Jesus Jones: Whatever happened to the band behind 'Right Here Right Now'
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I had done a video on the british band EMF and I noticed several comments suggesting I do a video on the band Jesus Jones so here we are. Best known for the early 90’s hit Right Here Right Now, the song wasn’t really representative of the type of music Jesus Jones made. The group combined dance rhythms and guitars with a new way of sampling. Frontman Mike Edwards would tell loudersound “Back in those days, putting dance beats on rock music wasn’t really done. So it meant that you had a wide open field in front of you to carve your own niche. Like EMF, Jesus Jones was hailed as the next big thing, but they seemed to fade away after a few albums. Let’s explore what happened in today’s video.
Jesus Jones frontman Mike Edwards would grow up in Bradford on Avon (pronounced A-vin) in the early 80’s. Edwards would reveal to Loudersound “It was difficult. Now if you want to hear a song, you can go online and hear it in 20 seconds. Back then, I’d have to save up my money, and get on the bus to Bath to buy one record, and then it’d be another hour back home. Getting hold of music was really, really difficult. Going to see bands was difficult. The access to music was really tricky and you relied a lot on the music press and the radio in a way that people don’t now.” Some of those early bands he was exposed to didn’t really shape the music he’d go on to make with Jesus Jones telling loudersound thathe saw early incarnations of iron maiden and whitesnake. It wasn’t until he moved to London in 1985 that he discovered a whole new world of music including groups like Pop Will Eat Itself and The Shaman (pronounced shay-men). Couple this with access to the music weeklies like New Musical Express and Melody Maker who touted bands like Public Enemy, Big Black and Sonic Youth and the blueprint for the type of music Edwards wanted to make was born.
Edwards would tell Loudersound about his influences “The music they made was modern and unique without ever sounding difficult or avant garde. “To be honest, that was exactly what I was aiming to do from 1988 onwards,”. “That was pretty much our modus operandi. I didn’t want our influences to be blinding obvious, I didn’t want them to over-shadow what we did. “
Prior to forming Jesus Jones, Edwards and his future bandmates played in a lot of top 40 cover bands. . While the gigs paid well, Edwards wasn’t creatively satisfied telling the Orlando Sentinel "They were guitar bands with no fixed direction, going nowhere,". "The music had no identity, no strength of its own - it was music just for the sake of it rather than music with a direction, music with an attitude."
Prior to the formation of Jesus jones, Edwards had known the group’s drummer Simon Matthews from when they were kids and they met in school. The group’s other members -- guitarist Jerry De Borg and bassist Al Jaworski --met through friends, and through the back pages in Melody Maker. Keyboardist Barry D worked at a skateboard shop and Edwards would admit to the washington post
"The reason he joined the band was so I could get free skateboard clothing,". "But it was senseless because about two months after he joined, we had to go full time" with the band.
"He's useless as a keyboard player,". "Luckily, he only has to play samples. He's very proud of his non-musicality."
The band’s sound would incorporate,rap, house music, '70s disco rhythms, art-rock and many other styles. The group’s name would come about two ways. One, it represented a musical rebirth for the musicians and second they met a lot of people while vacationing in spain named Jesus (Spanish pronunciation • How to pronounce Jesus... ) . It was now 1988 and Jesus Jones was born. .
The band’s success was almost instantaneous with Edwards telling the orlando sentinel "Within three weeks of the idea, I had a band; within two months, we got interest from a record company. Two months after that, we got a deal, and a further t