Tony Bacon gets influential with Simon Booth

'Then I heard the Miles Davis album 'Kinda Of Blue'," says Simon Booth. Working Week's founding member sits in a cafe round the corner from the One Two office. This album was the jazz he'd been waiting for.

"It was a very accessible jazz record. The hard bop before had been incessant: a one-minute head, then heads-down and go for it, then a one-minute head again at the end. But here was some lyrical, beautiful tunes, atmosphere and mood, and there was part of my psychology that needed that sort of music. Up until then I suppose the nearest thing I'd got to it was the odd ballad on a fusion record, or the odd soft soul number.

"I suddenly thought, there's a whole wealth of music that I don't know anything about."

Have you felt like that lately, what with everyone going on about all that jazz? With Working Week's first album just about to appear, we thought it would be a good opportunity to ask Simon — guitarist, writer, and member of the three-way core of the group (with Larry Stabbins and Juliet Roberts) — to give a few pointers and to map out his own entry route into the musical jungle known loosely as 'jazz'. So how about it?

"I'm a classic example of one of those people who got into jazz by accident. I was working at Mole Jazz Records (jazz shop in London), I'd just sort of come out of punk. If I listened to any jazz at all then it would have been the mid-1970s hard-end of the jazz fusion — Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, George Duke. I got bored with that, it seemed to be technique for technique's sake. So there I was sitting in the back of the shop packing records, or serving at the counter. The shop specialises in 1950s be-bop and early 1960 post-bop, so the first few weeks was just an indistinguishable mass of saxophones, and of drums going around walking basses.

"The first record to really strike me was the Stan Getz/Astrid Gilberto/Gary Burton LP called 'Getz A Go-Go', recorded live at a Greenwich Village cafe, and I was immediately struck by the atmosphere and the cool singing. It was one of the most evocative records I'd ever heard, and most of all it had fantastic songs. I spotted Carlos Jobim's name on the sleeve notes and got some of his records out, and I was quickly intrigued by a lot of his guitar playing, and got the chords out of the Jobim songbook.

"I was amazed by these weird, ethereal melodies over these very odd chords — major ninths and things like that, but odd voicings largely played on nylon-strung guitar. I don't think you could argue as a musicologist that Samba chords were anything different from jazz chords. I suppose the difference is the voicings and the rhythmic context."

And then you heard 'Kinda Blue' and read Art Pepper's book 'Straight Life'. Art Pepper must have struck you as a pretty extreme character?

"He made Sid Vicious look pretty tame, yeah. He spent considerably longer in jail — a brilliant musician, stunningly beautiful music. It struck me then that from my background and generation, a white Londoner, been to comprehensive, gone to college, you don't really come into contact with that tradition at all, even if you come from a soul background.

"What happens in jazz is that you make the music your own — you discover your own saxophone players, your own favourite solos and favourite records. That film 'Jazz On A Summer's Day' rounded things off for me when I was getting into the music, it's still one of the most stylish films I've ever seen. Everyone looks like your average young London trendy does now, flat tops, dark glasses — and it was done in 1958. The Chico Hamilton band were up there, button-down shirts, mohair suits, the style of the mods in 1966."

Do you think you're free to interpret the jazz of the past as you see fit?

"Well, I realised there was this music to be rediscovered and explored, and that maybe in doing that you'd get an interesting new synthesis. When every new generation takes up jazz there's always a new input because there are other influences. I was still listening to a lot of pop music and a lot of soul music, which is right! It's what everyone does. There was one 18-year-old at Mole Jazz, a jazz drummer, he wouldn't listen to anything but jazz, hated all other types of music — but I think he's a real exception. Interestingly enough, the National Jazz Centre (Opening in London's Covent Garden in the middle of 1985) is trying to promote the fact that it is an extremely open music, you can't really limit the boundaries of jazz. There's the jazz bigots who say, well, jazz stopped with Kid Ory, or with Swing, or with Ellington, or with Parker... or there's the avant-garde buffs, too, who reject the rest."

Are there other landmark jazz albums you'd point to for people who are just beginning to feel their way around the music?

"There are a lot of accessible records, like, say, 'Sidewinder' by Lee Morgan. That's been re-released and it's re-emerging as a club hit because it's a good dance record. It's from the early 1960s, a typical r'n'b, jazzy, Blue Note thing, all acoustic. Early funk, I suppose. Or there's classics like Dexter Gordon's 'Our Man In Paris', or... Johnny Griffin, though he's a bit intense for some people. I suppose you should start off with the more 'tuneful' stuff. There's always Nat Adderley, Cannonball Adderley. Their 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' is a great record in the soul-jazz vein, a real gospelly feel to it. And Jimmy Smith's 'The Cat', everyone who hears Jimmy Smith immediately thinks it's good, even if they don't like jazz. Thelonious Monk writes great tunes — 'Round Midnight' is a wonderful song, immortalised on Radio 2 as standard MOR! But it was a hard-bop classic. Then there's Latin jazz: Stan Getz, Carlos Jobim and all that, and a lot of the modern jazz is good. Arthur Blythe I like, particularly his guitarist Kelvin Bell who I think is one of the most innovative modern jazz guitarists, he avoids all the standard bop clichés and chords. He supposedly plays this 'harmolodic' stuff that James Blood Ulmer does, but I'm a bit suspicious of that. It's really just different, or rather unconventional, scales. And there's radio. If you're in London, Solar's Giles Petersen plays fantastic jazz, and plenty of the more dancey, Latin, bossa stuff."

A lot of the pirates are scoring by playing the music people want to hear, rather than inane DJs using music as a sort of sideline. It must be difficult to get on to national radio?

"It's the biggest thing holding Working Week back — I'm sure 'Venceremos' would have been a huge hit if it had got daytime play. The sales were fantastic in local areas, towns, but what makes a record a hit is if it sells in the suburbs too, in the provinces, and the only way you can get through to that is by radio. Unless... what I'd like to see happening is the return to jazz clubs like there were in the early 1960s, going into your local pub and there'd be a jazz club or r'n'b club upstairs or in a local coffee bar. That's where information's passed on. That's how a lot of soul music gets around now, after all — records sell through discos, all-dayers.

"We've got to avoid a certain trap... often, in some kinds of interview, the only reason the journalist has come along to interview you is because they know it's good copy now, jazz is trendy, everyone wants to write about fucking jazz. Working Week? Oh yeah, they're a hip band, they've been in 'The Face'. These people turn up, know nothing about jazz, fuck all. You talk about a music you love, and all they want to know about it is the hip side. As far as I'm concerned, the music's got universal appeal. The last interview we had in 'The Face' was the most disgraceful example of a journalist coming along and just wanting to write some supposedly in-depth attempt to suss out the 'jazz revival', and coming up with a pack of lies, rubbish. What do they want? Every band on 'Top Of The Pops' to be a jazz band? And then they'd say oh, it's boring now, and they'd start investigating the new wave of Mindless Pop Music. It's just the ebb and flow of trendiness..."

Your first record with Weekend, back in 1982, had jazz influences ('View From Her Room'). So you've kept the faith, as it were?

"Yes, we haven't turned round after two years and said oh, we've had a crack at it, this hasn't made us trendy so we're gonna ditch it and 'discover' another type of music to do. A lot of people have."

How do jazz influences affect you as a guitar player?

"I've played a lot of nylon-string guitar on the album, and to be honest I don't like the sound of raunchy rock guitars. I've listened to a lot of jazz players, people like Joe Pass, Howard Roberts, but I don't particularly want to play like that myself, I don't want to sit down and go up and down the scales and use as many different chords as I possibly can. I love melodic lines played on guitar, I really like Spaghetti Western twanginess on guitar, which I think comes out on the album. And when we play live I tend to play more like early Velvet Underground than early Joe Pass. As a guitarist I want to play texturally and rhythmically, I don't really want to solo. In the band, I'm more of a writer, I spend a lot of time writing... as a player I'm a bit of an upstart, but I'm not worried about that. The worst thing that could happen with this whole new jazz thing is that everyone could get obsessed by technique again. That was the great thing about the punk attitude: if you want to do it, you can."

Do you need a big Gibson semi-acoustic to play jazz?

"Well that's what I've got, and I use it. But for some of the album I was using a Strat. Before I had the Gibson I had a Gretsch Chet Atkins with a really thin, weedy, plunky-plunky sound. I got that because in Weekend we played a lot of African music and it's great with a bit of chorus on, really cuts through, play a chord and you don't get any 'meshing', you can hear the strings. It was a very light guitar, too; but I think the Gretsches are over-rated. Everyone wanted one because Nick Heyward was using one.

"I'm not a guitar buff, I don't know the model number of my Gibson. I think it's an ES175. It's like the one Pat Metheny uses, the standard big-bodies, two-pickup Gibson jazz guitar. I think I saw a picture of Roddy Frame with one once in One Two Testing. But guitars have to be played, and I'll play anything. It's a good guitar to play with your fingers, which I like doing.

"I've got this nylon-string Yamaha acoustic which I bought for £105 — I got it because I wanted to take it on holiday with me, I thought it'd come back beaten up. But it's brilliant. On 'Autumn Boy', a ballad on the album, we put a contact mike on the guitar and got this unearthly sound, the most horrible nylon-string sound I've ever heard, but in the context of the track it sounds great. And on 'I Thought I'd Never See You Again' the warm nylon-string playing's done on it too, the same as on 'Venceremos'."

Are you into guitar gadgets at all?

"I used a wah-wah for the first time on the album, on 'Innercity Blues', that actually worked out well, it was really a matter of feeling it rather than getting worked up about the machine. And on 'I Thought I'd Never See You Again' we couldn't afford any more strings, so Robin (Millar, producer) suggested I play the guitar with E-Bow. The sound was perfect, it sort of reminded me of all those Roxy Music albums. I haven't used one of those before either — ridiculous, I thought, unworkable! It didn't seem to have any power. I'd expected to hold it a foot or so in front of the guitar and something would happen, but you have to plunk it on the strings and wait about four seconds for it to start humming. I just played what I thought was a string part, really easy. I couldn't use it on the Gibson, there was too much acoustic resonance, you needed a solid. So I used the Strat."

'Jazz Guitar' is a vast area to investigate, again, for someone fresh to the music. How do you sort that lot out?

"In some ways, the guitar in jazz is the last outpost of jazz conservativism. The Barney Kessel, Joe Pass, Tal Farlow style. I saw Tal Farlow live, and it's almost like classical guitar now. All those guitarists are brilliant, but they've gone as far as they can.

"To me, the greatest example of jazz guitar playing, really innovative jazz guitar, was the first album McLaughlin made, 'Extrapolation'. I think it's also one of the best jazz albums to have come out of Britain. He does the most amazing textural things, and over-playing. But I don't like jazz-rock at all. It always seems like sixth-form music, music for people doing physics A-levels, for people who know every kind of computer model there is. It's for people who'll listen to the album and be more interested in the effects that the synthesiser player's using."

Whereas you're interested in a much wider definition of the term 'synthesis'?

"Scritti Politti are a case in point of a pop group who I think successfully bring in other areas of music — Green's attitude to pop is great. It's a melting pot, you can be completely iconoclastic, completely irreverent. If I want to have gospel singers on this track I'm going to do it, if I want a jazz solo, I'll have it. You wouldn't, for example, find a free jazz solo on a country-and-western record, but you could have that within a pop context. There is an element of that in Working Week. The track 'No Cure No Pay', an eight-minute work-out, has a lot of humour. There's a John Barry/James Bond speeding-down-the-motor-way-in-your-Ford-Capri-with-your-dark-glasses-on horn line on that track. It's dead groovy."