Blasting the cobwebs from the great Pandora’s Box of rock music, flinging open the lid and drunkenly pissing over its contents come the hottest new, next big thing, greatest band of all time, The Jeffrey Archer Nuance. Hailing from some wet, miserable hamlet near Cumbria, the JANs are a ‘don’t give a shit’ group of four working class lads who all went to private school using their drug addled, sexually deviant mischief as a spectacular muse to create a positive cacophony of post grunge, electro-crash, sex-sleaze, ‘waking up in the bed of a stranger after a night of posing at an NME sponsored student night and having to mop vomit off your favourite drainpipe jeans’ style sound.
“It’s been wicked, I’m off the dole, on the dope and I’ve got a debut album to my name!” enthuses JAN singer Arbitrary Dan, lifting his feet so that the maid can finish vacuuming the drawing room. Indeed JAN have already pushed back the boundaries of music by doing everything only slightly different to Franz Ferdinand. The first album, Blue Pill/Red Pill was recorded using one of those little Casio Dictaphone watches. “Yeah, we wanted to do something really profound, all these other bands they’re referencing some balls French movies and stuff?” snorts Dan in between drags on a crack pipe, “So I was watching the Matrix trilogy with Jon (Trouble, bassist) and we’d injected some Dettol, it blew our minds, I mean Neo actually flies at the end! Anyway, we thought the sound you get from a Casio would really portray our sound in the best possible light. It did mean we had to make every song 30 seconds though ‘cos it wouldn’t tape stuff for any longer.”
Abusing household cleaners and mainstream movies aside, JAN have yet to find a label to put out Blue Pill/Red Pill; preferring self-promotion they reject the methods used by recently tipped next big things but now bottom of the pile, the Arctic Monkeys. “Nah, the internet just isn’t cool enough anymore,” sneers Dean Scene the stick thin, identikit androgynous JAN drummer. “We had to do something really cutting edge, so we held some fucking proper guerrilla gigs!” Rather than following past, great, wicked and now sadly defunct amazing bands like the Libertines, JAN made sure their impromptu performances would single them from the crowd. “That’s right,” chuckles Dean, “We got on the tube all kitted up in camo gear and we took a party of Dutch tourists hostage. We really wanted to highlight our cause so we made them plead for help from their government into a video camera; it was cool because we played our new single whilst they cried and stuff.”
The ploy clearly worked as Red Pill/ Blue Pill quickly became the hot underground sound of this year, literally defecating upon the ‘pap’ released by dried out ‘has beens’ like Babyshambles. Yet the guerrilla stunt did not pass without drama, glockenspiel player Davey Borell was shot by armed officers in the chaos as the band escaped with their captives. “Yes that was really unfortunate, he wasn’t even running, he was just wearing a large coat,” murmurs Arbitrary Dan. “We were going to dedicate the album to him, but then we got an offer from Bob Geldof to play Live8, so we thought it would be better if we remembered all them starving kids and the horror of this modern capitalist world,” elaborates Dean Scene on JAN’s reaction to the loss of their band mate and close friend whilst lacing up his Nike-owned Converse trainers.
JAN’s success appears then completely unstoppable, even in the face of such tragedy and heartache. Although Red Pill/Blue Pill has yet to have been heard properly by anyone, it is sure to be the greatest rock album of the last the greatest rock album of the last 30 years. Few other bands today embodied the passion of this deprived generation with the flair of JAN, the Nuances would have been the voice of the nation’s youth, if Dan and Dean hadn’t had an argument over who had necked the most Finish dishwasher tablets during the course of this interview and subsequently split up.
This article is reprinted by kind permission of Kerplunk! magazine