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Everyone in the band is in other things as well, and you often find that when you’re writing something, when it first starts, you don’t necessarily know where it might end up — there are three or four places where things I write sometimes end up. What’s interesting with the Easy Rollers is that of all the things I’m in, it’s got a really clear set of references that we all share, a very clear identity. If you’re writing tunes for it, you kind of know the ballpark where it needs to end up sounding. As a result, a lot of the stuff I write elsewhere is like “oh, here’s a cool idea, let’s see where that goes.” This is almost more like “I want to write something in the vein of this” — it’s a bit like writing to a self-imposed brief, rather than free-form. That’s been fun as a challenge, and I’ve actually found it musically more stretching. Like — let me write a ballad in the style of early Billie Holiday. It’s like, I need to really think about how to do that, and would those chords actually do that, or is that me doing something that’s not really appropriate. It’s always this dialogue between bringing your own thing and needing to make sure it’s clearly based enough on the artists we all admire and are transparent on stage about admiring. It’s important to write things that are moving it forward, with your own twist on music that’s now, some of it, 100 years old — but also important that your twist isn’t so far off that it sounds like you don’t care about the source, or that it just sounds like a museum piece.
One of the ways I’ve tried to manage that is to make sure the other things I’m into are still allowed to bleed into it subconsciously. We have a tune on the new album we’ve been playing every gig since we wrote it, called The Ballad of Billy, A Kid. When I wrote it, it was very much in mind of those big, melodramatic, minor-key, dark, swinging tunes narrated expertly by Cab Calloway — we used to play a couple of his songs a lot. But the story I was writing followed a slightly dark criminal underworld vibe, and the more I was writing it, the more I was actually thinking about British folk ballads — one of my loves of music to listen to. I love folk partly because I don’t play it; I’ve got quite a pure relationship with it where I just listen and don’t dive in. Musically that tune is very much in the vein of Cab Calloway, but in my mind it was more a broadside ballad, like tunes such as The Unquiet Grave — those well-known English folk tales.
There’s a tune by Eliza Carthy called Mr Magnifico. It was on some compilation CD my mum picked up from Sainsbury’s — just something that was on in the living room. It’s unusual because she only sings the chorus; most of it is a member of her band speaking a story about this guy, who’s a bit of a reprobate. That was a very strong influence for The Ballad of Billy, A Kid, trying to marry it up with the jazz aesthetic we all live in. I might write a sequel — not too much of a spoiler that by the end he’s not necessarily as alive as he was at the start. That’s maybe a tune people coming to see the Easy Rollers wouldn’t expect, pointed at this kind of curious album track from Eliza Carthy.
A lot of coffee and the whole British folk revival in the house. Not necessarily bleeding into the Easy Rollers directly, but there’s a quite dark-edged Irish stuff coming through now too, with people like John Francis Flynn and Lankum. I listen very widely to folk of all mannerisms — it’s a nice escape, it feels rich, and there’s a similar association with tradition and the tension between tradition and progression that characterises a lot of discussions around making jazz. There’s also that region-specific nature of things — like you’d find between Chicago and New Orleans and Kansas City, and now between things coming out of Scandinavia versus LA. I find it quite allegorical, which is probably why I’m drawn to it as a listener — not that I’ll be playing loads of folk tunes at our Easy Rollers gigs.
Taken from an interview with Jamie Stockbridge of The Easy Rollers in conjunction with Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot – You can get tickets for the band’s show there on the 15th July, along with their other upcoming gigs at https://www.theeasyrollers.co.uk/diary and you can view the other upcoming events at the Shakespeare North Playhouse at https://shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk/
