Interview taken ( & edited ) from HermAphrodite #9.
But the Younger Youngers have rock roots too. In the form of
Jim. Who used to play for a very big-haired ensemble some years back. And 
now provides electronic wizardry for this
band. Oh, and also…
Me – “Jim looks like a Thunderbird.”
Joe – “Yeah.”
Me – “Does he know that?”
Joe – “Yeah.”
Me –“And are they real glasses that he wears?”
Andie –“They’ve got no lenses in.”
Joe – “But he says he can’t see properly without them.”
The little weirdo.
Joe – “He says he once did an interview – he used to be in a
rock band – and he said he hated keyboard players that looked like Thunderbird
puppets.”
Heh-heh.
Andie – “And look where he is now…”
Undistractable and indestructable.
Oh, and before we go any further, the drummer-less-ness of
the band is intentional ( and not due to a streak of heinous Spinal Tap-esque
accidents ).
Me – “Don’t you want a drummer?”
No. Short answer. No. They don’t.
Joe – “Not in this band. We just wanted to do something
easy. I think a lot of things get ruined in the ‘thinking too hard stage’…”
And drummer would make things less immediate. ( Not just
over-cerebrally complicated. )
Joe – “We can have a song finished in a day, go off and play
next week. Just that whole process of setting up a band; finding drummers and bass-players,
hiring vans when you’ve got no money, it’s very hard.”
Andie – “Jim’s got a little Polo, that’s what we used to
travel around in. And we could fit all of us in it and all our gear, and it’s
so easy.”
Joe – “It’s like kids would do. Just go ‘Right, I’ve got
that that and that, I’m gonna make something out of it’. They don’t go ‘NO! I’m
going to wait until I’ve got the right particular depth 
of carpet’ or whatever. They just get on
with it.”
Me – “So you’re the A-Team of rock.”
Andie likes this analogy. Joe doesn’t quite understand it.
Me – “Like Mr T would be stuck in a room, with only a
paper-clip and a piece of string, and from that he could make a tank.”
Joe is still none the wiser.
Joe – “I don’t know the A-Team.”
Andie ( incredulous ) – “You don’t know the A-Team?”
Joe – “You always do this, everybody does this, I don’t know
anything. People always bring things up, and then I feel really useless because
I don’t know them.”
But surely he’s been living in a bag ( or in a badger
commune ) if he’s never heard of them in any way at all?
Joe – “As I said earlier, I just didn’t participate.”
Me – “Television could have been your solace.”
Joe – “It wasn’t.”
Me – “Were you a book-worm then, as a child?”
Joe – “Music. It was music. I don’t know much about popular
culture over the last fifteen years…”
Me – “They’re maybe not ‘culture’, the A-Team, but still…”
Andie – “They were there.”
Joe – “And they were popular.”
And they didn’t make records. So he wouldn’t know. Andie and
Liz don’t tend to torture him over his lack of televisual awareness though. He
and Jim can cream them on music trivia.
Me – “So collectively you’d be really good at a pub quiz?”
Joe ( happily ) – “Yeah! Yeah, we would.”
Music in particular for Joe though…
Joe – “I actually had a record deal when
I was thirteen, I thought it was easy. And then I never got another one for
twenty years.”
And what exactly was he doing at the age of thirteen? Well…
Joe – “I was in a band called Dam Dam Dem Billy Caboots (?).
We were a sort of free-form jazz punk. It was Harrogate’s Art College band.”
Me – “Were you a child of John Peel then?”
Joe – “Oh totally, yeah. I used to sit there every night.
Music was my escape. When I heard punk rock it was like – ‘hooray, I’ve got my own
world now’. And then I heard The Ramones, and that made it even easier, because
I thought ‘fantastic! I’m allowed to play as well!” Which was the idea of it.
And I like everything like that. ( pause ) John Peel’s Festive Fifty was the
highlight of my year. Does he still do that?”
Yeah.
Joe – “Does ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division always win?”
No.
Anyway.
Me – “So was this all you wanted to be when you got older;
is this where you wanted to be?”
Joe – “Yeah. Yeah. It was the only thing I clung on to. It’s
in there a lot with our songs; that mixture between desperation and dreaming. A
lot of people have said I’m very cynical about it; I don’t think I am, it kept
me going. And I eventually got there. The only difference now is that when I
was thirteen, every night was going to be a rock ‘n’ roll party. And
unfortunately for me I only manage to get it together when I stop partying.”
It wasn’t exactly what everyone else had intended for his
future though.
Joe – “I was a public schoolboy, I was meant to go to Oxford
or Cambridge and play cricket for Yorkshire.”
And he actually got offered a place on the team. But he’s
happy with this fork in his ( life ) path.
Joe – “Yeah. Definitely. ( pause ) Some people seem to learn
some lessons really early on in life, and know what they want to do. Me, I got
there by trying every other alternative – I’ve done hundreds of jobs that I
really hated.”
So he settled for music, what made him happy.
Joe – “And oddly enough, other people seemed to like it.”
To an extreme degree, in some cases.
Joe – “We did have one guy with a placard, which said JOE
NORTHERN IS MY DAD. And he was an Asian
guy, which I thought was even odder.”
They love their fans though. And their placing in a live
arena.
Joe – “You get Jim fans going over to Jim, and they tend to
be boffins, and a few girls. And then obviously there’s the leering blokes in
front of the dancing girls. And then in front of me there’s either nothing at
all because they’re intimidated, or there’s a load of fucking weirdos. Both of
which I quite like. It gives us a really obvious reflection as to ourselves.”
Grin. And so, beyond that, what do they want out of this
band-malarkey? Full global networking with soft-drink sponsors and their own
range of dolls, or just to move a leetle bit higher up the festival bills…?
Andie – “I like singing, that’s what I want to do.”
She’s just happy to be being paid for it.
Andie – “I’m not really bothered about wanting to be
massive.”
Joe, however, isn’t quite so sure.
Joe – “I’d hate to be hate part of that fame thing, I think
it’s repulsive. But on the other side of it, I don’t want this band to be
something that sells three records in Shrovesbury, like I always did. I’d like
to see it in the mainstream. Because society’s happy with little weird bands on
the fringes, because they have no power. But it would be nice to see people
who’ve been told 
‘you’ve got no chance in your life’
become successful. It’s BORING watching the same old people who went to drama
schools end up in pop bands. It just gives out a message that if you’re not
‘That’, you can’t be in a pop band and sell loads of records. And I just don’t
believe that.”
So nyeah, Pete Waterman.
Joe – “And also, we deliberately put very dark lyrics into
pop tunes. What I’d always done was sing a load of lyrics that sounded like Joy
Division. I just thought – ‘if you did Joy Division’s lyrics, with Aqua’s
music, it would be fantastic!’ That was the blue-print we had, when we
started.”
And people saying ‘ooh you can’t do that’ just gives them
something else to move away from.
Joe – “It is about the blandest time in music, I think, the
blandest it’s been for a long time. It’s so bland I was even energised to put a
band together.”
And motivated to sing for it. And oooh, but we are grateful.
Last
revised: 26/07/01