FUNKIN' DYNAMITE...
JAMIROQUAI STYLE!

words 'BUCKET-O-FRIED-CHICKEN' shutter KWAKU ALSTON

Dynamite marks the sixth album for Jamiroquai in his eight-album deal with Sony. In 13 years Jamiroquai have sold over 20 million albums, toured the world four times and held down 141 weeks on the UK singles chart while still trying to make it “big” in North America. Klublife was able to get down and dirty with J.K. to get the skinny on the new album, the video, the tour and how things have changed for the better.

Klublife: Why was the album written in multiple cities and several countries?

J.K.: Because we had already done two albums at home and I wanted to get out of there, and I said I know what we will do, we will have these extended sort of holidays. I just thought it was interesting. We were just following the sunshine, to be honest. We could go chill in different places, Scotland wasn’t really particularly nice, Scotland was freezing. Costa Rica was in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t even get a chicken to eat, but we did get two songs out of it, one song that is on the album, that was difficult to get. Hot tequila browed, had to get in a right state to get that one. It was a nice little way for us to all bond together and start the pre-production. New York was a month; LA was a month as well. We went to LA to get strings recorded by a guy, Benjamin Right, who did jolly off-the-wall stuff. We wanted to see what the American back-up singers were like, what the string arrangers were like. We did check a couple of bass players, but they weren’t really cutting it. I mean it was a little strange, we were hoping for greatness, but it wasn’t there.

Klublife: Feels Like It Should video…creative input?

J.K.: I did do the stunts and we got to about 25m/hr on the back. We were hammering it along, but the trouble was the car kept breaking down and we had to do it between the traffic in Los Angeles. I had pretty much most of that input. I did sit down with Joseph Cahn, who came over to England. I told him how I wanted the story and the different characters and how I wanted him to do it, walking down the street and the candy man, I wanted to do this character and he said should the candy man have a blue face? So I said sure the candy man can have a blue face. Then at one point he did have loads of these electric bugaloo kids who came along and wanted them to do some Michael Jackson sort of dancing, and I said you know what? You can lose the kids from fame. He said, “Well, we have one minute and 30 seconds left there to fill Jay, what are you going to do?”And I said, “What I want to do dude, is get behind the f#cking car man. Let me get behind the f#cking car.” I wanted to do some stunts because nobody else has done that. It was a cool stunt to do. I will tell you what, I hope I hadn’t risen in that red dress. I couldn’t believe I was in transvestite city in West Hollywood and they couldn’t find me some size 8 red heels. When Joseph Cahn told me to ramp up, you know when that girl was all over me, she was sitting all over, that was fun. That wasn’t hell, that was heaven. Then Joseph said come you are going to do the same with Easy Rock from the Rock Steady Crew. I was like, no I don’t think so mate, forget it.

Klublife: Beat Box on this album. Intentional or studio mish-mash?

J.K.: Well, what I was going to do was, on the end of the last album, I was mucking around in the studio with a thing called the helicon, where you can make yourself sound like Barry White or you can be a choir, or a eunich…it is a voice processing unit. So I started to muck about and do some beats and then Rick started to muck about and dub it up a bit you know. I was going to put the whole piece on the album but I decided against it. In the end, there was some sort of doo-dad that Rick wanted a credit and Mike wanted a credit for putting it together and all this shit. At the end of the day, in the middle of all of this, I just stopped, I busted this rift through this thing all of a sudden, and it sounded great. So I shelved it and said I don’t want to forget that.

Klublife: How is Dynamite being received by the fans?

J.K.: Let me tell you something—fucking amazing! There are no two ways about it. We have come from doing 16,000 to 45,000 people a night in Europe. Now we are here and we play about 2,000 a night. It means we play tighter, we don’t have a lot of the problems we have with bigger shows, you know with seriously big places. Atlantic City, absolutely amazing; Boston, they went f#cking ballistic; New York, the first one was really good, the second one was off the scale. We often wondered what the second one would be like, maybe a bit snobby, like a London crowd. We have seen it all before but they were off the scale. I will tell you what. I don’t know what the reports are, but they have got to be rave reviews if my engineer walked up to me, who is the most miserly bastard that ever walked the earth, with compliments. He was coming up to me saying that was a 10-and-a-half man, it was a 10-and-a-half gig! It was amazing, and I knew it. We know when it is good.

If you’re looking to take your “funkin’” to the next level be sure to check Jamiroquai.com and  funkin.com to stay on top of J.K.’s whereabouts in 2006!