Jamiroquai: The King of Cool
The sound of Jay Kay’s Jamiroquai in 2019 is unapologetically buoyant, mesmeric and kaleidoscopic. Hey Mag dips in…
Words_Jim Butler. [First published in February 2019]
Esteemed American man of letters F Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t wrong about many things. Watching this year’s must-see Fyre documentary, you’re reminded that Fitzgerald savagely skewered the vacuous pursuits of morally bankrupt rich American white kids in The Great Gatsby, almost 100 years before Ja Rule and Billy McFarland went loco in the Bahamas.
He was awry with one observation, however. In the notes for his posthumously published novel The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald noted that there were no second acts in American lives (and thus, by extension, all lives). From Elvis to Madonna, by way of Kate Bush and even Take That, this pithy take on culture is repeatedly repudiated.
It was once more in 2017, when after a seven-year absence (an eternity in pop music) everybody’s favourite cosmic acid jazz-discofunkateers Jamiroquai returned with the release of their eighth album, Automaton. The re-emergence of Jay Kay and his band seemed eerily prescient. With the world standing on the precipice of collapse, Jamiroquai’s colourful and soulful grooves proved timely. Doubly so, when you consider the likes of Pharrell Williams, Tyler the Creator and Chance the Rapper had all spoken about the influence of Jamiroquai on their music in the intervening years.
But it was more than just about turning on the new school (okay, Pharrell would have been dancing to Canned Heat, Deeper Underground and Space Cowboy back in the ’90s). It was about bringing some much needed conscious funk back to a music scene obsessed with navel gazing singer-songwriters.
Writing in the UK, music critic Kitty Empire nailed it best when she wrote: “Ultimately, you can’t shake the feeling that pop is a giant feedback loop, in which Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield begat Jamiroquai and Pharrell, and the influence of Jamiroquai must have fed, consciously or subconsciously, into the aural landscapes of both Daft Punk and Pharrell.”
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Jay Kay was remarkably sanguine about his band being held up as musical torchbearers. “I mean it’s very flattering,” he told journalist Chris Weingarten. “It’s interesting, I watched the Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars documentary. It’s a fascinating documentary, but listening to that you also remember that everybody got their sh*t from somewhere else. Snippets, bits, bobs.”
Fast-forward to this year and the band’s glittering comeback shows no sign of stopping. This month Jamiroquai will return to the United Arab Emirates for the first time since 2013 to headline the second night of the Dubai Jazz Festival, on 21 February. Then there are shows lined up in Spain, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Germany and Belgium throughout May.
So what can those in attendance expect? Well, the word that keeps cropping up in reviews of their live shows since their triumphant return to the stage at London’s Roundhouse in April 2017 is “bangers”. Jay Kay’s boys (and girls the new additions of the band’s Cosmic Babes backing singers bring some extra sass to proceedings) might still retain the funk-jazz-soul groove that first catapulted them to fame in the early ’90s, but this has been allied to some belligerent, club-infused electronics.
A review of that Roundhouse gig was quick to point out the new electronic avenues the band now travelled, describing two of their monster ’90s hits, Virtual Insanity and Canned Heat, as “actual f***ing bangers”. Elsewhere, 2001’s Little L single was described as a “disco thumper”, while comeback release Automaton was noted for its “robotic funk”.
The review concluded: “Trendy 25-year olds sung along to all the lyrics, suits a couple of pints too deep clapped out of time with abandon and the middle aged couple in front of us fought over how to correctly dance along to a moody, dubbier version of Emergency on Planet Earth. In those moments the full spectrum of the crowd shared something special.”
Not bad for a band that has been around for nigh-on 30 years. Despite being touted by London’s hip style press for much of the early ’90s, it wasn’t until the spring of 1993 that the rest of the UK caught up when Too Young To Die and then a re-released When You Gonna Learn relentlessly grabbed the hit parade and refused to let go. Debut album Emergency on Planet Earth topped the album charts with its blend of on-point environmentalism and funky good vibes.
Alongside Britpop, dance music and hiphop, Jamiroquai’s many-legged groove machine ruled the rest of the decade. Albums The Return of the Space Cowboy, Travelling Without Moving and Synkronized all ascend to the higher reaches of the album charts and the band become a fixture on festival line-ups across the globe. World tours sell out, 27 million albums are shifted and awards come from the likes of Ivor Novello, the Grammys and MTV. Their music (Deeper Underground) is featured on the elephantine Godzilla soundtrack and a geeky kid in a Vote For Pedro T-shirt does a rather strange little dance to Canned Heat in Napoleon Dynamite.
Which just about brings us up to date. Their eighth album, Automaton was described by the band as “challenging man versus machine versus planet Earth”, and full of “smooth, sci-fi grooves, soulful electro-funk and a throwback techno vibe”. Which as well as displaying some excitingly tidy lyrical flourishes is eerily accurate.
They continued: “From the intergalactic grind of the title track to the handclap disco of first single Cloud 9, and the cruising sunshine of Something About You, it’s every inch a classic Jamiroquai album, and then some.”
That it is. Jay Kay might still have more cars than anyone will ever need but levied by the calming influence of two young children, he’s once more put the fun back into funk music. He may no longer be the dancing space cowboy on a conveyor belt, but heading up the biggest Day-Glo global groove has brought about a fresh, new moniker: The King of Cool.
When confronted with his turnabout in fortunes, the man himself was unsuitably modest. “I was kinda quite happy, pleasantly surprised,” said Jay Kay. “That was definitely like, ‘Whoa, crikey, thank you!’”
No, thank you, Jamiroquai. Thank you.”
*****
Read more about music — across all genres, in the February 2019 issue of Hey Mag HERE
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