In May 2003 Friends singer and songwriter William Jones was interviewed in Gothenburg by Swedish journalist Tommy Gunnarsson for the Pennyblackmusic online magazine. The interview, which was spread over three editions of the magazine, covered the origins of the band, musical and lyrical influences, songwriting and running a band. It is reproduced here by permission of the magazine.
It's early May and Gothenburg is showing its better side, with the sun shining from a clear blue sky. I am here to meet up with William Jones, the main man behind the legendary British indiepopsters Friends, who since 1988 have recorded 7 albums. We meet outside the grand central station, and decide to sit down at a café inside the train station and have a chat. An hour later, we wave goodbye, and this is what was said during those 60 minutes ...
WJ: I grew up listening to the Beatles. And groups from the classic era of pop, like the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. And classical music. When I was very young I learned the classical guitar.
WJ: Yeah. I went on to study music at university. And I have always loved pop music. Or any sort of music. But I particularly remember the Beatles. They were very exciting when they were new. It was a completely different sound from anything anyone had ever heard.
WJ: I began playing the guitar when I was 7. I had a very good guitar teacher, who used to come around to the junior school where I grew up in London, and for some reason I had a particular ability. So he suggested that I should start to have private lessons, and I got quite good. I also learned the piano privately and played violin at school in the orchestra. And I just got very serious about the guitar. There was something about the feel of it and the sound of it that I liked. In my teens my ambition was to become a classical guitarist.
WJ: I didn't. I got more interested eventually in writing music and I got more interested in classical music generally rather than guitar music. The repertoire for classical guitar is not so great. I, therefore, got more interested in composition and eventually also music analysis and history. So I decided to study music at university. I don't think that I would have been good enough to be a top classical guitarist. It's very competitive. There are two or three brilliant ones. And you need to be the two or three best. And I'm quite happy with that.
WJ: No.
WJ: Well, we work with a producer, John Spence, who has produced our last four albums. We go to a studio in Hull where he likes to work. The first three albums I produced, and I was kind of reasonably happy with them. But my technical knowledge was limited. John produced the single 'Far And Away' in our early days, so we went back to him to produce 'Bluishness', which was the first album he produced and which came out in 1992. During my teens I listened to pop music, and especially to acts like the Strawbs and Nick Drake, who were kind of folky. I loved an American band called Steely Dan. And then when punk came along I got very keen on that. I went to see bands like the Buzzcocks a lot, and out of that I got very fond of Orange Juice. And that's when I started wanting to be in a band myself.
WJ: In 1986.
WJ: Friends is my first and only band, yes. I had been playing with a colleague on the Summerhouse label, called Carl Green. We had a band called Whirlpool Guest House, and before they got serious and started releasing records, they were more of a rehearsing band. Then I joined on guitar just for fun, and then I started writing songs. But we decided that the band wouldn't use my songs. They would use Carl's songs. So we split in two. It was very friendly, but we decided to be two bands. We were working with a trumpeter at the time, and the trumpeter went with me, and the others stayed with Carl and became Whirlpool Guest House.
At the time, I was the songwriter and guitarist. I wasn't going to be the singer. We always thought we would try to find a singer. We never did find one, and at the same time I started to enjoy the singing, a lot. So I remained the singer.
WJ: Well, I got these songs and we did an early demo tape of five of them, with me playing all the instruments and Carl Green singing. And then I became the singer, and I asked some friends of mine, that were all playing in other bands, if they would like to join.
At the time, I was living in a town in the north of England, called Stockton-on-Tees and there was a very good band scene. Most people played in two or three bands at the same time. Some of them were doing it to get a contract with a major record label, and others did it because they were good songwriters and they wanted to get their music heard.
The early line-up didn't stay together long. There were always people leaving and joining. Eventually, myself and the keyboard player and the trumpeter, who was called Stewart, decided to rationalise it, so we made the band us two and just used other people on a session basis. We developed the songs, made the demos, and when we were going to record, we rehearsed with them, and paid them a small fee, and toured with them … But it was all on a session basis. We were the band.
WJ: No. That worked quite well for a while. Then Stewart moved away to university and left the band. At the same time I moved away from Stockton-on-Tees after eight years and I met Martin Parker, who is now the other half of the band. He's the drummer and works on the arrangement on the songs with me. So now it's just us two. We're the band, and we perform together acoustically, as Martin plays percussion as well, and the rest of the band is once again people who we just work with for the album and for the tour. And not full-time, as they are all doing other things too. What is happening now is that we are working with a group of people that we have worked with since the early 90's, which is a very long time. And the next album we will be recording this autumn will be with the same people as the last one.
WJ: Yeah.
WJ: I think there was a classical guitar music influence. On the early songs, the guitar parts I used to play were quite intricate. Quite classical, with a lot of picking.
And also, at the time I was writing a lot of systems music, a kind of contemporary classical music, similar to people like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, which was very repetitive with a change in patterns. So, there was an element of that, but with tunes on top, and as we developed, there was the influence of bands like Orange Juice and the Buzzcocks. The early songs tended to be very fast.
At the same time, there was a band that I have always loved a lot, called The Chameleons, who influenced a lot of people, like Oasis and the Stone Roses. They just reformed a few years ago actually. A great band, and are probably the best band I've ever seen playing live. And in some of our less poppy songs, they are also an influence. And then there's also an influence of various bands from the 70's that I used to love, like Renaissance, who had a very acoustic sound. We have always used acoustic guitars quite a lot. And then obviously The Teardrop Explodes, because of their trumpet sound and the fact that they are very English. We often get compared with them. So, I guess they are our main influences, and all also fairly obvious ones.
WJ: Yeah … But I don't listen to a lot of pop music now, so I couldn't say what may have influenced us. It may be a song that I just heard on the radio or on a record. But I think the influences in general are the same. I just think we have developed it more and have become more varied than in the early days.
WJ: Well, lyrically … I think in pop music, in the more darker songs, bands like the Chameleons again, whose music is very intense and sad. They're not depressive, but it's a big strength about it. And, I don't know if it's true, but I have always very intrigued by the lyrics of Steely Dan. I try to be very economical lyrically as a result. I try to say things in as few words as possible. And although they have a lot of names of places, persons etc in their songs, which we don't, I think some of the more quirky elements of our songs are influenced by that. I try to acknowledge it our songs. There's a song on our 1995 album 'Folk Songs' called 'Nikky Don't Cry', and Steely Dan had a song called 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number'. I tried not so much as copy it as make a reference to it.
WJ: Not political in the sense of British politics. There's a few songs that are political in the social sense. There's an early Friends song called 'Burning Bridges' … sometimes when you write lyrics you don't know if what you had in mind comes across. But in my mind, it's set around the First World War and has people coming back from that awful carnage to a land that was supposed to be better, but actually turned out to be worse.
It's a reference to my grandfather, who had been through all that in the Second World War. At the time I was writing that, in the 80's, England was a very depressing, bleak place to be. Unemployment was very high, and there was enormous poverty between rich and poor … it was just an awful place to be. People who had been through two world wars ended up with that.
Other than that, they're not very political. They are very personal and I suppose a bit selfish and largely about myself.
The last time I tried to write my lyrics differently. I tried to say what I was saying a lot clearer. Because sometimes when you write a song and listen to it five years later, you think "what on earth was I trying to say here?" On the last album, before I wrote the lyrics, I wrote down in narrative form what the song was about. What were the situation, who were the people and what was the intention? It worked well for me.
WJ: I like some of them. The third album, 'Songs Without Tears', I don't like that at all. The sound is as good as the first two albums, but the production isn't as good, and I produced it, so I am not happy about that. That's partly why we have used other producers since. I felt that was as far as I could take it.
Some of the early songs I love to listen to. Some of them I don't. I think they are kind of childish. That was what I felt at that time though. Some I feel embarrassed to listen to. Some I feel disappointed that we didn't make them better, and some I am really proud of.
I know that a lot of people like the early stuff best. I can't say they are wrong, and have to concede that there is something about them which is good.
WJ: No, it's a mixture really. We have got about 100 songs that we have recorded, of which we wanted to put on 60 or 70, but we couldn't of course, so we decided that all the ones that had got the most radio play and the best reviews and best feedback from people they had to be there, as that was people's judgement about what was the best.
It was a part of many things though, and we also wanted to have a range of songs that represented different styles, some with trumpet, some without, some with acoustic guitar, some with electric guitar, some slow songs, some fast. We wanted something off each album, and if we could something off each single, although we didn't put the first single on. Have you heard the first single?
WJ: You probably don't want to (laughs). We reckoned that there was no way we could say the first single was 'Best of Friends', and so we just went with what other people told us was best, plus a mixture of arrangements and styles. There's very laidback songs. There's quiet songs. There's loud ones, and rocky ones. There's slightly gothic ones. We wanted to represent the whole range.
WJ: My own favourite song is called 'Beautiful To Me'. It's off the last album, 'Beautiful You'. Before that my favourite was 'Day By Night', a song off the compilation.
WJ: My favourite album is the last one. That's quite common for musicians to say that, isn't it? It hasn't always been like that though. After we recorded the third album, that wasn't my favourite. You're bound though to think that your most recent work is your best.
'Beautiful You' is the album I have most listened to with most pleasure. We had a big break between our sixth album 'Folk Songs' and 'Beautiful You', so we had a chance to put together a set of good quality songs. After a gap of about six years, it really should, therefore, be one of our best.
They're the ones that I think I have recorded the best. I don't mean in terms of production quality really. We worked very hard and got some of our best performances.
WJ: No, we work. I have a job.
WJ: I am a marketing director. I worked in the arts for about 20 years, and managed arts organisations and marketed them. For the last couple of years I was Head of Marketing at a big arts centre, the Barbican in London, but I have moved out of the arts and am now Head of Marketing for a big charity in London.
WJ: Yes, but it would have to be a very good living in order to have to give up work, because there's so many things about my work which I enjoy. I enjoy being with other people and managing people, and I enjoy the work that I do. It's very valuable.
In the early days we talked about going on the dole and writing songs and looking for a record deal, but first of all we couldn't afford to and secondly I thought that it would be lonely and frustrating. I write a lot of songs. I would probably write more songs without working. I probably could have spent more time promoting the band, but who knows? We may still not have been massive, and we still may not have been making a living from music.
We have still got records out. They sound the way we want. There's a few thousand people around the world who know our music and like it. I'd like it to be more, but I'm happy with the way things are.
WJ: Yeah, I would like to be bigger, but I am happy with what I have.
WJ: It depends with different albums, but usually about 3000 to 5000 per album.
WJ: The bestselling is the first album, 'Let's Get Away From It All'.
WJ: It is partly because it came out in 1988. It is very reminiscent of its time. There was a lot of that kind of music out at the time. It was very popular and a lot of the music press were very keen on it and it was very well reviewed and got a lot of airplay and it became popular as well in places like Japan and Spain and Germany where most of them sold, but styles change and the shoegazing movement and the dance movement came along.
WJ: No. We have never been interested in making a complete change of style to follow what is going on out there. Some people say all our songs sound very similar. I would say that we have one style, but we have a whole range of ways of projecting that.
There is a song on 'Bluishness' (Friends' fourth album from 1992) at its very end, 'Into The Crystal Blue Horizon' which is a very long kind of psychedelic song, and we used to play that live and people used to shout shoegazers at us (laughs)! And so I think there is something in the songs that is varied.
Going back though to why 'Let's Get Away From It All' is the most popular, I think it has also been the bestseller because it came out originally on vinyl, and a lot of people bought it on vinyl. Then people started buying CDs and stopped buying vinyl, so we did a CD edition. A couple of summers ago we got licensed by Vinyl Japan on vinyl and they took a load of records to sell in Japan, so it really has had three chances to sell, so it has done alright. It has made a nice profit for us.
WJ: I don't know. I am very out of touch. It's not particularly promising for a band like us. I would say that we are a very traditional band in the way that we are set up. We're not particularly radical sounding. We don't fit into many trends, plus we have been going a long time and we're not kids. We're not the latest new thing, so it is difficult. The way we look at it England is just a tiny part of our market, the market of our world and if we're not successful or popular in England it's a pity, but it's not a big deal.
WJ: We sell a fair number of records in Germany. Yeah! We get a lot of press reviews and airplay.
WJ: Yeah! because indiepop music at that time was much more in touch and focused with the interest of young people, indiepop was a big part of people's lives who were interested in music, while now they're into clubbing and computer games and at the same time the media has changed. There used to be three big weekly music newspapers, 'Sounds', 'Melody Maker' and 'NME', and in our case everything we put out in those days was reviewed. There was far more media. Local radio stations used to have a rock show which would play our kind of stuff. Radio 1 had Janice Long and John Peel at times in which you could actually hear them, and they would play our kind of stuff, and now it is much more concentrated. There is one weekly music paper, 'NME', and local radio stations play chart music on rotation, and it is much more kind of segmented to the teenage market for everything, and there's not particularly a niche for us, so it much harder to break through if you are a band these days.
WJ: My belief is that music has a value, and it shouldn't be free and it shouldn't be stolen in the first instance. In my opinion it's worth something, and whatever the channels you access it with, whether it is on vinyl or CD or the internet, there should be a means by which people who make it can be paid, unless they choose not to, and unless they choose to make their music free to anyone who want to hear it.
You can't ring a plumber and ask him to do his work for free. Generally people who don't care about it being free are either very unsuccessful. They're not going to sell anything anyway or are very successful and have more to worry about.
WJ: There's something about it that is immediately captivating or which grabs you in some way, mentally or emotionally or both, and when you keep listening to it you can still feel that.
WJ: They're very important. The balance between music and lyrics is constantly flux in pop music, but I think that the lyrics are absolutely essential to whether the song is attractive or not. I always find songs where the lyrics are meaningless or where you can't work out what you're singing about a turn-off.
You know those songs where the lyrics are clearly written under the influence of drugs or are made to sound that way. I find you can't access those lyrics unless you're in that state yourself or if you think it doesn't matter what they mean.
It matters to me. It matters to me to understand lyrics. I find, with songs like that where you are thinking what on earth does that mean, that there's nothing there for me.
WJ: It varies a great deal. When I was studying music, classical music at university, one of the first things we learned was to just write down on a piece of paper the sounds that we hear. It's how a lot of classical composers write. They take a pen and they don't need to try it out on the piano or whatever. They just write what they are hearing down like words. I tend to write a lot of the music that way.
Sometimes the words come first and I tend to think that's a really good title, or that's a really good phrase, or a really good sentence, so I try to find some music for it. Sometimes the music comes first and we rehearse the songs for a long time, and of course the words come. Sometimes those songs tend to be the best songs when the words and music come at the same time.
There's a song called 'You'll Never See That Summertime Again' where the tune and the words came together. It came as a complete package, and is one of our best songs. 'Let's Get Away From It All' happened like that too.
WJ: No. In the early days we used to make demo tapes and send them out to major labels as bands did at that time. We spent a lot of time and money in studios making demos. Eventually we decided that we probably wouldn't be picked up by a major label, so we stopped doing that and started putting money into recording properly and getting stuff ready for release.
Those early demo tapes weren't very good unfortunately. When I listen to them now they are embarrassing. The singing wasn't very good. I was a very uncomfortable singer at the start and then my confidence got better.
We did get decent reviews for the early records though and then the major labels would say "We'll come and see you when you play in London", but they wouldn't usually show up and so we stopped bothering with them after a while. We have never had an offer though.
WJ: It would have to be a very good offer, because we would have to probably stop working for a long, long time. It's a very hypothetical question because it's unlikely to happen. If it did, it would have to be a fantastic offer.
WJ: Yeah, I've got a couple of moments really. There was one gig we did in Stockton-on-Tees in 1989. Everything was perfect. The whole audience was dancing the whole time. It was just a brilliant gig. That was a good one. Another one was playing in Japan. I went and did a solo concert with a percussionist, and that's where most of our audience is, so that was brilliant too. Another great moment was the first time we passed a thousand sales with any record.
WJ: It was with our first album, 'Let's Get Away From It All'. We had done two singles, which hadn't done that well and we were distributed by a company called Red Rhino, who at that time were part of a network of indie distributors, and they told us that if we did an album it would do a lot better than the singles and especially abroad. We were completely unknown really. No-one in Germany or Japan had really heard of us at that stage, but suddenly it went whoosh and we quite quickly got to 1000. We thought "My God, we're going to do a million" (laughs!)
WJ: Yeah!
WJ: It was. Yes!
WJ: I am involved in the label. I helped to set it up in 1986 with some other people in Stockton-on-Tees.
Originally I was working in this venue in Stockton. My role was as a music officer, and I programmed a lot of concerts - pop music, classical, jazz, folk, world music - and I ran classes and courses and workshops in music and we put on local bands every week and then we started putting on bands from the indie scene. We got a lot of bands before they went on to become much bigger, people like the Housemartins, Black, the Bodines, Primal Scream, and other bands like that, just before they really took off. The Mighty Lemon Drops played there. Edwyn Collins played there. Carter played there, and a band called 4,000,000 Telephones played there, who were the most remarkable live band I have ever seen. There was six of them. They were very unusual and totally wacky. There were two singers, who shouted most of the time. They were absolutely brilliant and they went down really well with the audience.
We formed the label really so that we could release Friends' music and the music of Carl Green who was in Whirlpool Guest House and 4,000,000 Telephones who we liked very much and who we wanted to get out records by. The whole idea of this label was that it was based around this venue where I happened to be working.
There were quite a lot of people initially involved with Summerhouse. We started off with those three bands, and then, as it grew, we took on Rumblefish who were quite big at the time and a Newcastle band called Quinn the Eskimo who did one album. Bands join, split up, fall apart, have rows, that kind of thing. Red Rhino, who distributed our stuff, went into liquidation and they had a lot of Summerhouse's stock which caused a lot of problems, so the label got kind of slimmed down.
It ended up for a while just being Friends and Shandy Wildtyme, to which Whirlpool Guest House changed their name, but they've now also split. Summerhouse has since then taken on a dance group called Southbeach. Friends and Southbeach are now the two main bands, and we're now looking at a third one to sign.
WJ: No, there is someone we particularly want to sign, and it may happen. It may not, but we're not looking for new bands.
WJ: Not at the moment! No in the early days the label got too big too quickly and it just wasn't very manageable. Running a label is hard work. It's a job in itself. I have a job. The other people on the label have jobs, so there is limited time to what we can put into it.
WJ: Yes. 'Let's Get Away From It All' was recorded by five very inexperienced people, most of them who were recording for the first time. The whole thing was recorded in less than a week and it's got a very simple, plain production, while on 'Beautiful You' the style of the songs is much more varied and the songs are more better developed. It's got a fuller sound and the playing is much more competent and I think that it's technically better-produced.
Some people like it. Some people don't like it, but I think that's the difference. In my opinion the overall quality on the last album is higher. The quality of the songs is higher than on the first album. On the first album there's some great songs, but there's a couple of not so great songs. On the last one I'm happy with all the songs.
WJ: I prefer the sound of CD, but there's things about vinyl I like. I like the whole kind of feel of the product, the size of an LP, its cover. Despite CDs being such a popular medium, I think the whole packaging is completely awful. It's such a hassle getting it out. I am just amazed that no-one has managed to sort that out after all these years. You have to sort of unpick the booklet to get it out of there. I find vinyl much nicer to handle, but I have to say that I don't miss all the pops and scratches you get.
WJ: No, because it would affect our sales too much. There are people in Japan who seem very keen on vinyl, but I think that that is just a kind of trend. We're, however, doing Southbeach stuff on vinyl only.
WJ: No, I don't. I have to admit that most of what I buy as well is old stuff.
WJ: Again a lot of old stuff. I constantly listen to Steely Dan. I still listen to the Chameleons and the Strawbs. I listen to Nick Drake, who I discovered a couple of years ago. There's a songwriter called Martin Newell, who used to be in Cleaners From Venus. I love his music. Have you read 'Lost in Music' by Giles Smith?
WJ: You should read that. The whole story is about the Cleaners From Venus. It's a brilliant book. I like Bob Mould very much. There's not a lot else I listen to at the moment. Southbeach's record is coming out, and I have become more interested in dance music as a result of that. There's very little contemporary stuff.
WJ: No.
WJ: The best advice I got was don't split up (laughs). Although we've been through many stages, and I suppose I am the only permanent member, we have never really split up and we have always kept the name going. There's no value in having a name unless you've got music coming out. I have always written lots of music.
It would have been easy though to play less, give it up, or think let's change the name. Friends is not a great name. Unfortunately the TV programme came along after we formed. It sounded like a great name at the time. It doesn't so much now, but we've always thought that there's no point in changing it because it's so difficult to get known again as a different name and to start all over again. My advice, therefore, would be don't split up. If you have got music coming out, keep it going.
My other advice to a band would be take it very seriously, but to do it, however successful you become, for pleasure. Make sure that you enjoy it, and always remember that the reason you are doing it is because you have something to communicate to other people. As soon as you start thinking of it as a career move, you might be might just as well be going into banking or another job. The reason you do it is because you have something to say and you want people to hear it. Whether you're on a major label, or doing it through your sound board and speakers in your front room, that's why you do it. If you haven't got something to say, and you're not interested in someone hearing it, don't bother.
