March 1999

by David Long

Jan’s gone pop! That’s right, no more dark brooding songs about ‘digging a hole bigger than hell’ or ‘throwing yourself at brick wall’. The dark gritty tunes of her previous releases have gone, to be replaced by sweet, sweet pop.

"Melusine’, her new single for her new label is a sixties throwback humdinger that’s sure to put more bounce into your step that any over-priced pair of trainers could, as its simple hook and cheeky beat have helped to make it the best single of 1999 so far.

"It’s sounding good on radio isn’t it? And it’s bigger than I thought it was going to be," says Jan as we sit sipping beer on Ponsonby Road. Whilst extra copies are being hastily reordered at radio stations throughout the country to replace those already worn out, I ask if this was an intentional change of direction to go pop.

"Yeah I guess," she says after a moment’s thought. "Just because I got sick of people saying I’m a rock chick. With my last album I was definitely moving away, I’d say I was not unhappy, but I needed to figure a few things out. Now I’m overhappy. So what do you write about when you’re not writing about that? Pop songs are hard, but I think I’ve figured it out, and its going to be a really good album."

Overhappy indeed. During our hour chat, trying to get Jan to say the remotest thing negative is like thinking of a word to rhyme with Hellriegel. When I force her to come up with at least one thing that gets her down, the best she comes up with is: "We don’t have enough of a selection of shoes in the country."

Hmm… Still don’t knock it, this new found enthusiasm is producing Jan’s best work ever, and plans for the next album are already in the advanced stages of thought. "Its all up here," she says pointing to her head.

"I’ll stick to the minimalist theme, with the vocals right up - no one ever does that - and I think the vocals should be big and blasting. If I look at my songwriting, its always changing. I don’t want to stay in the same place. I’d get bored if I wrote all the same songs all over again. I love change, I change all the time. I really did want to write a pop song that was a real pop song, but at the same time it was a really difficult song to write; it’s so much harder to write a song like that than anything I’ve ever done before. It’s so much easier to write an angst song, going down the scale in minors, that’s easy peasy. I could churn twenty of those out an hour." How do you expect the single to do? "It should do okay. To me it’s already a hit in my head, I don’t really care, well I do care, it would be really nice, but to me I’ve succeeded. I’ve had so many people, more people than with any other song I've ever written, come up to me in the street and say they like the song."