By Keith Walsh
While recording the album “The Modesty Blaise” for his band of a similar name, singer/songwriter Jonny Collins enticed a keyboard player with the promise of a genuine Hammond B3 played through a Leslie rotating speaker. “That’s a chap called Matthew (O’Connor)” said Collins, “who is a fabulous keyboard player. And the reason why I managed to persuade him to come to the studio to do it was because I had a Hammond in there with a Leslie speaker. ‘Come on. Look at this. How many chances do you get to play a Hammond, and Leslie?’”

The album is filled with brilliant keyboard tracks, some by O’Connor and others by Collins, as well as by Bobby Cole, (who also plays in Taurus 1984 with Modesty Blaise guitarist Alastair Jenkins.)

 In addition to the great keyboard work, which centers around piano, organs and the occasional strings, the heart of the album is the songs, with spirited performances and inspiring lyrics that are Collins’ trademark. Bobby Cole plays piano on “Pink Champagne On Mars,” showing considerable chops.

“Pink Champagne On Mars (Return Of The Uranium Girl)” riffs on The Doors in the intro before launching into wistful lounge pop reminiscent of the 1960s. In fact, much of “The Modesty Blaise” draws inspiration from the 1960s.

“The Great American Songbook”
As Collins explains: “It’s probably West Coast rather than anything else. Okay, so a lot of my favorite albums…let’s think of (Phil) Spector’s being a West Coast artist. Because although he’s from New York, the vast majority of his great recordings were done at Gold Star on Western and in places like that. Okay. As were the Beach Boys recordings. I mean if you listen to the album before that (Melancholia), which I recognize is a long time before, I think it sounds even more Beach Boys…. also that there’s a very strong British influence on a lot of our stuff as well. There’s obviously Beatles but also Kinks, and that sort of thing, too.”

The tunes on “The Modesty Blaise” and earlier albums by Modesty Blaise are strong not only because of the stellar performances, but also their songwriting. That’s largely because of how Collins approached music as a young man, after realizing that many hugely popular bands got by on poor songwriting with amazing production. “I’m not actually very good at playing any instruments,” he said, “and I just surround myself with people that are. But a large amount of that is because people during their formative years, sit in their bedrooms and learn how to play guitar, learn how to play keyboard or things like that. I didn’t do that. What I did, I sat in my bedroom….and I had to write songs. I studied the Great American Songbook.”

Quick Tip
So while many pop and rock musicians were practicing scales, chords and arpeggios, Collins, growing up in Bristol, England was studying songs. “I read biographies of Jerome Kern and of Cole Porter and Gershwin, Irving Berlin too. And I would argue that, yeah, there are quite a lot of bands that are like this. And yes, the sound’s great, but the songs aren’t good enough. That is a natural corollary of people having sat in their bedrooms and learning how to play the guitar.”

“Although, you know,” he continues, “I reckon that most bands have got one or two decent songs in them, simply by virtue of the fact that they’ve heard some songs, but to do more than that, I think requires a certain understanding of, as you’ve mentioned, a structure and just some kind of knowledge of as to what you’re doing with a song as opposed to what you’re doing with a record or what you’re doing with an arrangement and I think that an awful lot of songs are really, really poor….There are a lot of bands that will be infinitely better because their sound is great. But their songs are poor.”

One quick tip that songwriters can take away from this: “I’ve got one hate — its melody following chord structure. And there are so many times that you hear it happening. You think my God what’s going on?”

The songs across Collins’ work are perfectly fun and optimistic, despite him being a “militant atheist.” When writing the delightfully charming “Natalie Vendredi,” a song about a Britainer in the midst of Brexit isolationism, hoping to get out of England by securing a romance and an EU passport from a French girl, Collins noted the great number of songs with the name “Natalie” in them, yet none of them employing the rhyme “philately,” (another word for stamp collecting), which he does quite cleverly.

As Collins explains: “And I saw somebody do a song with ‘Natalie’ in it. And I thought ‘they haven’t  rhymed it with ‘philately!’ And why doesn’t anybody?’ And then I discovered that there’s a whole world of ‘Natalie’ songs out there….loads and loads of them, but I couldn’t find one that used ‘philately.’ So I had this title. I went to this gig. I saw somebody singing that the song, it wasn’t very good and they didn’t rhyme with the ‘philately.’ Right? Well, I’ll do it.”

Considering his songwriting prowess, I wondered if there were new challenges inspiring Collins for his future works? “The list song is really difficult. I find it difficult, and I have not yet managed to do it. Equally the protest song – I’ve not yet managed to do that.”

“Tie A Yellow Ribbon”
In his quest to write the perfect song, Collins studied Christmas tunes for his new “I’ll Be Home For Xmas,” which includes familiar tropes including Beach Boys style vocals, bells and snow. “I started writing it as a song of a soldier coming home at Christmas,” Collins explained. “And because I was thinking, ‘what things do you have in a Christmas song? You have kids singing. You’ve got that. . you’ve got snow. What are the things you have in the Christmas song?'”

“Oh, well — what if it’s a soldier coming home on leave?’ And for a while, I was trying to leave it kind of ambiguous. Could it be you’re coming home on leave? Could it be somebody being let out of prison? What could it be? And so, I still think there’s a slight ambiguity in it. It might be a soldier coming home. I think we kind of ruined that in the video, but that was sort of the idea, by the time we get to the end of it is, obviously somebody’s coming home from prison because the end is ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon by Tony Orlando and Dawn.’”

Synthbeat.com is happy to share this new Christmas song with you, wishing you a very special, happy holiday.

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