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 Fidelity!
Chrissie Hynde - Vocals, Guitar
JP Jones - Vocals, Guitar, Bass
Patrick Murdoch – Guitar
Sam Swallow – Piano, Keyboards
Vezio Bacci – Bass
Geoff
Holroyde - Drums
Fidelity!, the gutsy, raw debut album from
JP, Chrissie, & The Fairground Boys, is an epic love story,
albeit not a conventional one. Everything you need to know
about the heartbreaking, but ultimately uplifting and
fruitful relationship between The Pretenders leader Chrissie
Hynde and Welsh singer-songwriter JP Jones is contained
within Fidelity!’s 11 songs — from passion and desire, to
sadness and acceptance. As Hynde sings in the wrenchingly
candid opening track “Perfect Lover”: “I found my perfect
lover but he's only half my age / He was learning how to
stand when I was wearing my first wedding band / I found my
perfect lover but I have to turn the page / But I want him
in my kitchen and standing on my stage.”
Of course Hynde, a fiercely truthful
songwriter, and committed animal-rights activist, has never
been one to mince words. She has been beloved for decades by
fans around the world for what one critic has called her
“steely exterior and disarming emotional vulnerability.”
Hynde has met her match in JP Jones. The 31-year-old
musician hails from Porthcawl, a holiday resort in Wales
that is home to seven beaches and a large caravan park near
where his mother settled after growing up on a traveling
fairground. Jones’ father, a member of the Royal Air Force,
met his mother while on leave, and opened an arcade on the
fairground when Jones was a child. “I worked at a
neighboring arcade on the beach every holiday and summer
vacation,” Jones says. “I didn’t write a song until I was 20
and a friend encouraged me to stop noodling about on the
guitar and actually do something.”
Gregarious by nature, Jones approached Hynde
at a party in London in November 2008 without any
trepidation. “I’m good like that,” he says. “I can speak to
anyone. I just wanted to tell her I thought she was awesome.
I said, ‘Lechyd da,’ which means ‘Cheers’ in Welsh.”
Propping up the bar and five screwdrivers in, Hynde
remembers being approached by “some scruffy-looking guy,”
she says. “He was pretty hammered too, but we managed enough
of a conversation for me to ascertain that he was a musician
who had recently gone solo after his band split, and that he
grew up on a fairground in Wales.” Anyone who knows Hynde is
familiar with her connection to all things “fairground.”
(Remember The Pretenders’ “Kid” video?) “I’ve always
associated them with freedom and fun,” she says, “so when JP
said he grew up near one, something in me lit up.” The party
was too noisy for the two to talk properly, so Hynde gave
Jones her number, told him to call her sometime, then
promptly left for a U.S. tour supporting The Pretenders’
2008 album Break Up The Concrete.
Jones texted her within a few days wishing
her “All the fairground luck for your show tonight.” She
replied: “Write a song called ‘Fairground Luck.’” So he did
(“Fairground Luck” appears on Fidelity!) and sent it to her
the next day. “His voice stopped me in my tracks — what a
voice!” Hynde says. “And the song was like something I’d
never heard before — I was totally seduced.” When Hynde
returned to London, the two went to see Jones’ friends’ band
Big Linda, three of whom are now The Fairground Boys. When
Hynde embarked on another Pretenders tour, Jones continued
to send her song ideas and texts. “One of them said, ‘I
don’t know why, but I think we could make a great album
together,’” Hynde recalls. “No one’s ever said that to me
before.”
After winding up The Pretenders final tour,
Hynde returned to the U.K. in need of a
“coming-down-from-tour-break,” as she puts it. She and Jones
met up for coffee and Hynde surprised herself by impulsively
suggesting a trip to Cuba. Two weeks later — in a big suite
atop the famous Hotel Nacional de Cuba overlooking Havana,
surrounded by notebooks, empty rum bottles, and cigar butts
— the pair wrote the bulk of Fidelity! The album tells the
story of two people who fall in love but realize their
future is doomed by a 30-year age gap. “We laughed a lot
about the idea of riding around Wales in a caravan amongst
kids and dogs — our kids and dogs — but, of course, that
could never happen, so we put all of our irrational emotions
of disappointment into a tale of woe, heartbreak, and
ultimately, redemption,” Hynde says.
On Fidelity!, amid a backdrop of acoustic
guitar-driven rock and folk with blues and country
underpinnings (Moby Grape’s first album providing a great
deal of textural inspiration), Hynde and Jones unfurl their
story, both singing lead, trading verses, and wrapping their
contrasting voices around one another so naturally, it’s as
if they’ve been singing together for much longer than a
year. “Australia” tells the tale of how they met, while the
fiery “If You Let Me” conveys all the urgency of an
unworkable but co-dependant relationship inspired by the
Swedish vampire film Let The Right One In. The gritty
“Courage” builds to its emotional climax with both singers
repeating the refrain: “They got it wrong when they said
that we were done.”
“It wasn’t an easy album to make emotionally,
but writing and singing together was like falling off a log
— the music was pouring out of us,” Hynde says. “We wrote to
each other, about each other, with each other, and for each
other.”
But don’t think Hynde and Jones are crying
into their pints. Fidelity! (a title paying tribute to
Cuba’s abundance of signs celebrating Fidel Castro) is a
joyful, rock and roll album. Their obvious affection for
each other bleeds through every track, a sentiment conveyed
in the organic instrumentation, live feel of the recording
(two weeks in November 2009 at a studio in Oxford, England,
then another two spent tidying it up in London), and the
pair’s crisp, uncluttered production. They are releasing
Fidelity! on their own label, La Mina, through a partnership
with Rocket Science.
“We don’t have a middleman,” Jones says.
“Anything we want to do, we’re doing, and it feels
incredible. Especially considering the experience I had with
my band.” Jones’ previous band, Grace, was signed to EMI,
released an album in 2007 called Detours, and toured the
U.K. for two years. “The label splashed out all this money
and we were going to be the next big thing, like every other
band,” Jones says. But with record sales at an all-time low,
the label’s plans for a quick-cash chart success failed. The
label dropped Grace and the band split. Jones’ management
company began to connect him with hit songwriters, in an
effort to send him down an even poppier path, but Jones
wasn’t feeling it. “While I was going through all of this, I
met Chrissie,” he says. “I never knew who I was as a
musician. It’s so easy to get pushed and pulled in different
directions, but for the first time in my musical career, I’m
saying exactly what I want to say and speaking the truth to
people. That’s rock and roll, it’s real. Meeting Chrissie
has made me discover who I am.”
The relationship has been equally rewarding
for Hynde. She has collaborated with many musicians over the
course of her long career, including Mick Ronson, INXS,
Emmylou Harris, Johnny Marr, The Specials, Moodswings,
Incubus, Elvis Costello, Jeff Beck, Tom Jones, Cher, UB40,
Neneh Cherry, U2, Ray Davies, Frank Sinatra, Sheryl Crow,
Ringo Starr, Morrissey, and Brazil’s Moreno Veloso (a
pairing she calls “one of the great musical experiences of
my life”), but has never released an album under another
band moniker until now.
“For me, it's always been clear that music is
a vehicle to encourage self-discovery,” Hynde says. “That's
my higher goal. And I think truthful music makes you feel
joyful; it elevates your spirit. When your spirit is
elevated, you’re more open and attracted to things that are
correct. So we’ve been truthful on this album. We’ve proven
that two people can love each other, override their base
desires, and distill the love into something musical,
something elevated, something rock and roll.”
JP, Chrissie, & The Fairground Boys will
release Fidelity! through La Mina/Rocket Science on August
24th, 2010. |
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