The Devil and Mr. Kay
Nov 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Simona Rabinovitch
“You want to talk about space?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, let's talk about space,” challenges Jay Kay with a crooked smile. Eyes gleaming, he leans back in his seat. “I'm fascinated by space because I'm in it — the concept of getting up and looking at the stars and seeing a million places you could never go in this lifetime. I just want to go there. Have a look at my planet. But we can't even get to Mars, we can only get to the moon. If we hadn't spent all our money on weapons and killing each other, maybe people could go up there.”
Jamiroquai fans know the space theme is omnipresent in the band's music. As indicated by their titles, the group's albums — 1992's Emergency on Planet Earth, 1994's The Return of the Space Cowboy, 1997's Travelling Without Moving, 1999's Synkronized, and 2001's A Funk Odyssey (named after 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kay's all-time favorite film) — share a motif that is both practical and ethereal, combining environmental activism with cosmic ideas. Further, all five records share that irresistible Jamiroquai sound, which basically reinterprets the jazz, funk, disco, and soul music that a self-proclaimed “skinny white skate kid” first experienced in London's underground acid-jazz clubs — a sound that's helped him sell 16 million albums worldwide.
But people may not know that space is also the undercurrent of Jamiroquai frontman Jason Kay's life. “I've seen the line between darkness and light. I've been on the Concorde. I've flown so high and so fast that you see the line, the angle, like that,” he says, tracing an arc in the air with his finger. “I thought that was so amazing. You don't normally get to see that line so condensed. I absolutely loved it.”
Although he may not articulate it in such literal terms, it's clear that Kay himself lives on both sides of that line, forever navigating the yang-yin, black-white, bad-good system of human opposites he saw, one night, in the sky.
VIRTUAL INSANITY
Jay Kay's flashy antics have made the outspoken pop star a favorite target of British tabloids. His image has all the makings of a trashy newspaper's wet dream: the fleet of sports cars, including a Mercedes G-Wagon, a Bentley convertible, and three Ferraris. Buckinghamshire Manor, the £6 million 18th-century country estate he calls home. The glamorous former fiancée, British TV presenter Denise Van Outen. The quirky Gucci-meets-skate chic. The hat collection. The music videos. The debaucherous party habits, troubled family history, and public tantrums. All of the above have earned the cocky cat in the hat a reputation as a spoiled, hard-nosed star who lives life in the funk lane.
But this Monday morning at Manhattan's elegant Four Seasons Hotel, beneath his occasional shenanigans and swanky threads (no hat today, just checked trousers and an expensive-looking simple black T-shirt), Kay displays none of those traits. Frankly, he seems simply to be the boy everyone wants to take care of. Still waking up, he sits quietly in a closed section of the restaurant while his doting entourage hovers patiently about the bar, making sure everything is okay. His assistant sweetly tiptoes over, pours some cough syrup into a tiny plastic cup, and pats him reassuringly on the shoulder.
“I don't court tabloid publicists,” Kay says. “I always felt someone was feeding them information. I've got into trouble, smacked a couple of them in the head, demolished motor vehicles.” He is compelled to counter his decadence by pointing out his environmental awareness. “People see the Ferraris and the country estate and the girls, but they don't get to see the other parts of my life. They don't see me grow my own organic vegetables and fish in my own lake.” In fact, his social and environmental concerns are well documented in his music. For example, the hit single “Virtual Insanity” had the planet singing the dangers of biogenetic engineering long before cloning became a reality, and the Jamiroquai name is a reference to a displaced Iroquois tribe.
All in all, Kay comes across as far more reflective and self-critical than his party-boy persona might lead one to believe. (He's taller than you'd expect, too.) Indeed, his personal life has gone through changes that explain this evolution. In interviews with the British press, he speaks of ending his high-profile relationship with Van Outen upon realizing that the couple wanted different things from life and that she was not the woman who would provide him with the support and simplicity he craves. He has a capable new agent, who also represents Elton John. And, most revealingly, in a recent interview with the London Times, he alluded to shedding a cocaine habit, realizing as he approached his 30th birthday that the second skin could ultimately end his career. Kay turned 30 the day before the new millennium.
Kay's past throws some light on his two sides and upon his often-conflicting needs for public approval and intimate love. He is a surviving twin who speaks of living life for two people — himself and the brother who died when the two were infants. “It's like … I never quite seemed to get where I want to get,” he reflects. “I never quite knew what it's like to be settled down in a relationship. I never quite knew what it's like to have a twin brother.” His Portuguese father (whom he met only recently) left his mother, jazz singer Karen Kay, shortly after their birth. Much of Kay's childhood was spent on the road with his mother, and the two remain close.
Despite his shadows, Jay Kay is still Jay Kay and has neither need nor intention to stop having fun, being wild, and doing exactly what he wants. Getting into his favorite subject, he lights a cigarette. “Let's face it: we're all from space. All made from space dust,” he continues. Are you sure you can smoke in here? “Don't worry about it,” he assures. Oh, dear. This isn't Buckinghamshire Manor in England but the Four Seasons in New York. Jay Kay ain't no P. Diddy (although he might own better cars), and smoking in nonsmoking dining rooms is an eyebrow-raising faux pas. Sure enough, as Kay takes his final drags, a waiter approaches and politely requests that he butt out. No problem at all, mate, as he's already smoked it anyway, a detail surely not missed by the well-timed waiter, obviously a pro at dealing with celebrity posturing.
COLONEL MUSTARD WITH THE CANDLESTICK IN THE BISTRO
Later in the evening, it's dinner with the press. An eclectic assortment of journalists and music-industry types sit around a big round table at Da Silvano's, a trendy Italian bistro in Greenwich Village. Much like a game of Clue, this type of industry dinner usually consists of a bunch of characters who don't really know each other. And, much like a game of Clue, interesting characters make for interesting situations — particularly if alcohol is involved.
Suddenly, there is Kay, standing awkwardly in the doorway enveloped by his entourage. He sports a plush derby and silver-sequined trainers and is surprisingly shy. After a flurry of musical chairs and introductions, Kay and his manager join the media posse while the rest of the Jamiroquai crew sit one table over. A mildly awkward moment ensues.
“So, Jay Kay,” says an editor from FHM, breaking the silence with some male bonding. “I love your music. I really like to listen to it when I have sex. Do you ever listen to your music when you have sex?” Laughing, Kay says he does. As the attention shifts in his direction, Kay is reborn, delighting the table with tales of British raucousness, some of which are actually funny. As the evening progresses, he alternates between bouts of shouting and silence, gleeful performance and self-consciousness.
Between the antics of Kay and his delightful Scottish manager, the entertainment is spectacular. Apparently, Elton John and Kay get along smashingly, and Kay and his manager love to eat. “Alright, I think I can help us both out,”Kay whispers conspiratorially to someone who confesses to already having eaten. “You order the sardines for me; that way I won't look like such a piggy!” He orders a massive plate of pasta. “I might be skinny,” he proclaims, “but I'm lithe!”
Good wine flows freely, and after dinner Kay is frolicking happily on the pavement outside the restaurant, chatting up the maître d' and busting an occasional impromptu dance move.
BANDS ON THE RUN
Kay says that although he “mucks about” the studio, he leaves the fine-tuning to in-house Jamiroquai engineer Rick Pope. “I'm not much of a producer. I'm really the person who kind of sits at the back.” Still, all mucking about takes place in Kay's impressive home studio and new digital programming suite, both nestled in his ever-bustling 11-bedroom estate. “I built that studio and we did Synkronized in there,” he announces.
Although A Funk Odyssey doesn't stray from that shake-your-funky-ass Jamiroquai sound of previous albums, it does represent some changes within the outfit, notably the addition of talented guitarist and cowriter Rob Harris and the absence of former bassist Stuart Zender, who left the band in 1998. (Rumor has it that Kay wrote the hit “Canned Heat” about releasing his anger toward Zender and that the two have since reconciled.)
A Funk Odyssey's ten tracks showcase a broader spectrum of styles, incorporating a harder rock edge, sweeping orchestral soundscapes, and honest ballads. Of course, Jamiroquai's anthemic songwriting and disco grooves remain at the forefront. The album's first single “Little L,” an upbeat dance floor number cowritten by founding member and keyboardist Toby Smith, debuted at the top position of Billboard's dance chart. “You Give Me Something” and “Feels So Good” are equally hot.
“I'm not a genius,” says Kay. “Melody's my gift. It really doesn't go much beyond that. I just try to get it as close as it can be to what's in my head. I've always hummed. I get joy from melody — more than from anything else in life.” Despite the high of his music, his songwriting process seems agonizing. “I'd write a song, write the lyrics, hear it, and decide it sounds like rubbish. So I'd kind of write the lyrics first, think of the melody, sing it, hear it. As I've gotten older, I spend more time thinking about what's good and what's shit. It's difficult to be a good judge.”
Perhaps the highly personal nature of A Funk Odyssey made the album tougher to write, as it clearly reflects Kay's current state of mind. The emotional ballad “Picture of My Life” reveals the confusion and sadness of feeling lost and has been interpreted by British media as a reference to drugs. “It was hard to get out,” says Kay. “I woke up one morning, and I wasn't in the best place in my head.” But every dark side has its light. “Corner of the Earth” is as uplifting as “Picture of My Life” is dark. A tribute to Buckinghamshire Manor, it features such lyrics as “Nature's got me high, and it's beautiful/I'm with this deep eternal universe/From death until rebirth.”
FUNK PHENOMENON
From a production standpoint, the challenge of making A Funk Odyssey was to go for an electronic edge without losing the organic sensibility of a live band. To achieve the desired live-meets-electronic fusion, Jamiroquai sampled themselves. Rather than record a track live in its entirety, each musician recorded a few bars, which were then sampled and looped.
“We sampled the band on most tracks. We didn't always play it live,” says Kay. “I built another digital studio upstairs, and we'd get the track together in the digital studio and transfer it to an SSL board. By doing that, we warmed up the sound a bit. We didn't want a hard digital sound. We're still a live band. You've still got to keep the punch in it.” Another benefit to this technique was speed. “Sampling enabled us to get the framework of each tune. We did ‘Feels So Good’ in no time at all using 16-bar looping. It made it a bit easier. Rob would give us five or six licks. We did it really for speed and ease of use on Logic. We could just shove things around.”
The grinding, ultralow bass line that drives “Feels So Good” is a Memorymoog with an OSCar over the top. Kay's shoulders start grooving as he hums the bass line in question. “We kept it simple — really old-school. I wanted an electro-funk-rock kind of track. There was so much phasing on the voice, it was hard to keep in time. The vocals were going through an Emagic phaser, and that guitar went through the bit crusher. We wanted to use filters and plug-ins in a way that hasn't been done before, to mix new technology and old — old reverb units, obscure delay units, a crackling little preamp. But we skipped the auto tuner. We didn't want to sound like Daft Punk.”
Although he digs the filtered disco sound of French producers — Bob Sinclar has remixed “Little L” — Kay maintains Jamiroquai was doing the filtered disco thing five years ago. “I've fought all my career against sounding like everyone else, but we were way ahead. Christ, in 1996 we were doing that! If the ‘Cosmic Girl’ remixes were redone, it would be killer. I said years ago people would move away from hard techno and get into the disco thing 'cause it's more fun.”
AMERICAN BOOTY
Kay really hopes A Funk Odyssey will do well in America, hopes it contains enough magic space dust to propel the record into uncharted Top 20 galaxies, hopes to finally know his music is good enough to truly take off. Travelling Without Moving may have earned four MTV awards and a Best Pop Performance Grammy Award for “Virtual Insanity,” but Jamiroquai never quite achieved a level of U.S. success comparable to the band's majestic British reign. So making it big here would mean a lot to him.
“I've been doing this for 13 years,” Kay says. “I'd like to see something of my work reach the Top 20 in America. I'm always a critic. I listen to the album, and I kind of sit and think, ‘I wonder if I could have done it better.’ I hate this bit a few weeks before the album comes out, just waiting for the score. What are people going to think? One bunk album and you're finished.”
Despite the self-doubt, Kay partially attributes the disappointing U.S. sales of Travelling Without Moving (if you call a million and a half copies disappointing) to poor promotion by his record company. Signed to an unusual eight-album contract, Jamiroquai has been with Sony since 1992, when Kay split from his original London imprint, Acid Jazz. “A record company should work for the artist,” he asserts. “It cost me a lot of money to move from Acid Jazz, but I couldn't handle that thing of not being able to expand. Moves were made in the short term. I'm a long-term person. They still earn money from my music.”
Yet until he delivers what he calls “a big smashing album,” Kay often finds himself in the frustrating position experienced by most recording artists: trying to make the label understand the vision. “They tried to keep the whole album snappy and short. ‘You Give Me Something’ had an extra three minutes of beats on it, but the powers that be wanted it short.” So how did Kay make the record he wanted to make? “It was difficult. I had to do a lot of fighting. I didn't want to cut it down. It's an odyssey, something that summed up 2001. It has to be a certain length to do that. I felt they were cutting the journey in half. I was like, ‘You're cutting out my journeys, man!’ But I got my own way.” He grins.
Kay plans to post on his newly reappropriated Web site (www.jamiroquai.co.uk) some raw material that didn't make it to the album and invite his fans to finish it off. “I've got lots of good stuff on the net — new snippets every two weeks, beatbox things. I want to give them to people and they can piece it together themselves. They can make what I had in mind as the original full-length album. People can get a picture of what it's really about.”
MARS AIN'T A PLACE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS
Later, whisked into the night by a long limo and a large security person, the party moves to a dark little club. At the bar, it seems only right to challenge the Brits to a tequila-drinking contest. Someone must have slipped the DJ a promo CD, as suddenly “Little L” is blasting through the speakers and people are getting jiggy on the dance floor — including Kay, who breaks out the same sexy, fluid dance maneuvers he flaunts in his videos. Surrounded by people he trusts, he is the center of attention and appears blissful.
Dance/Through good times and bad times just dance/Got canned heat in my heels tonight.
Something Kay said earlier about space comes to mind, a fatalist prediction that a giant asteroid may hit Earth in 2028: “They sent out probes that made that calculation. It will miss us by less than 600,000 miles; on such a massive scale, that's nothing. We should pay more attention to space. You never know when the end will come.”
And suddenly, it's clear that Kay's line between darkness and light is a tightrope.
Associate editor Simona Rabinovitch likes sleeping under the stars, flying in airplane cockpits, and challenging celebrities to drinking contests.
Jamiroquai Selected Equipment List
OUTBOARD PROCESSORS
Akai ME35T
Alesis QuadraVerb
AMS DM-20 Phase Simulator
Aphex Aural Exciter Type III, Model 250
BBE Sonic Maximizer
Behringer Composer
EMT 140 plate reverb
Korg DT1-Pro tuner
Lexicon 224XL
Mutronics Mutator
Roland SDE-3000
Roland SDE-330
Roland SRV-2000
Roland SRV-3030D
Roland VP-9000
Sony SRP-L200
Sony SY-DPX-V77
Sony TCD-D 100
SPL Vitalizer
TC Electronic M6000
UREI 1176
Yamaha SPX1000
SOUND MODULES AND SAMPLERS
Akai S3200XL
Akai S600
Roland JV-2080
Roland XV-5080
KEYBOARDS
Elka Synthex
Korg X5D
Moog Memorymoog Plus
Moog Minimoog
Moog Prodigy
Moog Source
Nord Lead
Oberheim OB-4
Roland JP-8000
Roland Poly 4CV 100M 184
Roland Studio System 100m
Wurlitzer electric piano
Yamaha P-150
DESK AND TAPE MACHINES
Lynx Toneline
Mackie 32-8 bus console
Mackie PSU
SSL 4000E/G VU/TR 56 input
Studer A827
Tascam DA98
Tascam RC989 remote
Yamaha O1V + digital card
COMPUTERS AND SOFTWARE
Apple 8600/250 MHz
Apple G4/500 MHz
Emagic Logic Audio Platinum 4.5
Emagic SoundDiver, Zap, S-1, EX-1, ES-1
Steinberg Cubase VST 3.5
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