No. 28: James Johnston

Lost in sound and vision with the "mangled rock'n'roll" racket-maker turned painter.

Hi all, thanks as ever for your attention, you’ve helped keep this project going and just on the personal level it has been a very reassuring constant in a year of storms and shifting ground. We’re really proud of how it’s growing, we have big plans for next year - but remember that this isn’t just about one interview after another, it’s about the totality of the thing, so if you haven’t, do make sure you go back and have a read through the archives. That’s how you’ll get the most out of it!

This time round we’ve got someone who epitomises that interconnectedness. Among other things, James Johnston is our second Bad Seed! He has also worked with Barry Adamson in other capacities too, and funnily enough, although it was Brian’s idea initially to feature Johnston (I think because he wanted to photograph his apron) he had no idea that he has also made an album with our last interviewee Dot Allison.

Of course Johnston’s first musical outing was his own band, Gallon Drunk, who I was lucky enough to see very early on in my teenage gig-going days. They were then, and have remained through various incarnations, an absolutely glorious, brain-scouring racket who felt like they tapped into a very old and deep outsiderdom well beyond the simple identities of the indie/alternative world of the time - but even though there was dive-bar blues and jazz in what they did, it wasn’t old-fashioned, but about an explosion of inspiration in the moment.

I’ve since seen him play a couple more times, once in an incarnation of Faust which pushed that complete spontaneous sound and fury even further beyond recognisable reference points into a truly psychedelic white light experience, and once with Allison which was altogether more restrained - tapping more into the Scott Walker-adjacent bleak romanticism that Johnston would also explore in his own solo album The Starless Room in 2016. Obviously, then, the minute Brian suggested him I was in.

Johnston is more a painter than a musician these days, as you’ll hear in the conversation, and he spoke to me from his studio with canvases behind him dominating the video call frame. He was a very calm, modest, somewhat quizzical presence, and much as I tried to draw him on questions of subculture and scene, it felt like none of that mean much to him compared to the experience of the act of creation - which, though his way of expressing himself in speech is low-key, he described compellingly.

But as in so many of our BMTatR conversations, getting into the details of creation gradually did start to explain a lot about how artistic networks build up, and as soon as we’d finished I found myself going back to many of his musical collaborations hearing them completely afresh - I hope it’ll do the same for you!

When we start the conversation we’re discussing the location of his home and studio, both of which are in Kennington, just south of the Thames in London.

Have you always been a Londoner?

I grew up in Guildford. For some reason, I always laugh when I say that. It just sounds so unutterably boring. I've met someone yesterday… I've got a show coming up in the Czech Republic and someone yesterday said that Guilford's quite famous in the Czech Republic. because some Czech goalie has moved there or something. When I get there for the show in January, I should keep telling people I'm from Guildford. But yeah, I moved up when I was 18 and lived in South London, then North London, then East London and blah blah…

It's like if you mentioned Basildon to anyone in Eastern Europe, they cheer because it's the home of Depeche Mode.

Yeah, exactly.

But I think everything to do with Surrey and the commuter belt is filtered through sitcom somehow in the British minds.

Ha! Quite rightly so, I think.

But Guildford... was it a cultured upbringing?

In as much as my grandmother lived with the family. She'd lost her husband. I don't think I've ever even seen a photograph of her husband. But, anyway, she lived with us and she was a self-taught painter and she could play the piano by ear, and the accordion, and that all seemed incredibly exciting, to go into her little space. And she'd have, you know, bottles of Guinness and it was all: wow. And she'd worked in a cigarette shop when she was young and had a bag under the bed with hundreds of old cigarette packets in it.

That’s the dream, right there.

That was just amazing, just sort of all weird play things that was just fascinating, all the pictures and everything. She was hugely inspirational. And we had her pictures up all around the house of animals and landscapes, and, to be honest, not that dissimilar to the stuff I'd do in a way. I can definitely see where it all comes from.

So she was there. My mum loved classical music and had it on all day, but Dad was completely tone deaf, literally, and was more interested in reading about the Romans or something, but obviously that's culture too. Not in the respect of what I ended up doing. I was aware of music, though, I was aware of painting, so my mum liked painting and obviously my gran was a painter and they took me to see things like when I was tiny, like the Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum. That was incredible. Mind blowing. I was six and that was thrilling, objects as time travel.

And then I ended up being selected to sing in a choir, so I had choral music when I was young before my voice broke, which surprisingly, I absolutely loved. I learned the violin. I was absolutely shit at it as well, though. And I learned the piano. I was probably worse at that. And then the other side of culture, I've got an older brother, Ian, who was mad about music, rock music, the Stones, Velvet Underground, Stooges, all that sort of stuff. So I had that as well when I was young and moved up to London when I was 18, ostensibly to go to King's College to study philosophy. And I lasted a year and was asked to leave very politely. The I was living in Earl's Court in a bedsit, which was great. Go a bit crazy as you would, shut in a tiny room. And obviously that was an option to go out, but I didn't take it that often.

Before this, had you participated in any kind of music with your friends? Were you into rock music with your friends?

Yeah, before I moved up to London, when I was at Sixth Form college, I joined a band and we used to rehearse in this little space. It sounds kind of, I don’t know if it was that glamorous, but it was above a chainsaw shop, which always seemed quite cool. We'd just make a noise in there and it was fantastic fun and play at parties, that sort of thing.

Did you take specifically to rock that was a bit outré, to the Stooges, to stuff that seemed a bit outsider, straight away?

Yeah, but I don't know if you even think of it as being outsider at the time. It's just exciting, isn't it? I remember a record like Fun House just being a record you could just disappear into, probably because you couldn't really understand the words as well. There was just this mad world that was just so thrilling and it just seemed the most exciting. Maybe. I loved The Fall and Public Image and what have you, all that stuff.

So it was sound more than image, from the start?

I suppose at that, at that time, that's really what you had. More than image, unless you bought every single music paper under the sun, which, to be fair I did as probably as much as anyone else. But yeah, it was mostly about the sound, wait for your parents to go out and crank it up as loud as possible.

Did you listen to radio a lot or did you have any other sources other than your brother's record collection?

Mostly my brother's record collection and John Peel again, like everyone else, you know, listening to that, lying in bed, taping it.

So you had your brother’s 60s/70s stuff, then post-punk – did punk itself get a look in?

Well I was born in 1966, so that was that sort of end of the 70s, early 80s point was when I was particularly receptive... I remember buying “Death Disco” and just thinking: this is the most otherworldly thing I've ever heard¹. Going to school and humming it, thinking: wow, this stuff is incredible. At the same time, that's when I first heard just heard The Stooges. That's when I first heard this and that. And some brilliant contemporary music being made at the time as well.