JOSH LOYD-WATSON of JUNGLE: Kind of a Jamboree
An interview by Tim Gruar.
Elemental Nights, a captivating concert series during Elemental AKL 2022 returns to Tāmaki Makaurau this July with a sensational season of curated experiences celebrating the unique culture and creativity of the ropu and abroad with a veritable smorgasbord of show-stopping live music performances.
Included on the bill are Jungle, a UK electronic music project, originally founded in 2013 by producers Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland. With three studio albums under their belt including the Mercury Prize nominated ‘Jungle’ (2014), ‘For Ever’ (2018) and 2021’s soundtrack for summer ‘Loving in Stereo’ the band are carving out a reputation for soul-based funk tunes with a long line in 70’s grooves.
While the past few years have hit all of us pretty hard, Jungle put their time to good use creating a huge soulful disco record for our ‘post-social distancing age’. A Jungle live show is vibrant, empowering a collective feeling of togetherness. Jungle’s music totally references 70’s funk, and has been called ‘life-affirming, dancefloor-igniting, and a sun-kissed celebration of all the things that make music irresistibly joyful’.
Ahead of their visit to our shores Tim Gruar spent a bit of quality screen time with Jungle’s Josh Lloyd-Watson to find out about where their love of funk came from, dance music in a post-pandemic age, making a whole album’s worth of videos in six days, and the quality of grooves they’ll be bringing down under.
Hi, whereabouts are you based?
Hey, that’s my question! [Laughs] I’m in Wellington, the Capital. So, you’re coming down here to play in Auckland.
It’s kind of like the furthest point you can get from the UK…the opposite side of the world, it’s almost like a mirror, but nicer. We did a couple of shows a couple of years back – at the Powerstation.
This time, it’s the Auckland Town Hall. A much bigger venue.
Wow. What a change. You know, it’s interesting time with live music, it feels like everybody’s just opened up again. It’s almost like live stuff is almost oversaturated the market because of Covid. Everyone is catching up. I don’t know if anybody really saw that one coming. There’s so much to see all the time! There was nothing, then everything! We just started festival season. So, all the bands that weren’t doing anything during Covid are suddenly crazy busy.
So many bands here, almost by force, ended up having to do podcasts or returned to the studio…
Here in the UK, there was this ‘explosion’ of creativity. We all had to stand back, take a breath and then the creativity was unleashed – like a pent-up monster. All the bands that were making records during lockdown. And now they are all touring again but the demand on crew and that, so many found other jobs, started going home at 5 to their families again [laughs]. There’s a crew shortage now.
Is it just that the industry has been gutted by the pandemic?
And the Ukraine war has put demands on fuel costs and, well, the UK has been crazy since Brexit.
So how is the Dance Scene now? Has it come back? It wasn’t that long ago we had to be content with old Renaissance CD’s and a scarf over the lamp in the living room. Now, we can go back to the clubs!
[Laughs] That was me, too. The Dance Scene, it just disappeared. I mean, you know, we’re human beings and I think we’ve really only got, like, a certain attention span, you know, at the end of the day, without getting all hippie on it. Once the news cycle was changed, the anxiety goes, everyone comes back, Covid’s over and we’re back to were we were, you know? It’s the power of the media to just flick from one thing to another. People move on. They aren’t afraid to get back to the clubs, the crowds, all that. It’s just like before, now.
I think they just forget what everybody’s been through. It went from one day, you know, doing what we’re doing. Then flights with masks on and all these passenger locator forms and tests, hospital beds and numbers on the telly. It was like, you know, you have to have a lawyer to travel. And now it’s just like… Yeah, cool. Do what you want. I mean, it’s a good thing, but it also just makes you question the nature of our reality a little bit.
You and Tom McFarland have been friends since you were nine years old, back in primary school in Shepherd’s Bush. You started Jungle in 2013 mixing music and art in your shows and videos. You decided to concentrate on the work, take a backseat in the ‘fronting’? How did you come to the sounds, how did this package come to where it is today? Because, I don’t know, in my head I’m thinking: “how do you make something like this when you haven’t got the Jackson 5 or Quincy Jones in the room with you?”
Yeah [laughs], I suppose it’s just using your ears and knowing what you wanna do with it and like it’s about working with people who can make it work, and, you know, for us we see ourselves as like it’s almost, you know, it’s not too serious. It’s not too deep.
We’re trying to pick up from where hip hop left off a little bit, in terms of sampling, but also at the same time make it feel like there’s a live band, and then at the same time make it feel like it’s a remix of something that you’ve heard before. I think I can thank Radiohead for that. The way they balance between electronic and non-electronic and playing with that real and augmented sound they blend over.
We were inspired by hip hop tunes, and samples, but we wanted to create our own, and that takes you down all sorts of new rabbit holes.
So, you were aspiring to be more than DJ’s?
Yeah, we wanted to be more of a ‘collective’ by working with different artists across diverse disciplines.
When we’re live, we have more players – up to a seven-piece band, fronted by us. The music is sort of organic when it’s live, too. Like a sophisticated jam session. I guess that’s because we want a sort of honesty, a real connection. Not just playing a tape, you know?
Obviously, I’m not undermining that, but I think, you know, flipping records is one thing – definitely fun to do. It’s something that I’ve done a lot. But once I started flipping samples, I was like, well, that’s not my music, you know. So, we always get to the point where we ask ourselves: “Why can’t we make things that sound like that and cut them up and make them feel like samples on new records?” Almost Daft Punk sort of way, but somewhere between that and still sounding like it could be a Motown record.
Yeah, I was watching some live recordings and it always blows me away at how little instrumentation you actually need to get that big sound because you’ve got all those other toys on board, but just sort of like, you know, it always makes me a bit surprised when I look and go, oh, there’s only five guys on stage and a couple of singers but you get so much body of sound going on.
That’s the production we can do, live, and we work with great singers and musicians. We’re ultimately producers, you know, and we sort of just work with whatever we can do. If it’s strings, you record the strings and then you cut it off and you work with great singers and musicians and then blend it all on stage, like a conductor. We might also sing on the record, or get someone else. It’s the sum of the parts.
You record with one group, then tour with different people. Does it matter?
It’s better. You hear more. Different things come from different people, different gigs, same song, but the essence of the song is powerful enough that it doesn’t matter who’s singing it. And that’s really important for us.
Jungle is an ethos, especially in this day and age now, where it’s all about the individual, that icon. There’s Billy Eilish, Beyonce, whoever it is, you know, it’s this age of individualism and personal ‘brands’. There are no more bands that people really care about anymore.
For us, Jungle is like an escape from that, and it’s escape from this kind of desire to constantly think about yourself and to be part of something bigger.
You’ve recruited rising star Tamil-Swiss siner Priya Ragu for the jazz-tinged, kind of lounge number, ‘Goodbye My Love’. Then also another collab – with old mates Inflo (aka Michael Kiwanuka, Little Simz).
Priya is amazing and the Inflo team helped us write ‘Talk About It’. For ‘Can’t Stop The Stars’ we involved some intricate strings, brass and woodwind. We wanted a sort of cinematic feel to it. We all roll into a big warehouse-like studio, try playing all these different instruments, searching for all these sounds…
And then there’s a story about the videos as well. Isn’t there something about making them in a short period of time?
JFC Productions (Charlie Di Placido and J) directed a video for every single track on the album. They all form part of a wider narrative, a story that becomes clearer as each video is released, like a serial I suppose. We wanted more than just a dance video, a kind of continuing story about the environments – buildings, streets, rooms.
It was an interesting thing because it was a new concept for us. The song needs to be connected to something and having a visual really kind of helped people feel and imagine and go into the world of the song. And I think it kind of travels further in this day and age. More than TikTok and Instagram. Deeper.
Like thirty years ago, there weren’t a lot of music videos. People used their imaginations. But now you have to have one. We thought, how can we do this and make it kind of cost efficient. And so that ended up, you know, pushing us down the avenue of doing three a day. And that was intense! It was really intense and you know it was a very interesting process. So, we’re like six in two days or, you know, it’s just about the speed of things and the intention of things. And. And we set out to do that! And we had a great bunch of people and it kind of worked!
And that carries through to the new single ‘Good times/Problemz’.
It’s just a natural evolution from where we were two years ago with ‘Loving in Stereo’ and the stuff we were making then. I think you know gradually as it changed over time, things got more. You know, we’ve got better at understanding what it was sonically that we were trying to achieve.
Overall, we’ve evolved and grown. From working stuff out in our bedroom to the big stage. There’s us singing into a phone and then going into a studio and working with like choirs and strings and stuff and that just has a huge sonic quality that packs so much more intensity. It’s now that we have the ability to realize that sound. But at the end of the day, a song’s a good song – you only need a great drum beat and an amazing stonking vocal.
View this post on Instagram
So when you make it here, when you bring this to Aotearoa, to the South Pacific. What’s the band line up looking like?
It’s probably gonna be about seven of us. Which is enough [laughs]. I always wanna get as many people on stage as possible. You know, everyone’s singing, like an Earth Wind and Fire thing, you know. Percussion. Drums, Keys, lots of kind of synthesizers, sample pads, vocalists. It’s just a bit of a, kind of a Jamboree.
Jungle are performing at the Auckland Town Hall on the 26th July as part of the Elemental Nights Festival. Limited tickets are still available from the Elemental Nights website, but get in quick as you don’t want to miss out!
Note: This post contains an affiliate link. If you purchase a product using an affiliate link, Ambient Light will automatically receive a small commission at no cost to you.
If you enjoyed this content, please consider donating towards the running of Ambient Light, covering expenses and allowing us to expand the coverage you love by visiting our PressPatron page.