Jewel Scheme may be a new name on the scene but it’s a name with some pedigree as Martin Henry, Chris Connick and Allan Carroll were all early members of De Rosa. Whilst Martin went on to become that band’s mainstay, with Chris leaving and rejoining the band on a couple of occasions, the three school friends had not made music together for twenty years before Jewel Scheme.
Their self-titled album was recorded between Cyprus and the Scottish Highlands and Martin was happy to take ITM? through each of the record’s nine songs.
But when discussing the overall song-writing process, he was keen to stress that unlike his previous works, he is much less the central song-writer for this project.
“Most of the songs came from demos that Chris had brought but I brought ‘Stink’ and ‘Spectral Index’ which were quite well formed from my demos. And there were maybe two or three others that we actually just invented together.”
Without any further ado, here’s Martin telling us how the Blue Nile, Talk Talk and Battles as well as … Vladimir Putin and Scooby Doo !
You’re Not Wrong
“That was from one of Chris’s instrumental demos; he does a lot of really interesting keyboard led stuff.
“Lyrically, it’s a song for my daughter. You get to that age, when they’re in school and they start to care about what’s happening with their peers as much or more than what’s happening with their parents.
“There was just a moment when she was feeling a bit down about people who had run away from her. So, it’s pretty much just a reassuring little kind of tune about that, ‘You’re not wrong, now that they’ve run away, don’t chase because under your own rib cage, you build a place.’
“There’s that kind of reassurance you try to give as a parent which is that home’s always here and as much as we can, we’ll always be here for you.”
Spectral Index
“That came from a demo I made in 2007 in between ‘Mend’ and ‘Prevention’ that sat there for years and didn’t find a home. It was always an instrumental so when I listened back to it, I tried to think about how I would sing it so the words and the melodies are brand new.
“It has a kind of drone thing; it doesn’t move much from the one chord. And I was reflecting a bit about music that does that that I like, and I was thinking about the Blue Nile and ‘Hats’.
“Lyrically, I was thinking about getting old and recollection and I think that’s a recurring theme in some of my stuff, so ‘way back when, they’re all there’.
“It’s funny, I don’t really talk about spirituality or belief for anything like that normally but I do when I’m writing lyrics. It’s just a nice space to do it, isn’t it?
“But it’s about life and death and change.”
Chordal
“This is all Chris, this one. I really like it and it’s really odd but I don’t think Allan and I added much.
“Most of what I added was editing. I think it came in with a kind of big chunky boom, boom, boom, boom. And I think I maybe just chopped that a little bit so it was a bit less of a shock when it came in.
“This is my wee song where I get to moan about social media, you know, ‘scrolling all the vids in your threads, it’s like disease, and our memory spreads’, talking about the legacy that we leave when online.
“There’s a weird middle eight and it sounds like a really bored creep in an old room with a lamp and a mobile phone, you know?
“And it’s got a Scooby-Doo reference in it! It says, ‘the gang in the mystery’. I think the kids were just watching Scooby-Doo that day, so I just flung it in!
“You know, I really don’t care if things are that cohesive and certainly not in Jewel Scheme. I think that there are threads in each song but for it to take a corner and go on a tangent and back is fine.”
Stink
“That’s one of mine. It’s talking about capitalism – ‘It’s good for you, na na na’ and ‘You go where the money flows.’
“I’m singing in an American accent quite a bit more and the Scottish accent is much softer. At first, I had “There’s Jesus in the parking lot again” and I had to revise it, “There’s Jesus in the car park again.”
“Again, it’s about authority and who’s in charge. Billionaires. And there’s a bit when it says, ‘beneath your golden bird’ and I was thinking about the big golden eagle that’s in Glasgow Cathedral. So there’s stuff about religion and systems of control. And then at the end, of course, it just says ‘we’ll guillotine you, we’ll take your heads, drop your coins instead, we will remove your heads’.
“I don’t usually write that – angry, slightly political stuff. But I did it in a way which is a bit vague and daft.”
Minor Bad
“I think that it was worked on in Cyprus, but it came from a starting point from Chris.
“It’s just all feel and it has a kind of Talk Talk vibe, there’s loads of lush reverb, 80s synths and piano.
“I had just come back from a trip with the family to Paris and it did say ‘At the tower of Eiffel’ but it just didn’t sound right. So I changed it to ‘at the tower of Babel, we were miles away’ and I started to talk about language.
“It’s pretty dreamy and vague but it really fits the feel of the song itself which has a really weird structure. And it’s really difficult to play live as well!”
Bells
“’Bells’ is a funny wee single. It is really catchy and I think that there’s just something about it, it’s kind of an earworm one.
“It was really Cyprus in terms of it didn’t exist that morning. We had been exploring and went to a village called Omodos in the Troödos Mountains of Cyprus and we made some samples. The bells you hear at the start are from the monastery from that village.
“I don’t remember much about actually making the tune other than we were all sitting round playing in a house in Cyprus and the next day, I think I’ve probably had an idea for the melody for ‘help me out’ and stuff like that.
“And I sung it when I got home and that’s the only song on the record that is one take in terms of vocals. The rest of them are revised a little bit but that one I just sung it once.
“I think it’s really vague and opaque but I was thinking about a dream that I had so I just sung it from that kind of place.”
Rhayader
“I really like this song, it might be my favourite. It came from a demo of Chris’s, but we all worked on it a lot together. In terms of the mix and the sound, it just came together really well.
“Rhayader is a place in Wales and this is about the Rebecca riots in Wales, I’m not gonna be able to sum it all up, but basically, there were landowners that started to control the roads. There had never been tolls or gates before and it really messed with the locals and the people that worked the land there.
“So they organized these attacks on these tolls and gates and to do so the men would dress up as women to sneak up on the gates and attack.
“And they even had a rhyme they would say when they were attacking these places, I’ve used some of it in this song – ‘nothing to stand in our way, sisters, you and your mothers must be free.’
“So that’s my little version of that story.”
Big Table
“I think this one sounds like Battles, it’s got quite distorted synths and live drums, which are quite prominent.
“It came from an instrumental from Chris and which was called ‘Big Table’ and I just thought he must have written it when he was sitting at a big table!
But he told me he was thinking about the big, white table that Vladimir Putin uses when he’s sitting at one end. Because he’s terrified of other people and stuff, he doesn’t want to look small compared to people so he doesn’t sit too close to them!
“So, there’s loads of stuff of my idea of what’s going on in the head a totalitarian leader, for example, ‘We sit together separated by a length of wood for them to brood’ or ‘you’re just a fly, tiny fly, so sit opposite me and wonder who is on my mind’. All that stuff.
“That was fun. I like that one. It’s got that pretty funky based thing at the end as well.”
Democracy Amethyst
“That’s one we made up together completely.
“In all these songs I was looking for a chance to sing and do things that I don’t normally do and I made up this kind of dub walking bass line for this one.
“And singing fast is something else that I don’t do a lot. I usually find that stuff really hard to do so I just wanted to do it and see what it was like. So there’s a kind of rap.
“I think it’s a nice closer for the album as well, in terms of like, it’s funny but it’s also dark, you know?
“It was kind of inspired by some news and political things that were going on at the time as well. I don’t want to go into it too much because I just don’t like talking too openly about that stuff.
“I was being critical a bit about authority but I’m glad that it’s vague and that it doesn’t actually say what it’s specifically about.”
The album is released on Gargleblast Records on CD or as a download on Friday 13th September and is available from here.
The band play their first ever show to launch the album at the Glad Café in Glasgow on Sunday 15th September. [Tickets] Martin plays a rare solo set of early De Rosa songs to open the show.