Frost* – Interview met Jem Godfrey
Jem Godfrey: “It was nice to remember the Frost* journey while making this album. I think ‘Life In The Wires’ is my favourite Frost* album therefore, not just because it’s the freshest release, but because I think it has the spirit of all the previous albums in there. Like a big reunion of old friends.”
Bijna twintig jaar is de Britse progressieve rock band Frost* al bezig. Hun nieuwe, vijfde album is – het genre illustrerend – een conceptueel dubbelalbum vol klaterende muziek. Voorwaar een huzarenstukje. Bovendien maakt het een ‘salut’ aan elk van hun vorige albums, zodat je er goed aan doet om dit aandachtig in je op te nemen. Wij zaten ook geboeid te luisteren naar alles wat Jem Godfrey, de schepper en zanger/toetsenist/gitarist van deze Londense band erover te vertellen had.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 26 november 2024
Hello Jem. How are you doing and where are you based in the UK?
Hi! I’m very well, thank you. I live just outside London in the UK. I was born and raised in London.
Congratulations with the fifth album ‘Life In The Wires’. You decided to create a double album before writing the new songs in Summer 2024. How did you start working on such an extensive challenge and how do you look back at your Summer in writing mode?
Thank you very much! As usual the album started with lots of little bits and pieces of improvisation that I record into my phone over the course of a couple of years. I then go through it all a while later and pick out the bits that are interesting and go from there. It’s not a quick process really and I spent a long time just listening to things repeatedly until I think of some new ideas to go with the older ideas. The starting point can be a melody or a lyric, or a rhythm or a piano thing… there’s no real formula. I started to get going on the album with full force in January of this year. It took about five months to make from there and I absolutely loved every single second of the process. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had making a Frost* record.
A conceptual world had to be created as well. How did this idea take shape and can you tell a bit more about the concept?
It’s a journey story, a bit like ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’ I guess – a character going through a series of experiences that define his life and his ultimate destiny. I don’t want to give too much away, not that there’s much to give away really. It should be for the listener to decide what’s going on and what it all means. All I will say is that like all good films, there’s a bloody huge explosion at the end. J I came up with the title last year while I was out walking in the countryside. I liked the cinematic sound of it. It could mean many things. It could be about trapeze artists or telephone engineers! As a kid I was always fascinated by radio. I used to scan the long and medium wave frequency bands on my parents’ radio and loved hearing all those different voices and sounds and bits of music that would come and go from all over the world as I tuned the radio around. So I remembered that and thought, “What if there was a radio where voices are just being sent to me? What if nobody else can hear them apart from me on this radio?”. That gave me the idea for the Naio character and what that might mean in terms of a story. As Frost* I always wanted to have a double album in the catalogue, but I needed a decent idea to hang it off. ‘Falling Satellites’ was nearly a double album, but I didn’t think the general theme could really sustain a long form recording. ‘Life In The Wires’ is a bit more expandable because of the more 3-dimensional universe it’s set in. So, you can go back in time a bit to see a moment in Naio’s past, or sideways a bit to see things from the perspective of The Eye. With that sort of narrative in my head it was much easier to write because I was writing to a story idea rather than starting with a blank page each time.
There should be a link in the lyrics to previous album ‘Day And Age’… How?
The start of ‘Skywaving’ is the end of ‘Repeat To Fade’ from ‘Day And Age’. It’s also set in the world of ‘Day And Age’. The main character from ‘Life In The Wires’ lives near the sea that the character from ‘Terrestrial’ is lost on, for example. I imagine it in my head as like the cities in ‘Grand Theft Auto’. It’s all going on simultaneously, but if you’re not zoomed in on it, you don’t see it. But it is all happening. They are connected, definitely, but it’s not a sequel per se, more like a spin-off series, like ‘Frasier’ was from ‘Cheers’.
I am delighted with the return of including solos and that was partly due to a link with your first album ‘Milliontown’. Can you go deeper into that matter?
Thank you! I think with the return to more involved instrumental music on this album, there was always a chance it might sound a bit like ‘Milliontown’ in some places and it was good fun to go back to that version of us again. Also, I sang pretty much all this new album, I figured it had been nearly 20 years since I sang the whole of one album, so I thought “why not?”.
So, it is somehow going back to your roots?
The Frost* rule over the last 20 years has been to always to do something that’s the opposite of what we’ve just done before, or something we haven’t done before. With this new album, the opposite of the previous album is the soloing element. The thing that we’ve not done before is to do something again, so going back to our roots is a consequence of the rule to do something we haven’t done before. Ironically.
Which bands specifically can be mentioned as your roots, your reason to make music yourself? At what age did music enter your life?
I was about eight years old; I think. My brother is six years older than me so when he hit his teens and got into music big-time, I got exposed to it all too. Simon and his mates were very into “The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal” which I didn’t like at all. It all seemed to be about casual sex and weaponry from what I could work out. My first musical love was electronic pop – bands like Visage, OMD, Depeche Mode, Thomas Dolby, Japan, Sparks, The Human League, Ultravox etc. My brother then moved more towards the neo-prog movement happening at the same time as “The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal” with bands like IQ, Solstice, Twelfth Night, Marillion, Haze, Pendragon, Cardiacs and so on. It was a great time for non-mainstream British music. I found the prog musicianship more stimulating. So I had access to this as well as my synthesizer music – if it had strong keyboard work in it, I was interested. I was also fascinated by music production, the emergence of sampling and using the studio as a musical instrument was of huge interest to me. I loved Hugh Padgham’s mixing and productions. I was a big fan of Trevor Horn too, I was very inspired by his break-the-rules approach to producing music. “Why does it have to be done the way everyone’s always done it?” It was a rich diet of influences really, I was lucky.
A sense of nostalgia is also noticed in the theme and music. This is an important sentiment for you I think. Can you tell a bit more about that?
I’m getting old I guess. I was 33 when I started Frost*, I’m 53 now. It’s mathematically apparent that there’s more behind me than in front of me in terms of remaining alive. My parents are gone and some people I’ve known in my own age group have started to pass away as well, younger than me in some cases. That’s the most shocking part. As a result of that, I’ve been trying to take more time to appreciate my journey through life; where I’ve been and how I’ve ended up to this very moment – writing answers for an interview about a band I started nearly 20 years ago. I’ve had an amazing, fortunate life and really appreciate how lucky I’ve been. As I was writing ‘Life In The Wires’ all of that was in my mind so I guess the slight sense of nostalgia was always going to weave its way into the lyrics. It was nice to remember the Frost* journey. I think ‘Life In The Wires’ is my favourite Frost* album therefore, not just because it’s the freshest release, but because I think it has the spirit of all the previous albums in there. Like a big reunion of old friends. It’s been comforting in a way too.
Do you hope that the discussions about AI will rise in near future? How do you face it as artist? (I am not a fan at all of it)
I think it has its uses for sure. For example, it’s very handy on Amazon when it goes through all the reviews and creates a summary of the product in use. It saves me having to wade through pages and pages of people saying contradicting things. I think in music it will find a place for a while that may undermine real musicians’ ability to make a living. Allegedly Spotify has AI generated music available on the platform that it collects royalties for so it’s paying itself effectively on music generated by the combined analysis of real musicians’ compositions. That seems fairly depressing. I suspect that this will further send musicians onto the stage where you can’t be AI’d. Assuming there are any venues left to play in of course! I remain hopeful though. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “Art will find a way”
Do you like to write an album on your own and when are the other members involved in the whole process?
I guess it depends on the situation. John and I wrote a lot of ‘Day And Age’ and ‘Falling Satellites’ together. I wrote all the first two albums. John did co-write two songs on this album with the songs ‘Strange World’ and ‘Starting Fires’. John came to the studio to do a lot of guitar parts although he did email some more over a few weeks later. Nath emailed everything over which is how he likes to work, it all arrives fully formed and awesome, so I literally just drop the wav file into ProTools and that’s his part done. Craig was on tour with Steve Hackett for the whole time I was making the album, so we had a bit of a time zone dance sometimes, but it was fine. He would email his parts over for me to work on. They all brought their A-games to the party on this album. Absolutely incredible performances.
You also returned to doing the lead vocals. A natural development with that nod to first album?
It was mainly because I wrote most of the album on my own, I was singing it as I wrote it and in keys that were comfortable for me to sing in, so it made sense to follow that to its logical conclusion and do all the lead vocals on the recording. I think these things inevitably make it sound a bit Milliontown-y.
And your first drummer Craig Blundell returned. What is the story behind that?
Yes, I’m very pleased to say that Craig is back in the band full time again after his hiatus. Very simply, he got in touch again after ‘Day And Age’ came out and we had a few lovely conversations about life in general . He’d found himself in a more peaceful place where he was able to give more of his time to more projects and we were very honoured that Frost* was one of the bands he considered important to him, so of course we welcomed him back with open arms. It’s not just about musical capability, this band, we have to have a laugh first and foremost. The musicianship is a wonderful side effect of our friendship really.
What can you tell about the making of and the presentation of the video clips for this album?
They were done by the immensely talented Christian Rios, a video director and animator based in Florida. He came up with the storyboards and put it all together. It was fantastic working with him and I hope we can work together again soon.
I know that you don’t play live that often, but are there plans for live gigs?
Touring plans are still up in the air for the same old reasons – terrible Brexit bureaucracy and the cost of it all – insurance, fuel, lighting hire, merchandising, venue costs, 10 people to pay every day… We’re not popular enough for touring to cover the cost of touring, but to be more popular we have to tour. It’s a bit of a Catch 22 and I don’t have £500,000 in the bank to spend on a world tour to break the cycle. It’s frustrating. I hope we can do something though as it’d be great to play this album live.
Last year we were blessed in the Netherlands to see Frost* scheduled at Midsummer Prog Fest in Valkenburg. What are your memories on this happening?
We had a great time although again thanks to the UK leaving the EU it was a bureaucratic nightmare! I had to list the colour and manufacturer of my £4 audio cables on the documentation to get our gear into the EU for example. It’s that stupid and a completely pointless waste of time!! The crowd were great though, we had a lot of fun. The promoter was great, the crew were brilliant, the catering was absolutely awesome and what a beautiful town!
What are the five double albums in music that should be mentioned as legendary ones? Which one is your absolute favourite and why?
‘The Wall’ by Pink Floyd, ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’ by Genesis, ‘Out Of The Blue’ by ELO, ‘Sign O’ The Times’ by Prince, ‘Seeking Major Tom’ by William Shatner. My favourite is a tie between ELO and Shatner because there isn’t a bad track on either of them.
If you like to add something relevant, please feel free to do so….
Thank you sincerely from all of us in the band for all your support. It means the world to us and we’re very humbled and grateful that you’ve chosen to continue to do so over nearly 20 years in some cases. It’s amazing and I really hope you like this new album.
