They are barely over their twenties and their music swears by the rock and hard rock of the 70s. A tour supporting Deep Purple under the belt, they already have the Maroquinerie de Paris in their sights next February.
Why and how “kids” from the English Midlands fell into a music that existed long before they saw the light of day?
James Bartholomew (vocals): I can only speak for myself. I fell in love with music in general around age eight or nine when my aunt taught me how to put a vinyl record on a turntable. It was an album of John Denver in concert at the Universal Amphitheater (An Evening with John Denver, nda) which grabbed me from the first song. Then my dad introduced me to Def Leppard, AC/DC, Journey, Van Halen and so on. It was only later that I took a, let’s say, more psychedelic route with Pink Floyd then Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath. But I would say that it was with the folk music of Bob Dylan or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young that I discovered the notion of songwriting. In fact, most of Jayler’s songs start as folk songs before moving on to something else.
A group embracing its influences, and without worrying about being perceived as a retro group, seems to be more accepted than a few years ago…
It’s very clear. As the decades pass, new genres or subgenres appear, such as doom or thrash in metal. Same with punk: we talk about post-punk, pre-punk, etc. At our level, I think that with the disappearance of legendary figures like Ozzy (Osbourne), people will seek to be interested in new artists who remind them of these legends. That’s how someone like Yungblud became all the rage. He attracts a young audience while drawing inspiration from older music to create something very personal. Jayler is following the same approach.
Jayler is very keen on your complicity with Tyler Arrowsmith, the guitarist of the group…
He and I like to say that we were separated at birth! But since he was born in December and I in July, and not the same year at that, the theory falls apart quite quickly (laughs)! If we happen to get upset during rehearsal, or even yell at each other, it’s forgotten within two minutes. I love and hate him like a brother… He’s the one who convinced me to be a singer when all I was thinking about was holding a guitar because I always thought that singers farted higher than their ass (laughs)!
What’s so special about the Midlands and Birmingham that we’ve already ” book “ Traffic, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Duran Duran and now Jayler…
I don’t know. There must be something in the drinking water! Or in the cigarettes we smoke. More seriously, perhaps it’s because Birmingham has long been an urban jungle, very industrial, from which people seek to leave as soon as they can…
