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Ever since about 14 or 15 I was in a teenage rock band, trying to be Muse while my cooler friends were trying to be the Arctic Monkeys. I’ve always written songs and words for songs, and never been the lead singer — I’ve always had a relationship with singing and songwriting through hearing somebody else’s voice in my head for it. On the most recent Easy Rollers album, it felt like: I do this for the other things, why haven’t I done this for this one? Partly I was intimidated by the harmonic knowledge you need to approach this stuff, and by the fact it’s a music so cemented in people’s heads that you don’t want to screw it up. But I was always a songwriter anyway, and applied that part of me to this. My influences for all of this tie back to being a 15-year-old in a band.
I don’t want to turn this into an issue about the fact I used to be a bit of a Green Day nerd, but especially their later, more grown-up stuff — like American Idiot — they were trying to tell stories, whereas when they were 19 it was all city pop-punk songs. I’ve always grown up liking songs with characters and narrative. A lot of the great Tin Pan Alley jazz standards do that — you listen to God Bless the Child and within that short AABA verse it gives you enough room to imagine quite a fleshed-out person singing or being sung about. Good jazz standards give you that space to create filled-out characters and stories.
There’s a tune — most famously recorded by Chet Baker — called I Get Along Without You Very Well. It’s really beautiful, a kind of breakup ballad. It doesn’t give you any context for what the relationship was like before or what happened, but you’re transported into the middle of something you can flesh out yourself. I’ve always been drawn to songs that either follow a clear story or put you in the middle of something clearly bigger — you can build it out your own way.
My dad still is a big Billy Bragg fan, and so am I now — the Ballad of Billy, A Kid was quite influenced by that, thinking about how to launch someone into the middle of something. Billy Bragg’s got a tune called Levi Stubb’s Tears, and part of the lyrics reference the Holland–Dozier–Holland Motown writing partnership we’ve all grown up with. The first line of the whole song is: “With the money from her accident, she bought herself a mobile home.” It throws you in — what was the accident, where is she now, what’s she running from — the first line gives you everything. I’d like to try and achieve that with a song one day. Some of the great jazz standards have stood the test of time because even though they’re pushing 100 years old, they’re vague enough that people can loop themselves in and feel they apply directly to them, without becoming meaningless.
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/
