John & Jehn - Time For The Devil

TRACKLISTING:
1. Intro 2. Time for the devil 3. Oh my love 4. Shy 5. Vampire 6. And we run 7. Prime time 8. Down our streets 9. Ghosts 10. Love is not enough 11.  Shades 12. London Town 13. O’dee 14. Outro +  Long ride home (ghost track )
OVERVIEW:
“This is not a love song”, said John Lydon, back when he wasn’t advertising butter. And this is not a love story, either, as many of John & Jehn’s lyrics will bear witness to. "It's about the despair of being in love" explains Jehn, with reference to 'Love Is Not Enough', a track from their forthcoming second album to be released on France’s Naïve label, 'Time For The Devil' (inspired by a short parable called ‘La Hora del Diablo’ by the Portugese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa). "You know when you wake up in the morning and the only thing you want to prove is you're not a couple?"
And indeed, John & Jehn are no longer a couple. They are now John & Jehn & Raph & Maud. On stage anyway. Raphael Mura (of Underground Railroad) has been enlisted to release them from the confines of their drum-machine, and Maud-Elisa Mandeau has been drafted in on guitar, freeing John to focus on bass, because it forms the foundation of pretty much everything on 'Time For The Devil', and allowing them both to pretty much assume the roles of lead singers with a band behind them. "A lot of the new songs are dancey… groovy” Jehn tells us. “We were looking for a groove, and we always started writing the song with the bass. Never guitar."
A departure, then, from their eponymously titled first album – released on Faculty Records in the UK back in 2008 – which referenced Joy Divison, The Velvet Underground and other 1970’s luminaries of bluesy pop-noir. And on their self-released EP which introduced them to British ears way back in 2005; ‘L'Amour Ne Nous Déchirera Pas’ (‘Love Will Not Tear us Apart’) which in turn led to their move to London and their move away from those sounds which insprired their early material.
“I just hate to repeat myself,” says John. “Every time someone says we’re a duo, I want to have fifteen musicians on stage the next day. Every time someone says we are a guitar band, I want to use new instruments.”
This constant search for change and renewal opened the door to those who would compliment and enhance the John & Jehn aesthetic, and they encouraged this, gathering creative souls around them in an ever-evolving methodology. An old friend, Antoinne Carlier, came onboard as artistic director, orchstrating video, artwork, website and photography, and Dave Bascombe of London’s Metropolis Studios engaged with the process long before any mixing was strictly necessary, exerting a gentle guidance.
“We wanted to take advantage of the freedom to record something different so we focused on the writing and discovered we can do things we’ve always wanted to do; some really poppy, harmonic stuff, with rhythmic pianos. We recorded seven tracks in total, five we kept.”
Those five began with ‘Oh My Love’, a key-stabbed, bass-driven, night-crawling, Roxy-Music-stalking number, dripping with thinly-veiled insouciance, and ‘Down Our Streets’, perhaps their sweetest melody to date, laced with hand-claps and cheery synth lines and ‘la la las’, but pulled together with a lyric concerning itself with the relentless, suffocating presence of London’s CCTV cameras, and the resulting longing for the enveloping cloak of night to fall (another track ‘London Town’ deals with a similar longing to escape the glare of the daytime metropolis, into its tenebrous crannies). This juxtaposition of bright melody and melancholic subject matter appears again in ‘O Dee’. As the tune glances over its shoulder at The Ronettes, its lyrics speak not of the death of an individual, but of the personafication of death.
A casual listen to ‘Time For The Devil’ reveals the lineage between John & Jehn and PiL, XTC, The Psychedelic Furs, The Stranglers and their ilk, but also classic pop as they move from brooding atmospherics of ‘The Ghosts’ to ‘Vampires’ with it’s opening gambit echoing The Beach Boys ‘Good Vibrations’ but lyrical theme addressing a good friend who’s partner is, to quote the writer “a fucking pain in the ass, killing him with her depression and shit attitude.”
Never less than compelling – to the feet and the head - 'Time For The Devil' is perhaps most remarkable for finally delivering on record (or whatever the hell kind of format we're using these days) what John & Jehn always delivered live: pop songs, hypodermically injected with dancefloor potency, laced with literary barbs and acerbic wit.
“We’re having a party” as John Lydon almost said. “…and everybody’s welcome.”

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