from "Convulsion" (a British fanzine) by Jane Wilcock
for more info about "Convulsion", try their website here.

Diamanda's new album is a collaboration with rock legend, John Paul Jones. We had the great fortune of being able to interview them a few short days before our print deadline. First on the phone was John Paul Jones, who was not at all as would have been expected. He was extremely polite, English and came across as the consummate professional.

I am very intrigued as to how you got together with Diamanda to create The Sporting Life.

JPJ: We have a mutual friend who I'd worked with before, and one day we were just talking and he said "Fancy doing something with Diamanda?" I thought that that sounded really good because I had been very aware of her work since 1983 and I had seen her perform at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1989 and so seemed like a really good thing to do. He had said that she wanted to do a more rock orientated album so I said yeah, I can do that. So he got us together, we exchanged tapes, wrote it and recorded it.

The album has a lot of emotion about it, beyond Diamanda's voice which is just so amazingly powerful, but the music itself is also very emotive.

JPJ: Well we have a lot of common tastes in music which we found out at the first meeting, which is very nice. It means we could do a lot without having to explain to each other what we had in mind. I tried to record it so it had as live a feel as possible and a lot of Diamanda's takes are just one vocal line all the way through, I think that they are all single takes or two at the most.

What city did you decide upon to write the album?

JPJ: Actually it was written in New York and in England. I was writing here and Diamanda was writing in New York, and we were swapping tapes. We met up, rehearsed and more or less got the material together in two to three weeks, we then got the drummer in and just put it down. With mixing, the whole thing took about two months in all.

We had met just once for an evening, when Diamanda was on her way to Norway last year, and we decided that we had lots in common. She is a delight to work with. It's easy to work with professionals, where everybody knows what they're doing it, why, and what they're on about. But, just because it's professional doesn't mean it's cold and calculated, you just know how to keep all the other unnecessary stuff away, and put all your energies into making music.

What have you been up to? Have you performed live at all?

JPJ: No, I haven't performed recently. Not since the two Led Zeppelin reunions. I have been producing, I have been composing quite a lot. I do lots of classical composition, but I haven't performed at all.

Why have you decided to play live now?

JPJ: I really like playing on stage. The touring aspect has been done before, but I was beginning to miss actually playing. It's quite enjoyable that. It's one of the attractions of the project, apart from working with Diamanda. The thought of just being able to take it out on the road, and play on stage is something I really have missed over the years.

We talked to Helios Creed not so long ago and he said that you had some interesting stories about when you were working with Butthole's.

JPJ: Really?, why would he say a thing like that I wonder?

You seem to choose who to work with very well. Is there anything you haven't done yet, because this album must be quite a landmark?

JPJ: I think so too. I try and make life as interesting as possible for me, and as exciting.

Well I suppose this collaboration is new for me in that I'm performing on it, and hope to take it out on the road so that's going to be quite different for me. I try and make my projects really different and exciting, because I have done everything really. There's no point in me doing the same thing over and over again so I try and do new things every time. Rather than end up as just a producer of Rock bands.

There are certainly plenty of them and a lot of them sound the same. I also like to make records that I like to listen to and at the same time do what's expected. It's nice to keep things moving forward. Rock shouldn't have ended in the seventies, but for a lot of people it seems to have.

Do you have any plans for after the tour?

JPJ: Well nothing's finalized yet. But before the tour I'm going to work on an acoustic project with Heart. With some of the old stuff as well , arranging them acoustically and with strings. We will be getting the whole thing together and recording it in a club. So again it's a bit different.

[The rest of the interview is with Galas. I only included the parts about JPJ and their collaboration.]

When we talked to Diamanda, it became apparent just how different the two personalities were. It also became extremely obvious how they could work together.

The last time we spoke you said that the only collaborations that you liked were those where you "Collaborate with myself". What has changed?

Galas: That is very true, but I could tell from the first time that John and I played together that this was going to be a very interesting collaboration. I have retaken that position because I really loved working with him. When we first met we talked about the kind of music that we wanted to do in terms of sound and we agreed immediately and all we had to do was see if we could play together, see if the vibe worked. He comes from such an eclectic range of musical experiences from leading Motown sessions, to arranging other peoples music to composing his own music to working with Zeppelin to so many other experiences. I do too, so we have a lot of common ground that perhaps, especially non-musicians wouldn't have a clue about, and since the comprises most of the music industry we are never surprised. (Laughs)

From listening to the album it sounds like you enjoyed making it.

Galas: Completely! That's utterly true, I did enjoy it tremendously and we are really looking forward to the live performances.

I asked Diamanda where the ideas come from for some of the songs. Firstly "Do You Take This Man?"

Galas: When I first talked to John about this album I was really interested in doing an album of homicidal love songs that were driven by the idea of following someone down the street that I couldn't have until I caught them. Like a hunt, that kind of idea. So I think that the songs have a lot to do with that. About refusing to let a person leave who has forsaken you. Lets say there is emotional content to a lot of the songs.

"Baby's Insane"

Galas: I think "Baby's Insane" is pretty much... (laughs) I don't mean to laugh in a pejorative sense but I mean there is a certain humor to it. I think it is a person who is kind of isolated in a room and people know this person is pretty moody and the person knows so and just wants people to go away, it's kind of eccentric. I think a lot of people have felt that way at certain times so it is that kind of song. Anyway, I think the lyrics say it better than anything I have to explain it.

"The Sporting Life"

Galas: "The Sporting Life" is about a female gang. You have to picture John and Pete Thomas as good ol' boys playing a shack along the side of the road and going "Damn!" Seeing my bitches cut some guy up just `cause we don't like the way he looks. Yeah, it's that kind of vibe. it's sort of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill Kill, but a lot more violent, a lot more nasty.

This album sounds like the definitive Rock album, but extremely fucked with it, was it intentional?.

Galas: Ha, thank you, I think there's no doubt about that. The music just goes where it goes. You have taken two people, who have come from similar but quite different places, and so it just happened that way.

When you are playing live who are you going to have to actually back you up and support you?

Galas: Pete Thomas, he plays with The Attractions, Squeeze, Los Lobos. He's a great drummer. He's played with everyone, a lot of different people. He's very strong, a really big guy - very funny, very, very perfect for this music.