think that’s because a lot of the time I’m preoccupied storing things like new songs so that I don’t forget them.

I wanted to ask about the album cover. One of the commenters on Mess + Noise thought it was from the theme park Fantasy Glades [in Port Macquarie, NSW]. Is that right?
Ah yeah, I think it is from Fantasy Glades.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] What’s the story behind that picture?
It was a found photograph, and we just really liked the haunting, old picture. Like other families go to Disneyland and different things like that. And there is a strange quality of this childhood memory. Initially we wanted to do a Disneyland theme, but obviously we couldn’t get away with that trademark, so we thought that photo might be cooler.

Had you both been to Fantasy Glades as children?
Yeah. It’s pretty cool.

Is it a three-piece when you play live, or are there more people?
Well it’s still a three-piece at the moment but we might be getting a few more later on. Depending on if we can get the people that we want when they’re available, we might see if we can expand it.

Who is the third person right now?
It’s a friend of mine called Jack Freeman. He plays bass.

When I first heard of Jagwar Ma, I was interviewing one of the guys from Foals and he mentioned the band. What’s the origin of your friendship with those guys?
They just kind of repped us quite a lot; they were just quite fond of us. Also, just by coincidence Jono’s brother [Dave] has done film clips for Foals. So he put them in touch with us and we just hit it off and became friends. And it also turned out that they quite like our music, so we did a European tour supporting Foals.

It’s good to have those people who want to help you out of a genuine fondness of the music.
Yeah, totally, they are just genuine champions. It’s very nice to have that support. It’s a bit like a fraternity, because they’re a bit older than us and we’re the young guns.

You talked about those new songs. Are they in a similar direction to the record or is it too soon to tell how they’ll turn out?
I don’t know. I don’t really feel like the record … well, we didn’t want to do anything with [one specific] genre or anything. We didn’t care. So we have the freedom to do whatever we want with the next record. I want it to be more detailed and more elaborate and more beautiful, but it’s hard to compare.

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‘Howlin’ is out now through Future Classic. Read Jules LeFevre’s review. Jagwar Ma are in Australia for Splendour in the Grass. Other live dates are below, all with Guerre and DJ Angelo Gruzman supporting.

Thurs, July 25 – The Bakery, Perth, WA
Fri, July 26 – Rocket Bar, Adelaide, SA [sold out]
Thurs, Aug 1 – The Corner, Melbourne, VIC [sold out]
Fri, Aug 2 – The Standard, Sydney, NSW [sold out]
Sun, Aug 4 – The Standard, Sydney, NSW