BANGBANGBERLIN.COM can exlusively tell you all that Jamie, previously of beloved Berlin band Myriad Creatures fame, has GONE SOLO! He shall also now be known as Jim Kroft. Tres Rock'nRoll, we know. Of course it's sad when a band part ways, but we cant help feeling excited for Jim as his solo album was released just last week and after a listen, we have to say i'ts bloody fantastic. Titled 'Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea', it showcases what a truly talented songwriter and singer he is. Jim has been busy gigging around between Berlin+London and we can't wait to catch him live ourselves. Enjoy the interview!! Jim, you have left your band Myriad Creatures and are going solo - tell me about this dramatic decision! It was the hardest decision I have ever had to make. I´ve built up the band with the guys since we moved over to Berlin at the turn of 2007, and we´ve been down many an addled trench together - gigging from Romania to Aberdeen, releasing our first record last year, and getting known in Europe. The band is in a fantastic position in that it has some great people supporting it on the business side, as well as such a wonderful grassroots fanbase - which is very rare nowadays - and tough to build up. There is also a great album which we have been concentrating on since last September, and one I have a lot of belief in still now that I have left. However, you have to look into your musical heart and try to stay true to it. I am a singer and a writer of songs, that´s the basis of my life. I decided that I want to follow that without any compromise whatsoever, and that no longer entailed being in a band. That didn´t mean that I didn´t love the music we were making together (far from it) it just means that at some point you recognize mortality cuts things short in life, and that your time to try and follow your purpose is limited. Doing things you enjoy, and things that make you happy don´t always coincide with the path that you want to take. Neither does prudence. Sometimes it is the harder choice that makes you feel shittier, and gives you more pain, but you have to follow it because you believe it to be right, and because your guts tell you to do it. So it was very tough to make the decision to walk away, and I am now back in the wilderness, starting again. However you have to trust in your ability to recreate and make good work. Or you might as well go back to The Man. I commend you for staying so true to what you believe in! It's a tough one I know, we alll here at BBB have a lot of love for both Myriad Creatures and your good self. So anyhow, onwards! Tell me about the debut album! How did it come about and what sound were you going for? The album was a complete rush of blood. The Creatures album was finished and ready to be mixed but unfortunately producer Gordon Raphael got a great job he had to do, so the mix was delayed. There was a lot of energy, but nowhere to put it. Anyway I have great musician friends in London where I am pretty well connected, so I got in touch with Matt Ingram who runs Urchin Studios in East London (which is owned by Gordon). There was the smallest window for recording before I had to get back for the Creatures mix. So we had two rehearsals then went into the studio for 9 days straight! On top of all that, on day 9 the string quartet came in and played the arrangements Ben Barritt had written during the session - he didn´t sleep more than 4 hours each night, some times camping in the studio while hallucinating quavers...One of the best days in music in my life was just hearing these wonderful arrangements played flawlessly. The playing was breathtaking. The whole album was recorded for just over a grand - proper D.I.Y independent record making - outside the record industry, just a bunch of absolute dudes playing and working their guts out for each other. It was very humbling to experience such dedication and expertise for so little dosh. It was a labour of love, and I am in debt to the Gods....and Urchin Studios! Who exactly were the people you worked with on the album? I carved the musicians into two sets - one set had 5 rhythm tracks for the first day, the second, had the other 5 tracks. I figured that with so little time to practice it would be better for everyone to have less to concentrate on. Matt Ingram co-produced the album with me and played drums on some of the tracks, and Dan Cox engineered. They are the Urchin team. They are knocking out records for the best price and the best quality as any one in London. They recently had Fyfe Dangerfield (Guillemots singer) and Adam Ficek (Babyshambles) in to do records. I think of Urchin as like a smaller and less known version of Steve Albini´s (Nirvana´s In Utero Producer) Studio Electrical Audio in the States. He has worked on some of the biggest album around but refuses to take points (where producers usually get paid on album sales). I love the orchestral sound, slightly Beatles-esque in places - who else were influences? And whats your favourite Beatles album/era? I love all types of music, but i wouldn´t say that many of the left field influences found their way into this record. Ultimately I am a first time solo artist, and part of the priority is to get yourself in a position to record the next. But there is definitely an older school quality. I was trying to write a modern adaption of a Johnny Cash song with Guess That´s What the Gods Say - with the stomping rhythms, acoustics and the way his songs flow so great. On the other hand, on Falling Apart the string section on the chorus is trying to incorporate an Enrico Morricone type figure on the strings. Low budget East London cinema adaption! You have to try! Tales of the Dark Arts has a Beatles feel in the harmony. Its my favorite on the album and opens it. There is so much to learn from the songwriters who wrote for Sinatra, and people like Carole King. As a solo artist I guess I am a bit lost at sea in the Berlin environment which is so progressive. But the songs are an engagement and reaction to modernity, and I think that these questions transcend style.... I love the themes you address in it, about the excitement and loneliness of moving abroad (to Berlin) and your social commentary on the strange times we live in is especially well-observed - would you say overall your outlook is positive or more worried/despairing? Good questions Bang Bang Berlin!! My overall outlook is of acceptence, engagement and positivity. Growing up you have a tendency to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. It is natural. Life is tough, and the more you realize how fucked up things are the harder it can be to find a foothold. However if you keep searching, keep looking, keep asking the questions and trying to remain as open as possible, you do find that foothold. If there is one thing this album charters it is this question - how does one grow up sane in a bonkers world? Tales of the Dark Arts starts with a question I stole from Marx:`everything is pregnant with its contrary today (that´s the good bit which is obviously the Marx bit ha ha!) its a head fuck at the best of times - unless there´s something that I missed then humanity´s in a twist´. It sets out the problem, the condition, the challenge. When everything is so complicated, so twisted, so back to front, how do we remain sane? My experience was that I had to go the point of virtual insanity to get to a perspective, a foothold. Life - the things I lived through - which are all just normal human things - the death of a parent, divorce, drugs, trying to resist the man, too much freedom, what the hell do you do with this freedom, losing relationships whether parental or in love, to pursue what you love - nearly drove me to the edge. And it nearly drives everyone to the edge at some stage, whether they choose to admit it or not. So how do you cope, how do you survive? With honesty, with taking things step by step, communication, whether professional or just reaching out. Basic human stuff. But modernity is a vast sceptre, as is life, and you have to deal with it one way or the other. But ultimately I remain positive - the chaos must be faced - and with a smile! Re The Great Doomsday Song - are we all doomed? I went to Dorset to meet James Lovelock with my brother to ask him this question. (Lovelock is the father of the Green Movement and wrote Gaia Theory). This was years ago before Climate Change had reached the front covers of newspapers and had become a political issue. It was interesting. His perspective was that we are further down the line than anyone has quite fathomed, and there is simply not much that we can do about it. His advice - politically - is for governments to start taking measures now to deal with the fall out. Personally I don´t/can´t agree with that. However, humans are so over populated and have eradicated so many species, that I don´t think it matters either way -nature will find a way to balance humanity - and it will not be pretty. John Gray says we are going into the era of solitude - where we will be a lone species after we have made extinct all the others. It´s easy to get depressed about this stuff, to sit in your armchair and say what´s the point. But that´s bulllshit. You have to love smile, engage, go on. There´s no point beating oneself up over the greater state of things that you can´t change. But you can still play your part, and work out how you can do what ever you can. This album is about saying you gotta participate anyway - regardless of the doom and the doomsdayers. Lovelock told me to go to the Arctic Basin and set up camp there - Europe will be intemperate - I´ll see you all there for some shows! How would Jim Kroft recommend we start redeeming ourselves? Ha ha - by buying my record, tons of them, I am sure that will at least help me! Or come to the shows and do some dancing. Dancing is the purest way to salvation, and there is no one worse at it than my good self! I love Tales of the Dark Arts - do you believe in magic? or religion? or spirituality? I try to believe a bit of everything! There was an old coin dug up in a Celtic grave. On the one side it had a Christian Cross, on the other the dagger of the local Pagan religion. The dude was hedging his bets - that´s what I call wisdom! And yes, I believe in magic, I believe that extraordinary things happens - especially in adversity. Religion? For me something just cannot come out of nothing. And when I have gone far out and tried to actually conceive of that, then it has only tipped me over the edge. Come on - you can´t make an equation and put that stuff in a text book. All the great scientists say that the further you go into the question of matter, the more paradoxical and strange the results become. Sub atomic materials start behaving irregularly and you reveal them selves as not waveforms or particles but something in between. I can´t conceive that stuff - I only know that it makes sense to me that it doesn´t make sense. I find it comforting. It's better to be a fool-fraud like me and just enjoy the big questions in the pub - now that is a place where you can find some proper illumination! You wrote the whole album yourself - tell me about your writing process. how does it work for you? It comes out of life. Even if I am very busy i try and pick out an idea, or vamp on some chords. If you don´t sit down it won´t come. It takes tremendous discipline though, and you have to obey it and live your life around it. It tends to have a habit of fucking things up foryou ha ha. What I mean is that if you are serious about writing and serious about putting it first and giving yourself to it, then it takes sacrifices. If you sacrifice, you suffer and this often means losing some of the good stuff in life - whether seeing loved ones as much as you like, or walking in the park or whatever. I think it is a pretty old and boring idea that you have to suffer for your art. I don´t believe that. I just believe that writing something good and true means walking the road less travelled. Don´t expect it not to hurt because the truth is it does. Do you ever get writers block and how do you remedy it?+ Process. Discipline. Charlie Parker said that if you don´t live it, it won´t come out the horn. Luckily, life keeps on moving a pace, and it is hard to keep up, whether you want to or not. I came out here, to give myself to the process, and in that experience, the writing has been very kind. Leonard Cohen gets to his desk and treats it like a 9-5. I think there is a lot of rot about art just coming. Rubbish. You have to work and be in the process. So far, touch wood, I have not had writers block. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, sometimes better ofter worser. But it comes if you let it, and you want it to. How do you feel when you look at the album as a whole and what youve made/accomplished? I feel like I want to make more. That I want to better it. I feel good to have begun. And I look it and think thank God I know the Sunst. Bros in Berlin, because their artworkis always genius. Berlin has obviously been very influential on you - do you see this relationship with the city continuing? How has it developed form the point you arrived ot where you find yourself now? Absolutely. Berlin has been kind to me personally, as a musician, and as a writer. It is the best city on earth, and hell I blame it for too many hangovers, too many good times. It has been a hell of a ride here, and I feel privileged to be here at the is time in its history. The city and scene is changing quickly, and every time you grasp it, it is gone. We had an amazing rehearsal studio for 3 years on Friedrichstrasse - you are talking about the heart of the Berlin - and we never paid any rent or electricity. Where else could that happen in Western Europe? We had bands like The Kooks come and play and it was pure anarchy. The 1920´s eat your heart out - it was anarchy. This will never be repeated again in Western Europe. This is the last stand. And I am enjoying it to the dam full. What kind of second album do you think you would make, if you could? It will harmonically challenge. I want to push my songwriting. I am writing songs that are much more non-linear now. That progress in different ways and through different keys. It will be completely out of time and sell nothing. But it will be special, I really believe that. And it will engage and build on the themes and ideas that are there in the first album. I am thinking of naming it after Marshall Berman´s book - All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.... What are your plans re this album - touring/promotion? I´m playing record release shows this month in Berlin and London, Fete de la Music, WABE in September, and hope to get the opportunity to do a support tour for a bigger band if the opportunity arises. I hope to see you Berliners at Cafe Zapata on the 7th of May for the record release - it is also a night to celebrate the Tacheles, who the forces that be are trying to shut down.....they will not succeed!! Thank you so much Jim and best of luck! Thank you too dear LizCat!