Jim's story on the making of POPARTGLORY

How it started...

It all started on the internet I suppose...

I got in touch with some long lost friends and met some new ones. Alistair runs a great ezine called Tangents. He encouraged me to play again and put me on at his club in Exeter. It was a quiet beginning. Tom and I had started writing new songs on the acoustic guitar. It was good to get back together. It didn't turn me on enough though. The songs were good and we will use them again I am sure. I had been writing solely on the computer using Rebirth and Cubase as instruments, so I was more influenced by the Warp record label and drum 'n' bass than Britpop and guitars.

Wattie and Martin had already said that they wanted to get involved - Wattie had written some songs which sounded groovy. We took a few songs and decided to see what they sounded like in a proper studio. I worked hard to try to add more detail to the songs - Tom helped me program the drums.

The 3 songs were put together at home, with the idea that we would just go in and add guitars and vocals to keep that mix of sounds to the electronic sounds. This was more along the lines of what I wanted to do.

The songs: 'Learn to Suffer', 'I Heard 'I Wish It Would Rain'' and 'Blown Away' came out fine. Blown Away included some piano by Kenny Hossick. He had sent me a MIDI file of his ideas and I edited them and changed some of the sounds to a lullaby-sounding music box/ glockenspiel to give that child-like innocence. Kenny was keen to help out as much as possible and became a mink thereafter.

Wattie came down to Oxford for the recording and had been working very hard on guitar parts for the songs. He played the nice solo in 'I Heard...' and contributed with his composition of the powerpop 'Learn to suffer'. 'I Heard 'I Wish It Would Rain'' included the vocals of Pam Berry. Pam was a Minks' fan from way back and was pleased to help out. She sang in many other groups including Black Tambourine and The Castaway Stones. Her voice worked great on the song. She also did a vocal on 'Learn To Suffer', but we opted for my take which was originally just a guide vocal for Pam.

Tom and I did a few gigs together in London and they were great fun. Martin got involved too. Wattie lives in Newtonhill and I live in Dunoon, 4 hours apart from each other. I had written a few pages of thoughts and lyrics and posted them on a website. Wattie took the idea, redesigned the website to look better and we were off. He added photo's and beefed everything out. He even managed to add music to the site with the acoustic demos that Tom and I had done and the full group demos. But things were going slow.

I work on momentum and need that constancy or I retreat into ennui. So I suggested that Wattie and I send each other ideas every week: ideas for lyrics, guitar riffs, website additions etc. Even musings about what we think the group meant to us. We called it 'Minks at Work' and got started straight away. I had loads of old tunes, samples etc. which I dusted off and sent. Wattie sent me lyrics, tunes and rants. Every week there would be something new. We started a few months before Christmas 1999. By Christmas we had a load of tracks made up of a mix of old and new ideas. Wattie was inspired and put them all on a CD with the 3 songs we had recorded in Oxford. The resulting 'Veritas' compilation is a great taster of the madness and change that we were going through in those months and gives a flavour of the ideas we had had floating around in our heads during the 1990's as a whole I suppose. A mix of ideas as to what we might have done if The Jasmine Minks had been active as a group then.

'Veritas' is very rough on sound quality, being mixed on primitive software and then compressed in quality for sending as emails. The levels are all over the place too, some tunes jumping out and others purring away quietly.

After the 2000 New Year, things began to take shape properly. On the 1st of January I worked on a tune with a sample from an old 1970's disco tune. It later bacame known as 3B48 (marvellously titled by Tom and shrunk in to bite-size by Chris, a friend and Minks' fan in Greenock). The tune stomped heavily. I sent it to Wattie, who immediately sent back an introduction in an Isaac Hayes style - 'Hey boy, just dance'. I had been on holiday on the Isle of Skye the previous summer and had jotted down loads of lyrics. I tend to write freeform stuff and pick out the good snippets later. These optismistic words came from there as did a few others.

With 3B48 we thought we were on to something good. At last I heard something that I thought was simple, hard and bright. That was the beginning of a mad month or so where nearly every song was a cracker. Nearly all of the songs for the album came from those weeks. They were basically mapped out and eventually we bought an 8-track recorder. The original demos were added to as I travelled around to get Kenny to do keyboards and Wattie to do the guitars.

We then went into a studio called the Foundry in Glasgow and overdubbed most of the vocals and all of the live drums. Wattie got this great guitar sound from a pile of effects and his Rickenbacker 12 string. It inspired me to pick up the guitar again (I hadn't played one note of guitar on the whole writing of the album).