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Interview
by SashaS
20-9-2002
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| The Shining boys' rocking verve |
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Paranoia and beauty
The Shining rise high above the former alliances
When (rather than if, we hope) one has an opportunity to listen to John Squire’s ‘Time Changes Everything’ and The Shining's ‘True Skies’ in succession, it will be clear why they couldn’t work together, despite trying for seven months. The Shining's music is adventurous, searching for new horizons, reaching beyond conventional to outline their sonic takes.
Two members of the band are known faces from The Verve days, bassist Si Jones and guitarist Simon Tong, and there are three newcomers: singer Duncan Baxters, drummer Mark Heaney and guitarist Dan Macbean. Jones, Baxters and Heaney first met while attempting a band with the former Stone Roses’ guitarist Squire.
“It was about eight months after The Verve’s split,” Jones expends on the story, “John (Squire) rung me and asked if I wanted to go up there (Manchester) and have a go; he was playing with Mark and Duncan at the time and I spent seven months travelling up and down the motorway… But, after all these months I didn’t feel it was exactly what I wanted to do, my heart wasn’t in it and I told John; he understoodd and everything ended up amicably.”
“Mark was feeling the same,” Jones continues in his Wigan-ese accent, “Duncan wasn’t sure… They persuaded me to have a go with them; I suggested Simon, from The Verve, to come in and play keyboards and guitar, he knew Dan… So, out of one band not working out we came up with the one that works just brilliantly!”
Supernatural rock
The Squire assembled squad played “retro-rock”, as Jones puts it succinctly, and the outfit did demo/record songs that “are gathering dust” somewhere. The Shining, nameless until the moment of signing a contract, spent almost 18 months rehearsing, writing, hanging out and getting to know each other.
“We locked ourselves away,” Jones explains genesis of their sound, “and didn’t have any contacts with record labels, managers, anybody; we didn’t want to play The Verve card... We learnt to play together, getting the feel how everyone plays, building that intuition between the members… We actually demoed the whole album before coming out, at all…”
“We felt we had fully realised idea of who we were,” Jones enthuses, “what we wanted to be, what we were about. We didn’t play it on the ‘two-guys-outta-Verve card, give us a contract.’ We got people to come and listen to us; we played six or seven songs, to really find out what we could do and when we got several deal offers we really knew we earned them on our own. The album was born out of love for music, it is simple as that.”
“There’s a supernatural element to rock music which rarely gets tapped into these days.”
Way to a reason
The talk of a ‘rock-renaissance’ continues and guitar bands are cramming our attention monitor; although The Shining are not wagon-jumping they might appear akin to the Brit’s neo-psychedelia (in passing), they do not fit in because there are elements of Sly Stone and Funkadelic, Kraut-rockness and avant-garde rocking Can-style. Making their lives necessarily more complicated, perhaps?
“We don’t fit,” Jones readily admits, “but The Verve didn’t fit, either. The reason why is because we believe in what we do, it is a question of artistic honesty… We play what comes natural to us without any, sort of, contrivance… Our next album will be a next chapter in The Shining career and not a pastiche of The Stooges because that’s what is in.”
“What’s more beautiful now is not being afraid,” Jones suddenly confesses, “which was a big problem in Verve and it was stressing everyone out… But, you learn how to deal with it and set your goals further, you know what can be achieved. Ambition has grown in that sense.”
With some members so young to be hardly out of their teens, singer Duncan is only 20, and at the begging of a Rock’n’Roll road, while Jones’s been there and partied it, having a six-month-old baby and wife, he must be looked upon as a party-pooper?
“Yeah, I have different priorities,” Jones sighs, “but it only takes me a couple of days to get back into a touring routine and can party as well as the rest of them. I’d be gutted if I were to stay in a hotel room while they were out having fun. It’s different when we are in London, more sedate, more responsible…”
Earlier in the day a newsitem’s arrived about The Rolling Stones playing a private show in LA for a $7 million price tag. We wonder how much would The Shining charge to play in our back garden?
“I don’t know if I could put a price on it,” Jones thinks aloud, “but I think we can settle on a couple of kegs of beer…”
The order is placed as soon as we part company!
Tour dates:
21 September – Leadmill, Sheffield
(Five Spanish shows - see local press)
02 October – Masque, Liverpool
03 October – Garage, Glasgow
05 October – Academy 2, Birmingham
06 October – Sugarmill, Stoke
08 October – Cockpit, Leeds
09 October – University, Manchester
10 October – Mean Fiddler, London
SashaS
20-9-2002
The Shining’s album ‘True Skies’ is released 16 September 2002 on Zuma Recordings
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