JT: Hello.

Hey, is that Josh? {He’s laughing already.}

JT: Yeah, hi.

Hi, it’s Jem from Frost.

JT: How’s it going?

Pretty well.

JT: I hear you’re in the studio right now, rehearsing or recording. What’s that for?

We’re just at the moment starting to rehearse for the gig.

JT: Okay.

We were meeting yesterday. We were over at John Mitchell’s place, just sort of, um, just running through the album and listening to it and thinking, oowwh, we can’t play that.

JT: Ha, ha, right, right.

{He is sort of half-talking half-laughing himself.} That’s where it started. As for the studio, I’m kind of halfway through writing the second album already.

JT: Oh, wow. {I’m thinking this means more possible songs for RoSfest.} Okay.

Yeah.

JT: So, what gigs do you have coming up?

We’ve got four days in Europe with Pallas, I think, in October.

JT: Oh, great.

That should be cool and then I think we’re doing a couple more up in the UK and then we’re doing RoSfest in April.

JT: I was curious, how did that RoSfest thing come about? {For the record, they hadn’t even released their first album when they made it into the line-up.}

John Jowitt is very well connected there I think {statistically speaking, he’s played there every year, so he’s more visible than any artist to festival goers} and kind of, there’s been a bit of buzz about the band. So, we kind of, either we asked them or they asked us and then it’s just which is the correct answer, but, um, they were kind of very keen for us to be there. So, we agreed immediately, because everybody wants to play there anyway.

JT: Yeah, John Jowitt’s been there every single year. I think he’s the only musician that can claim to say that. {He laughs} I was wondering; is he going to come back this year and then I see he was in this new group and I was kind of speculating, maybe this group would come.

Definitely! I mean, he’s the common link. I think if he wasn’t in the band, it might not have happened. Thankfully, he is and we are so.

JT: Okay. You were talking about the new album, but before I ask you some questions about that, I wanted to talk about the current album that you’re in the process of releasing.

Yeah, sure.

JT: I think it’s an unbelievable album. In some ways, it crosses the pop world and the progressive rock world. It’s something new. It’s something I haven’t seen before and think every song in it is great.

Aw, thank you man, I appreciate it.

JT: So I wanted to ask you some specific questions about the songs on the album.

Okay, go.

JT: Like why did you start with an instrumental song?

I kind of, I was listening to the audio. It was the first thing I wrote for starters. It didn’t fit anywhere else. I couldn’t really, I tried to put it halfway through and it didn’t quite work cause the intro is quite long. So, I kind of thought, I needed, I really wanted for the listener hearing it for the first time to not quite know what to expect. It was a minute and a half of this quite gentle piano. So, it was, I was just trying to fool people really, and then also it not having any vocals, you don’t quite know what to expect from the band when the second song does have vocals. I was just trying to mislead, {he laughs} kind of mislead people really.

JT: Oh, yeah.

I have to say, it just seemed to fit at the front for some reason. I don’t know why.

JT: It’s funny that you bring that up, because when I first started hearing the album, I actually thought it was an instrumental album.

Yeah.

JT: Which I was totally fine with, I thought, oh, great, these guys are really top-notch instrumentalists and then right into the second song, that’s really like a vocally-driven song.

Absolutely, yeah.

JT: The second song now, what is that about? You say, “no me, no you.” What does that mean and what are you singing about in that particular song?

It’s kind of, it’s about somebody who, um… pissed me off about two years ago and I haven’t talked to them since. So, it was quite close to me as well. It’s not direct commentary on that situation, but it’s kind of a roundabout sort of thing about, you know, when somebody oversteps the mark and you decide to kind of extract yourself from their lives. It’s a song about that really.

JT: Okay, and who’s the Snowman… or what is the Snowman?

Uh, death. It’s all cheerful stuff, you see, it’s all about a fear of dying that one.

JT: Oh, okay.

It’s just that sort of thing, you kind of, there is always that eternal question of is there anything else afterwards and it’s that sort of fear of not knowing as that moment approaches.

JT: That song is quite a bit different than all the other ones. It’s kind of a laidback song. What’s the idea behind that?

Again, I have myself this rule, for every one thing I do, it’s not always neat or dynamic, for every one thing you do, you have to do the opposite. So, I kind of wanted to, if ever I was to do a complicated bit, I have to do a simple bit, or a loud bit, I’d like to do a soft bit. So, it’s kind of, I just wanted to get light and shade on the album as much as possible, you don’t sort of get semi-acoustic prog songs really. I sort of wanted something that was a bit kind of a bit Peter Gabrielian, a bit sort of almost like a strange little acoustic number even if it had loops and synths and stuff, but I kind of wanted something that very definitely didn’t have loads of drums on it.

JT: Actually, just to proceed down the track listing, “The Other Me,” I believe you talk about your little Frankenstein.

Yes. {He guffaws if there was ever a good use of the word}

JT: Is that, I think as far as that one’s concerned, I think I kind of have an idea like what that’s about, but I thought you could just extrapolate upon that.

Well, it’s kind of; it’s actually a sob story. It’s about a bloke who clones himself and then implants that clone on his wife and then his wife gives birth to himself and as it grows up, it replaces him and nobody notices he’s gone because there is another one.  So, it’s just kind of weird, sort of a bizarre cloning horror story.

JT: Wow… What is the little Frankenstein?

It’s the baby.

JT: That’s the baby.

Yeah.

JT: Okay.  I could have never figured that one out. That’s funny. My favorite song is, they’re all great, but “The Black Light Machine” is my favorite one.

Yeah.

JT: It’s almost as if you’re getting two songs in one, because it builds up and then switches gears. You get the same themes, but it’s more bombastic. What is the Black Light Machine and how did you come up with the idea to break it up in two ways like that and just develop that song?

It was written, it’s kind of a weird song, because the guitarist with the sample, I’ve had that on my computer for about four years actually. I would just pull it out some times and just play around with it and it was always a really cool riff that I liked. The funny thing about it is the back half was written before the front.

JT: Hmm.

Cause after “Hyperventilate,” the next thing I wrote was the end half of “Black Light Machine.”

JT: Oh, really?

And so therefore I felt, well it can’t be another instrumental. So, I need something to sort of get on the front of it. By some sort of very happy coincidence, that little guitar riff I had was in the same kind of key, so I built a song around it. I wrote it in reverse as it were. So, I sort of worked backwards and it was the second thing to start and it was also very last thing to finish that chorus in the first half. I couldn’t get a chorus for months. I’ve got like demos of 25 different choruses on that song.

JT: The one interesting thing about that song is that I’ve played that for people who aren’t necessarily into progressive rock.

Yeah.

JT: And they really like that song and it’s kind of a song that can actually polarize people from the pop world or the mainstream world into progressive rock. It’s just so catchy, but it’s just so different. Most people who aren’t into progressive rock, they can’t really handle these long songs and that one just kind of kept their interest the whole way through. It really does a lot.

Yeah, I mean, everyone says it’s poppy on that first half of it. As to what it’s about, Black Light Machine is, there was a guy, I think he was in the American Midwest about 1900. I think he was, a guy called Philo Farnsworth, who pretty much invented television. He was just in a bit of a race with Logie, John Logie Baird. He was a Scottish inventor who came up with a different version of television and it was when they were working on, I think, Philo Farnsworth’s version was in the local paper at the time heralded as this amazing Black Light Machine.

JT: Hmm.

I remember thinking, what a fantastic phrase. I wrote it down. It’s a kind of, it’s a roundabout critique about how television influences people’s lives and makes them do strange things.

JT: Okay, and then, last, but not least, the title track is a really long song. There’s a lot going into that. How did you put that song together and what is Milliontown? What is that exactly?

It’s based on a book called The Apprentice by a guy called Gordon Howe, which is kind of a book I found about three years ago and it’s the story about this guy who has been dead for five years in the ground.

JT: Aha.

And, he gets dug up by death and says we’ve picked your name at random out of a hat and you have to be my assistant for seven days, because my old assistant has been killed. So, you have to help me. You have to be an apprentice on a trial for seven days. Help me kill people and it kind of is this bizarre story of these seven days where you have to go around helping death sort of taking people lives basically and it’s this sort of, I remember thinking that this is such a brilliant concept cause the guy is kind of just as amused as you or I would be if we were put in a similar situation and so he is, in the middle of all this, doing this work, he’s starting to remember little bits about his own death cause of course he’s dead and it’s just sort of this amazing story. He traces his own death.

JT: Hmm.

And finds out where he was so it’s kind of, it’s just this amazing story. I remember thinking, how fantastic and in terms of Milliontown, the book is based in Oxford, in England and again, Milliontown was a word I had in mind. I’ve got a book full of really interesting words that I like and things like Black Light Machine went in there and Milliontown was another word I have in this book and so I needed a reason to hook up Milliontown with the actual songs. So, I was looking at the book The Apprentice and it was set in Oxford, England and there’s only about a million people in Oxford. So, it kind of basically rounded off the Milliontown, sort of in a roundabout way, is Oxford. So, there you go!

JT: You talk about the fact that when you’re writing music, you incorporate opposites.

Yeah.

JT: If you do one thing, you do another thing. Can you just talk about it cause you have a lot of variety here on this album? Can you just talk about your songwriting process in general? How a song comes about, you know? Do you first start with like the keyboards or the singing or the melody or the lyrics? How do you put a song together and just… how do you put it together I guess?

Yeah, it’s kind of, it’s a variety of ways. It depends. The thing I use the most is my Dictaphone, is absolutely used in the whole process. So, it’s kind of, I might just be sat at my piano up in the house and just come up with an idea and put it all on this Dictaphone or similarly it might be a little vocal line or a melody or just some words or something. Everything goes onto the Dictaphone. So basically from there, from there I can kind of take it to the studio and stretch it out. Sometimes like it’s a keyboard riff or sample, just a little bit or you know, just a bit of sound, an interesting bit of sound and then what I tend to do is, when I’m building songs up, I’ll go to the Dictaphone, which might have about 200, 300 little snippets of me doing stuff, going, “dah, dah, dah, duh, duh,” drum loops, or whatever and, I just sort of go through them and try and take the bits that might be relevant and piece them together. So, it’s almost like doing a jigsaw in a way.

JT: Okay.

If there’s any gap, I’ll write some more stuff to kind of bridge the gaps and, and pretty much that’s how songs come together. Lyrically, I tend to start with singing, just phonetically singing, kind of vowel sounds and just sort of things that sing well and I’ll kind of, from there, it’s like kind of almost thinking I’m singing the words that I’ll eventually write. It’s this weird way of writing lyrics. You go, “aye, wa oh wa oh.” Afterwards, you’re thinking okay, “duh, duh, duh,” and it sort of, it leads you down lyrical, sort of, um, avenues of stuff. So, it kind of, it writes itself in a sort of quite abstract way, but at the same time, it seems to work for me. So, I’ll keep doing it.

JT: I have to say, the name that you came up with for the band is actually one of the coolest {no pun intended} names I’ve heard of, for a band name. It’s short. It’s to the point. It’s clever. How did you come up with the name? What does it mean exactly?

Again, it was just a word. I’m kind of, I’m a huge, I’m such a fan of the language and words and, um, I’m one of these sad people who reads the dictionaries. I’m sort of, very into words and stuff, so I have this book with all kinds of words that I write down and stuff I hear and sort of things that I think are interesting and Frost was kind of, of all the names, as you say, it was just to the point and I thought it was really modern-sounding, because I didn’t want to, with this I wanted to give, cause prog bands are full of this terrible, sort of old cliché, I don’t know, Arthur’s Sword, or the Dragons of… Thunderhorse or something and it kind of, I don’t want any of that old prog nonsense really cause I think prog can be, it can be absolutely as modern as any current music form. It’s just that I think a lot of bands fall into a lot of clichés or they think they’re expected to do this kind of, wearing face paint and all that kind of stuff and I just, it doesn’t have to be that way I don’t think. So, I just wanted something that was really modern and to-the-point and monosyllabic and just like, zing! Just a word that you can identify with and Frost seems to do the trick. I’ve since discovered that there’s about five bands called Frost.

JT: Oh, there are?

I put the asterisk there just to make it different.

JT: I was trying to figure out; I was going to ask you, what’s the point of the asterisk? It actually looks like a snowflake.

It was kind of like a happy coincidence, that it also, as you say, looks like a snowflake, which is perfect. We’re just talking about getting shirts done at the moment and I think the asterisk is going to affect it pretty heavily. So, it’s quite good, yeah.

JT: You’ve put together a band, which I’d consider like a supergroup. How did you meet these guys? How did this come about?

It never, it didn’t occur to me, I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like a supergroup. Again, it was the Internet. When I was starting off with the whole thing, I bought about forty albums, thirty or forty from up-and-coming prog bands or current prog bands to just try and get an idea of where prog was at these days and, I got the Kino records and the Arena records and sort of bits and pieces and listened through them and the star player in it all was John Mitchell and then he really was, I was thinking, who is that guitarist. He’s fantastic and so, I got back to the house and pulled up Google and just typed in John Mitchell and after a couple bits of snooping I found his home email address. He rather carelessly left it on a website, so I literally just typed it up and said, “Hello, you don’t know, my name is Jem, I’m just working on this project at the moment and do you fancy doing some session guitar on it?” and after a couple days I got an email back and he went, yeah, okay, fine

JT: Wow.

I played him some stuff and he came down to the studio and we kind of, you know, we spent a couple of days just playing around and having, drinking some beer and just chatting and kind of playing guitar and having a laugh.

JT: Hmm.

He sort of got more and more into the project and as we sort of, after sort of a bit longer, he did his recording for the album. He then said, “if you want to do this live, I’ve got the bass player you want is John Jowitt, I mean, he is absolutely fantastic, good man, you’d love him, he’s brilliant.” So, literally I emailed John Jowitt, sent him the stuff, and he went, “oh, it’s fantastic,” and then from there, he said, “oh, I’ll tell you what you need, you need our new boy Andy Edwards to play on your band.” So, it kind of, it was all done on the Internet really. It’s this weird way of putting a band together. It was all done by email and so it was just pretty easy really, you know, one person suggested the next person and after sort of a couple of weeks before we knew it, we had a band. It was brilliant.

JT: Yeah, that’s amazing how it came together. You truly have some of the best players there and every one of them pulls their own weight on the album. So, it just really clicks real well.

Yeah, they were amazing, I mean, they were really amazing to work with.

JT: You’ve got some top players from the prog community. You’ve got the guys from IQ, Arena, Jadis, highly known bands. I also see you’ve got another musician on here, John Boyes who does additional guitars.

Yeah.

JT: How did he play into this whole thing?

He’s our kind of secret fifth member. He doesn’t come out with us live or anything. He just plays on the albums. He’s like our Brian Wilson sort of character.

JT: Okay.

I’ve known him since I was seventeen. We used to be in a band together and we’ve stayed in touch for years and years and years and he was just, when I was working on the album, this is sort of prior to working with John Mitchell, I sort of thought, cause at the time I wasn’t a guitarist, at the time I couldn’t play a note. So, I thought, this needs guitar. So, the natural call was to my old mate, who’s, you know, my guitarist. So I asked him if he’d mind coming down for a couple days and playing some rhythm guitar and some lead and just having a bit of a laugh and he said, absolutely, that’s fantastic and he did such a good job that I couldn’t, it was, it just didn’t seem right to replace him with John Mitchell’s bit. So, he kind of, he’s, as a result of that, he’s now become our secret fifth member, which we can’t really talk about, you know, and you never see photographs of him. He’s our secret squirrel.

JT: Okay. I also see that you’ve recorded at some interesting places like The Cube and The Outhouse.

Yes.

JT: Like what are these places, I mean, how did you find these places? Kind of interesting names there.

The Cube’s my studio. It’s here at my house, well, it’s in my garden. It’s a separate building away, done in the garden, which is my studio basically. It’s where I work from everyday and, I call it The Cube again, it’s sort of a Frost reference cause of ice cubes. So, I kind of wanted everything to sort of have this sort of frosty reference. I just thought, what a great name for a studio, and it is square, so it’s not entirely a lie. That’s sort of the first facility where we did most of the recording. The second place is The Outhouse, which is actually John Mitchell’s studio, which is also in his garden bizarrely, but his is an old Victorian coaching house in his gardens where he records lots of bands and we did the drums at John’s place, because I don’t have a drum at mine. So, it was a really sort of good combination. We did some backing vocals there as well and we did his lead vocals at John’s studio at The Outhouse. So, they’re pretty much sort of private facilities owned by me and John.

JT: Okay, that’s cool. Also, looking at the artwork on the album, it’s kind of clever. It’s simple, but it kind of jumps out at you. What is the idea behind the graphics on here with the telephone booth?

It was done by Paul Tipper, who did the Kino album cover as well. Again, I just really liked the artwork on the Kino album. It was a really striking picture that, the kind of the steps with the popcorn. It was kind of a really modern, clean-looking image. So, I spoke to Paul and that kind of a thing I am very keen to do is, um, not through any particular nationalistic interest, but I really wanted to make an album that looked and sounded British.

JT: Hmm.

Because I know that sort of you get a lot of albums. I mean, Spock’s Beard, they kind of have been very, very prominent and very successful and they kind of, they have a very American feel obviously.

JT: Yeah.

I wanted to parry that with a kind of, with a British-kind-of-looking thing. So, what could be more British than a phonebox?

JT: Well, you know what’s funny, when I heard this was a progressive rock album and I saw the cover, I thought the album was going to be about Dr. Who.

Well, yes, I mean, I’m a huge Dr. Who fan anyway. So, there’s a little, tiny little bit of that involved as well, but I just thought, I didn’t, again, it’s just such an iconic kind of item. I was just trying to make it very easy for the listener or the buyer. So, you’d know the band was called Frost and that’s a striking name and you know it’s got a phone box on the cover and it’s easy to find and I wanted to have a very clean iconic cool-looking sort of image, which is why inside the sleeve I’ve got shots of Paul’s and a cheap station as well and it’s underground. Just kind of things that are very sort of London and kind of English and British. I just wanted to have that kind of image.

JT: Actually, the thing that blew me away the most about the album was just how it broke new ground. It’s really hard to compare this to something else and I was curious, what you’re musical influences actually are. What were the bands that you grew up with that kind of have influenced what you do and might have worked their way into this album?

Yeah, when I grew up, the main band I couldn’t, they were all that and my heroes, was Genesis. I was such a huge, I still am a huge Genesis fan, Tony Banks in particular, because I learned to play piano. I didn’t have formal lessons and such, I was self taught, but the way I taught myself to play was over a couple of summer vacations, I just had a copy of Three Sides Live and I learned to play things like In the Cage and, all these sort of really complicated keyboard solos and that was my way of learning how to play keyboards. So, I think by just the nature of that, the way that Tony Banks plays and writes it’s built into my brain as second nature really and there’s kind of, there’s a lot I tend to do, although I’ve tried to not do it. I think sometimes I can’t help, but sound like him from time to time. So, I really have tried not to, but, you know, he’s there. Everywhere I go, he’s always there, bless him. So, again, it was just sort of a deliberate attempt to do something different again cause when prog bands try to do a long song, they always in order to get that big, it’s like Apocalypse in 9/8. Every band always does the, “dah, duh, duh, dent,” and the Hammond Organ goes, “deet, dah, deet, dah, deet, duh,” and you get this sort of terribly old clichéd bloody thing that you think, “oh, here we go.” So, I just tried to think of what would be the complete opposite of that if I was going to do a long song and I really love the album Duke and I kind of thought, well, no one ever does something like Duke Travels. There’s kind of that whole feel sort of very complicated piece of music, but done in a much more rockier way and I just remembered thinking into Milliontown, there is a whole seven minute section at the end, which I sort of based on Duke. So I wanted to do something that was just so obviously not Supper’s Ready. So, in terms of, you know, Genesis as I say were a huge influence, but also bands like It Bites in the eighties were a sort of English prog band.

It was not so much Yes, although the latter day Yes. 90125 had a really big affect on me. I thought it was a fantastic album. Still do and then Peter Gabriel who I just absolutely adore.

JT: It also seems, I mean, you’ve got a lot of stuff on there that is really catchy and accessible. So, it also seems that you’ve got some pop influences as well. Am I picking up on this correctly?

No, you’re absolutely right, yeah, I mean, it can be a bit Britney Spears can you? It’s fantastic. I subconsciously pick up those production techniques from those sort of melodies and the way they’re structured, because obviously that’s what I do for a day job, but I don’t see why prog can’t have that element of that in there anyway, because songs at the end of the day got to have melodies and choruses and structure and bits and pieces that you can sing cause a song without a melody, I think, though I’m very melody-driven. So, therefore, I kind of probably do subconsciously incorporate a bit of pop into the prog, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

JT: Hmm. I’m curious how did your involvement in music actually begin?

In all music or in the pop music?

JT: Yeah, in all music. Did you first become a vocalist or did you first learn the keyboards? How did that begin?

I was a keyboard player first, yeah, definitely. I’ve been playing since I was eight or nine; my brother really introduced me to progressive rock. He said listen to this, he said Jethro Tull and this is Rush and he’s like that and I definitely loved it also, from there it was just sort of a progression of, of working, I obviously started off playing in sort of a local blues band for a couple years and then sort of did gigs around the area and then we started a progressive rock band when I was about 19, supporting IQ strangely, which is a really weird thing.

JT: Hmm.

So, it’s all come full circle in, in twenty years.

JT: Yeah.

Um, and then sort of from there, I sort of dropped out of music for awhile. I went to work at a place called RadioOne, which is the UK’s largest national radio station where I did production, did all the kind of jingles and sweepers and all the on-air imaging and the branding, just where I kind of learned to use ProTools and get that sort of how to produce voices and use computers and work in a studio and then from there, I’ve gotten one of the DJ’s that was working there, he was the drive-time DJ, sort of he was managing a guy who was also a musician and sort of said in a way you should work with my guy. So we sort of hooked up together and over the last five years, we had this fantastic run of pop success, which is brilliant. So, it’s kind of, well, it’s been this sort of weird route back into music, by radio, but radio’s been a brilliant catalyst of meeting people and working with musicians.

JT: What was the turning point that you decided you wanted to do this as a living?

Oh, I’ve always wanted to be. It was just a no-brainer. I didn’t go to college cause I didn’t need to. I was quite arrogant at the time. I though, nah, I’ll be fine. I didn’t really sort of plan for it, but I just I’ve wanted ever since I was sort of eleven or twelve, I’ve always known I was going to be a musician. That was the thing I wanted to do. So, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve known very early on. So, I was able to sort of plan towards working to do that. So it’s just always been a lifelong thing really.

JT: And then you also said that your brother is a musician as well?

Yeah, he’s a semi-pro musician, but he does music quite a lot of the time. He was the drummer in the band I was in. I was the keyboard player.

JT: Oh.

As a family it’s sort of like the Osmond’s. Prog-Osmond’s is what we are.

JT: Is there any plans for any collaboration, I mean, does he do progressive rock?

He’s got a band called Tinyfish, which has just started up.

JT: Oh, okay.

Other than that, we haven’t got any plans to collaborate so far, but you never know.

JT: Okay. I like to ask this, just kind of as a fun question, but, you know, you’ve obviously seen the movie Spinal Tap I’m sure, right?

Oh yeah, yeah.

JT: I just like to ask if musicians recall any Spinal Tap moments in their career. Just something kind of ridiculous that happened that just kind of sticks out, that may find itself in that movie.

There’s too, too many, I mean, there’s so many kind of, there’s so many events that happen. I remember we did this gig once, we were playing. It was like a summer ball in this sort of big college in London and we were kind of on/off the other bands and when we didn’t, actually by the nature of these things, we didn’t actually get on stage until 4 AM… So it was the first of any gig I’ve ever had where we started off with the lead singer throwing himself on stage. He went, “Good Morning,” which is kind of the antithesis of, “Good Evening.” So, that’s absolutely fantastic and there’s kind of, it was always that that’s the reality of sitting there just thinking, what on earth are we doing? Why are we doing this for a living? What a weird thing to do? So, there’s been so many kind of, so many events like that and unfortunately most of them are far too rude to tell. So, um, yeah, as they say, the whole thing is Spinal Tap.

JT: That’s funny.

If anybody tells you otherwise, they’re lying.

JT: Right. Now I like to ask some personal tastes. We’re getting towards the end, so this is kind of like the lightning round.

Okay.

JT: So, I’m not going to keep you too much longer, but I’d like to just jump through some of your personal tastes.

Sure.

JT: Just to start with, I’d like to find out what’s the last CD that you purchased?

Um, what’s the last CD I purchased? That’s a very good question. What came to the door the other day?  It’s a UK band called The Feeling , the album Twelve Stops Until Home, which is, it’s kind of like Cola ELO meets Jellyfish. It’s a really sort of modern kind of band. It’s really brilliant, big harmonies.

JT: Oh wow.

And then I think before that I probably bought another English band called Keane.

JT: Oh yeah.

Called Under the Iron Sea, which is a fantastic album.

JT: I’ve heard of them.

Yeah, they’re really good.

JT: I’ve seen them on TV. They’ve gotten kind of big over here… Actually, also along the same lines, what’s the last concert that you attended as a fan?

It was Thomas Dolby, um, sort of UK-Synth-Pop like from the eighties, he was at the London venue about three weeks ago I think. So, that was the last gig I saw.

JT: Okay and then I have, these questions are hard for some people, but what would you say is your favorite album of all time?

Oooh, that’s a very good question.

JT: Just something that’s gotten like the most playtime. Just something along those lines.

The album, does it have to be an album that you sort of play now and then and you think, brilliant.

JT: Right.

Um, that’s a very good question.

JT: If you can’t narrow it down to one, you could just tell me the ones that just pop out.

An album that I never get tired of, is Out of the Blue by ELO.

JT: Okay, cool.

That’s a fantastic album. Wind & Wuthering by Genesis is another one that I sort of could listen to again and again. Exit Stage Left by Rush, that’s a fantastic live album. Yeah, a variety really.

JT: Okay and what would you say is your favorite band?

Favorite band of all-time?

JT: Yeah.

Aw gawd, it would have to be Genesis I think.

JT: Okay, that’s cool. That was easier. And then kind of, I got the feeling that your music is influenced by things outside of music as well. So, what is your favorite TV show?

Um, at the moment, there’s a new show of Dr. Who in the UK, so, um, I would say that’s my favorite TV show.

JT: Oh, really… And then what is your favorite movie?

Oowl, favorite movie, gawd.

JT: That ones hard for me cause I could come up with like a list of a hundred probably

You know what my favorite movie is? It’s really shallow and two-dimensional, but I think Back to the Future is my favorite movie.

JT: Oh, that is, that’s cool.

Time-traveling cars you see. You can’t go wrong. Nothing wrong with that.

JT: Yeah and then what would you say is your favorite book?

Um, oomh, my favorite book. {My phone goes off in the background and plays some ringtone theme called Fantasy.} What’s that in the background?

JT: That’s my phone.

That’s fabulous.

JT: I’ve got multiple phones here. I have people trying to coordinate with me and stuff.

Duh, dee, dah, dee, dah, dee. That’s brilliant.

JT: Yeah, I’ve got different themes depending on if it’s somebody I know or it’s somebody I don’t know. {He laughs} That’s all programmed in. That’s somebody I know, so I had to go look real quick.

It’s like when they get the fax in that cop show, what is it?

JT: I don’t know.

Duh, duh, dee, dah, dee, dah, duh. That’s brilliant.

JT: That’s probably going to find its way in the next album.

Yeah, absolutely I was just about to jam now. I’ve got my Dictaphone.

JT: If you need to pick up your Dictaphone, I’ll give you a second there.

Nah, I’ve got it. It’s in my brain now. I can do it. I’ll be fine.

JT: Okay.

I’ve memorized it… My favorite book is probably, it’s a cook book. It called The Complete Delia Smith.

JT: The Complete, what was that?

The Complete Delia Smith.

JT: The Complete Delia Smith, okay.

It’s fantastic. It’s a huge UK, it’s just like a sort of institution here in the UK as a cook and I really like cooking. So, I’m never, that book’s going to be the book I look at the most.

JT: Oh, wow. So, what’s the best thing that you’ve made from that book?

Oh gawd, um, there’s a variety of things really. There’s so many different. Some of the best things I’ve ever made from that book is, I don’t know. I’ve certainly got very fat because of that book. I don’t know, that’s a very good question, I’ll have to get back to you on that one. I don’t know. I’ll have to; I’ll have to have a look through.

JT: We’re actually almost towards the end, but I kind of lied. I just want to backtrack for a second. When we first started talking, you were talking about being halfway through the next album, can you just tell me a little bit about what we can expect from that album? Is it going to be more or less along the lines of the first one or are you going in a totally different direction or, can you just give me a little breakdown, just a little sneak peak?

I’m not one for repeating myself. I’m banning keyboard solos in the second album just because I think I’ve done that. So, it’s kind of, I’ve proved I can play really fast. I can do a Jordan Rudess if want to, so I’m going to try something differently. I just bought a Chapman Stick, which is a thing Tony Levin plays, a kind of twelve-stringed or ten-stringed instrument, which is sort of bass and guitar, but put together. So, I’m going to kind of, that should be arriving next month. So, I’m kind of, I’m going to practice doing that and also, I think it’s going to be more, it’s going to be the same kind of vibe, but it’s going to be a bit heavier I think.

JT: Oh, cool.

A little bit more guitar-based.

JT: Okay.

We’re all going to use more organic keyboard sounds like Hammond Organ and probably less synth kind of sounds I think. I’m going to try to make it sound a bit more, a bit harder, a bit more upstate.

JT: Okay.

But still, kind of still very much based upon melody, you know; lots of backing vocals and still be very melodic.

JT: You’re saying that you’re going to be playing the Chapman Stick, right, is that what you said?

Yeah.

JT: Like how many instruments do you play?

I play keyboards, a little bit of guitar. I’m sort of staggering through playing the bass a bit at the moment as well on the Chapman Stick and a little bit of drums.

JT: Okay, like would you consider yourself primarily a songwriter, a singer, a keyboardist, like what thing do you align yourself with the most or are you just balanced throughout all of them?

Um, that’s a good question. I’m probably a keyboard player. That’s kind of where I think I am.

JT: Okay and I was curious, for me, it’s difficult actually picking a favorite song off the album.

Yeah.

JT: I would, like I said earlier, probably choose the Black Light Machine, but what would you say is your favorite song off the album? Which one makes you the most proud?

Probably Milliontown because it was such a technical achievement to make twenty, it’s so hard; I didn’t realize how hard it is to make a song that long.

JT: Yeah.

It is obviously made up of sort of different bits and pieces and the difficult bit is fusing them all together in a way that doesn’t sound like you’ve just kind of gone, “oh here we go onto the next bit, off we go.” So it’s kind of, that was a real challenge that and I think probably off that whole track my favorite bit is probably the last seven minutes, that instrumental bit, um, just because it took me about six weeks to write and kind of, I’d do a bit and I’d get stuck, so I put it down, go and do something else, then come back and do a bit and just literally, I was inching forward for like, you know, two inches at a time and taking two steps back each time. So, it was this huge kind of convoluted process, but at the end of it, to listen back to it, I was so proud of it and kind of, I just think it has some of the strongest melody moments as well in there. So, I kind of, I think that’s the one that’s my favorite and the one I’m most proudest of.

JT: Yeah, I mean, for me that’s up there as well and I’ll be going back to that a lot and I’m sure I’ll gain more and more appreciation for it. I mean, it’s got really good re-playability to it as well.

Yeah.

JT: I can see myself years from now going back and saying, “Wow! This was brilliant.”

Well, I hope so, I mean, Black Light Machine is pretty cool too, because it is one of the ones that was around for the longest. I’m kind of; I’m more used to that one than Milliontown, which was really being written right up to the last minute. So, it’s kind of, that feels like the most recent track on it for me, so I think that’s probably another one of the reasons why I’m very fond of it cause it’s the kind of thing I’m least used to yet.

JT: Okay and actually, most musicians are like free spirits. I can see that you’re a family man here cause I do hear the little Frankenstein running around in the background. So, right off the bat, you’re unique in that sense, you know, there’s this question I like to ask. It’s kind of a dumb question, but nobody else asks it. Do you have any pets?

No actually, no, not through lack of trying, but I think dogs eventually.

JT: Dogs eventually?

Dogs eventually will be the answer, but no, nothing yet cause we live quite far in the country and so therefore we get adopted by everybody’s cats. We also have all kinds of birds and owls and things everywhere.

JT: Wow.

So, it’s actually the wildlife is using us as their pet rather than the other way around I think.

JT: Okay. How did you wind up out in the country? Is that where you grew up or does that just make it easier for you to do your work out in the quiet there?

Yeah, partially. I’m from London. So, I kind of, after I got the chance to sort of get out, I think London is for the people in their twenties really, and so I sort of, when I got to my thirties, I thought, oh, I’m out of here cause it’s getting more and more aggressive and kind of, it’s quite violent and a bit intimidating sometimes. So, I thought when, I mean, we were having a boy as well, we kind of thought, it would be good if he could grow up knowing what a sheep looks like.

JT: Okay, and actually I have one more question here and I was told before I talked with you, “Warning: Jem is a very busy guy!” He’s doing a lot of stuff and he’s recording stuff.

Yeah, I am.

JT: So do not take too much of his time. So, I’ll end with basically this, I’m sure you’re going to pick up a whole ton of fans with this album, I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant. It’s something new, uh, people are really going to like this album a lot.

Hope so.

JT: Is there anything you’d like to say to these fans at this time?

Yeah, actually, I think, you know, I’d like to say thanks for giving us the time to listen to us and seeing, hopefully you like it. I think anyone who devotes a bit of time to thinking, right, I’m going to listen to it and see whether I like it, that’s giving something to us. So, I’d just like to say thank you for listening to the album and I hope you’ll stick with us for the remaining four.

JT: Oh, there’s going to be four albums?

Oh yeah, five albums, five years, that’s the plan.

JT: Okay, is this project what you’re doing exclusively now or are you involved in other projects right now at this time?

Yeah, I’m still doing the pop stuff and I’ve also got a London-based company, which I’m starting, well, I’m part of, but there’s a lot of music for TV and radio as well. So, I’m kind of, I’ve got a lot of things on my plate, but it’s all good, it’s all different, which is good as well. So, I could never get bored of any particular thing cause I’m always doing a variety of stuff, so it’s running alongside a whole bunch of things.

JT: I can see why I was told Jem’s a busy guy cause it does sound like you’re in a lot of things. Most people only have time for one genre. Is there a genre that you prefer more than another or do you just like to do a lot of different things?

I like them all. I think, you know, it’s again, it’s balance isn’t it? One thing can offset the other. With the prog thing, it makes the pop stuff, if I did pop everyday, I’d go mad and if I did prog everyday, I’d go mad, so it’s kind of a nice bit. It keeps everything in perspective I think.

JT: Okay, well, that’s pretty much all I had for you and I just want to tell you that you did put out a phenomenal album. I’m really looking forward to the next ones that you’re coming out with and I just think that this album is exceptional and I think a lot of other bands and fans are going to take notice of this and, you know, I just wish you a lot of luck with this, cause I can see you’ve got a lot of potential and this album is just amazing.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

JT: So, I’ll be keeping my eye on you and I will be going to RoSfest, so I will see you perform there.

Oh, fantastic, we’ll have a beer.

JT: Yeah and I’m not exactly sure how you’re going to pull this stuff off live, because it’s so complicated, but I’m sure you’ll do just fine. So, I’ll see you at RoSfest.

The current plan is to make it a bit heavier live I think. We’re going to lean on John a bit more to turn up his guitar. So, I think we, hopefully we should rock in every conceivable way.

JT: Yeah, and I’ve seen him there with Arena and with Kino and also I’ve seen John Jowitt there all three years with his various different bands.

Yeah.

JT So, I think this is going to be a really great match-up. I’m really looking forward to it.

So am I. When I come to play, it will be brilliant you’ll see.

JT: Okay. So that’s all I have. I’ll let you get back to your recording and rehearsing and your family.

Thank you very much. Good to talk with you.

JT: Yeah and I just appreciate the time you’ve taken to talk with me.

Thank you, Josh.

JT: Just enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Yeah, no worries man, take it easy.

JT: Okay, bye.

Cheers.

Frost official website  -  www.frost-music.com  
http://www.myspace.com/milliontown