Their latest single, S.O.S, has been released to an audience eager to hear how Bluejuice will find their feet after the departure of keyboardist Jerry Craib. Recorded in the UK, the song was helped along in the studio by an impressive roster: Blue May and Alex Burnett tackled production duties while session players Sam Best and Ade Omatayo, formerly of Amy Winehouse’s band, joined seminal vocalist Vula Malinga of Basement Jaxx Oh My Gosh fame.
Despite the daunting talent surrounding Jake Stone in the east London studio, he felt at ease steering the song towards its final sound. “They’re all a tightknit group of musicians and while they’re busy, they’re not necessarily working for any more money than what people would be working for here and were quite easy to get in to do this,” Stone says of the session players. But was there any feelings of intimidation?
“Yes absolutely, there is some of that. We already had a demo of the song done and they basically played to that. They always ask if that’s what you want, but it’s more that they’re like a steam train and you can’t change direction too much once they get going. Luckily, what they were doing was generally what I wanted. They’re fairly confident in their abilities so once they get an idea what they like they’re gonna drive that idea and you’d have to be very musically onto it to even keep up with the musical process of the band. I had so much trust in the band and was confident in what they were going to do.”
Bluejuice have seemed to be a crowd favourite from the early days of Vitriol screeching out across the airwaves. S.O.S already has toes tapping and Stone acknowledges that they while they have enjoyed warmth from the industry, they’ve worked damn hard to get that.
“There’s an affection for the band which I’m really grateful for,” he says. “We’ve worked to market the band in that way; we really felt like we had to do everything we could. I was writing for The Brag for a long time, I was bartending at the Hopetoun and the Annandale and most of my friends were in bands but we were never the cool band. We needed something to push us out there, the performative style of the band was different to what was going on at the time so that helped, and our ability to do media really helped too.”
A risk that the band weren’t really in a position to assess was the departure of keyboard player Jerry Craib. “It was scary because he is so talented and he was such a big part of what the band do. But we knew there was a way to overcome it. Bands have replaced people before, you know, it’s happened.”
If AC/DC could go on then anybody can. “Definitely,” he agrees. “When you think about that, if you have replace a vocalist that’s a big ask. Luckily AC/DC were primarily a rhythm section and even though Bon Scott was almost definitely one of the greatest rock‘n’roll front-men in history, Brian Johnson came in and does a great job. We’ve got a lot of songs there and I knew we could get past it and make them work. Our front of house engineer strangely enough said, ‘I’ll give it a go’ and we were like, ‘But you’re our front of house guy’ and he was like, ‘Yeah but I can play keys’ and suddenly he was playing our whole set and we were like. ‘Whoa’. He’s been the biggest surprise because he wasn’t even playing with us before and now he’s nailing our set. So yeah, I feel good about everything.”
If people know your music intimately enough to be concerned that a synth patch has been slightly altered than really, all you can feel is complimented. Bluejuice have clearly made the impression they set out to make.
“I expect it to come up, people are naturally interested in that and I understand that people want to know whether we’re still the same band,” he says. “We won’t be the same band, Jerry was a completely different player to the other two guys although Cameron is probably closer to Jerry he’s not as interested in funk. Alex is great and they’re both, well, Cameron can do the set and make it sound like Jerry and does a different thing and is probably a new evolution and the likely future direction of the band.
“At the moment, we kind of have two touring bands – one with Ivan and Cameron on drums and we have Alex and James our original drummer. There’s a degree of everyone having a go here and it seems to be really working. I know which one I’m most comfortable with and I’m not going to say. At the same time there’s a workable format with both set ups. If you know the band, you’ll know some patches are different and some parts are being played differently but it’s essentially the same.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
