| Biography
Space, Motorbikes, the Open Road First, the good news: Crispian Mills is back amongst us, armed with a brand new band and the best songs of his career to date. The bad news: what with the traffic, it's taken him three years to get here. You can't rush these things smiles Crispian, silhouetted by candlelight in the overgrown back garden of a West Kensington bar. You've got to be with the right people if it's going to work. Finding those people once is remarkable, but finding them a second time, well.... Around the table his fellow Jeevas (a derivation of the Indian term for life-force) nod approvingly. At the far end sits drummer Andy Nixon. A vision in black corduroy and beads, he appears to have been beamed in from a particularly beatific student sit in at the University of Do As You Please, California. To his left, chiselled, 'Easy-Rider'ish, bassist Dan McKinna strokes his beard and remains silent. The collective impression is of three twig-thin drifters who've just hitched a ride in a boxcar across the prairie to be here. Clearly, they're not hanging around. We had two rehearsals to start with, and after that we knew we were going to do something together continues Crispian. And for me that was a big step forwards. After all, it's been a while... For those absent throughout the Britpop explosion, Crispian spent the mid-nineties surfing the top of the charts as singer-guitarist with Kula Shaker. Boasting their own personal guru, interviews strewn with references to Arthurian legend and the knack of writing top five single sung entirely in Sanskrit, they were never going to fend off the critical onslaught for long.
After two gloriously psychedelic top ten albums (the second recorded on Dave Gilmour's Victorian houseboat, no less) they finally disappeared in a puff of smoke when Crispian, exhausted by the promotional treadmill, suggested disingenuously that flaming swastikas (an inversion of an ancient Indian peace symbol, remember) might look good as part of the bands light show. The press, finally discovering a chink in their armour, didn't so much have a field day as re-enact Agincourt. The end, spiritually at least, came at the Lizard Eclipse Festival in
Cornwall in August 99. One of the few places in Britain to witness totality, for Crispian it signalled, if not the end, then at the very least, the end of the beginning. Next stop, New York. I spent some time over there really trying to clear my head he explains. I always knew that at one stage Kula Shaker would split up, and it had just come to that point. I was looking for some kind of scene, or something, which would make me want to play music again. But I didn't find anything. Then when I came back I tried loads of things, none of which were really working.... Months came and went, and with them, line-ups of a band which came to be known as Pi. Things reached a nadir with an arena tour supporting the absurd Robbie Williams. Something had to give. Reunited with his original "K" era management, Crispian set
about returning to what he was best at: writing the streamlined psychedelic pop which had made Kula Shaker one of the great cult pop bands of the nineties. Having been introduced to Andy and Dan via mutual friends in Bath, the band gelled over a shared love of local heroes Bucky and set about forming a group who, as chance would have it, looked like extras from Antonionis Zabriskie Point and sounded like the Who with sunburn.
Andy: Things just clicked. We did four weeks of rehearsals, and then went in to record the album. We finished the entire thing in three weeks. We recorded it in this tiny studio in a Twickenham basement that could have been straight out of a scene in Help! and belonging to Pete Thomas (of the Attractions) continues Crispian. It was very claustrophobic and the walls
were covered in Americana: pictures of cowboys, Lee Majors, that kind of thing. At the same time, most of the music we were listening to was American. Hendrix, (electric) Dylan, The Pixies, The Sonics, plus plenty of wacked-out stuff. We wanted to get that feel of the freedom of electric American rock n roll into the record, that feeling of space, motorbikes, the open road. And it's there, it's in the bloodstream of it..." The Jeevas debut album 1-2-3-4! tells the story. If in the past Crispian's musical touchstones had been the talismanic trio of the post-Rishikesh Beatles, Deep Purple and the Small Faces, this time around he's entered into what was, for Kula Shaker, a self-imposed Forbidden Zone. The seventies. Debut single Virginia sounds like Transformer period Lou Reed reciting the lyrics of Syd Barrett, Ghost (Cowboys In The Movies) nods to a free fallin, peak-period Tom Petty, whilst a foot-on-the-gas race through the Undertones You've Got My Number speaks for itself. The nearest comparison you can make is to the spine-tingling treble assault of Big Star mixed up with the acid on the lawn harmonies of Relics era Floyd. Having had an entire century's worth of po-faced Noo Yawkers and miserable gloom rockers assaulting us via the airwaves, it's like waking up and finding out someone's cancelled Monday and installed a triple Bank Holiday instead. Better still, lyrically; the Jeevas are like On the Road re-written by Will Self. Tumbleweed, witches and magic bicycles arrive with every chorus. Not that Crispian's lost his self-effacing sense of humour since his brushes with the press. Just check
out Ghost: Skipping school/ Cutting class/ I'm never gonna pass/ I was predicted an F in all/ But religious education... One last thing. "The key is that I wanted to keep it simple, to keep it fresh" he adds. "Through everything I still see playing music as a service industry, and that's not denigrating it. It's about supplying people with a good time. The Jeevas, then. A great, grungy three piece rock band from Bath via Twickenham who look like friends of Serpico and sound like Hendrix if he grew up on an acid and strawberry farm in Somerset. If you've got any sense of humour or any standards at all you'll love em. Hitch a ride. Beep, beep, yeah! |
