| Photos : Jack Lovekin

Last October, we were at Left of the Dial festival in Rotterdam. Three days of concerts in unexpected venues : rock in churches, alternative music, and open bars on boats with electric guitars in the background. A wind of freedom was blowing over the whole city. After a captivating live performance in a church, the London-based band Famous became our special discovery of the festival.

Party Album, released in 2024, delivers 30 minutes and 57 seconds of mixed emotions. Famous depicts and celebrates the complexities of existence. Listening to it feels liberating. Party Album can be addictive: we listen to it on repeat, without getting bored. That’s why we jumped at the opportunity to meet a member of the group!

As lead singer and songwriter of Famous, Jack Merrett’s songwriting is subtle. His taste for contrasts, a bit like Gainsbourg, is brilliant. Touching, ironic, sometimes devastating lyrics, are layered over soft and complex chords. You can sense optimism, followed by silences, ending in heartbreak, on top of electrifying guitar solos. Vocal variations, that remind us of Lou Reed, reflect Merrett’s ability for bringing his lyrics to life. He blends genres, playing between chaos and harmony, with a natural talent for captivating his audience. The enigmatic Jack Merrett writes – among other things – about despair filled with hope, love, friendship, and the UK.

La Vague Parallèle: Hey Jack, how are you doing? We’ll start with something special: if you were not performing and writing music, what would you do?

Jack Merrett: Very well, thank you. Good question (laughs). I’m not sure. I would love to probably write. Be a writer of some kind. I’ve studied quite a lot and I’m very interested in history, politics and religion. I imagine I would do something with that, whether as an academic or a journalist.

LVP: What would be your first book about?

Jack: I’ve always wanted to write an essay or a book of essays about England. I’ve always been interested in what England is historically and what it is now.

LVP: In your music you bring cultural aspects of the UK, in an ironic way sometimes. You also mention your life in the UK in general. How is it going right now for you?

Jack: I’m doing fine. I get along. I think the UK is okay. The world is probably generally in a period of transition and uncertainty, where an old way of conceiving things is no longer feeling accurate or like it has purchase. I think the United Kingdom is no exception. We are struggling to work out exactly what it is we mean or what we are trying to accomplish in the world and I find that very interesting. It’s true for much of Europe that we haven’t quite worked out what it is that we’re meant to do in the 21st century.

LVP: Talking about Europe, you came to Rotterdam a few weeks ago now for Left of the Dial Festival. Can you tell me a bit more about your experience there?

Jack: It was a really nice opportunity. We played four shows in the weekend, which you don’t really get to do very often. I really like the city and the wonderful people. It was a great festival. For one of the shows, the pianist and I did a set with just the two of us for something a little bit different. It was nice to be able to experiment a bit.

LVP: In Modern Times, you say “the party album is here and it’s so much better than I could ever have hoped it would be”. Could you tell us more about the creative process of Party Album? Was it different from your other projects like The Valley released in 2021?

Jack: It was quite different. The Valley was made with a small core group but was very collaborative, lots of people contributed to it. It was quite dysfunctional. We made it over a long period of time. Whereas for Party Album it was written, developed and then recorded with the same core group. There is maybe more of a feeling of being a band with a consistent character across the different tracks. In terms of the development of the lyrical ideas, I took quite a lot of comfort from being very honest and laying down the sort of story of my experiences in quite stark terms. While there’s still some of that in Party Album, I became more interested in starting with those experiences and situated them within something a little bit more expansive, where there was more room for abstraction and ambiguity. I started wanting to write about myself and about experiences that happened to me. Putting them in a slightly more fleshed out universe where other things happen. There is room for other people and more of what I’m interested in as well. There is a lot of history, religion or religious ideas mixed into it, which served as an impetus to make it less about the particulars of my life and more about how those related to something a little bit more communal.

LVP: Do you remember having a day or a moment that switched or started the creation of this album?

Jack: The first song I wrote for the album, knowing that it was for the album, was a song called Love Will Find A Way. It is at the end of the album in how it’s sequenced. That was an unusual one for me, because usually I’m a very slow writer. I take a lot of care and overthinking in the lyrics in particular. For Love Will Find A Way, I came up with the central piano motif and just put it on a loop on my laptop. I started writing. Pretty much all of the words came out in the order that I would sing them. The way in which that song was written felt like a new opening because there’s still me in it. There’s still very everyday details from my life, like a text I sent to my mum and little fragments of everyday stuff. These little tongue-in-cheek examples of love in my life, in all the forms that it takes, whether it’s with friends or with my family or romantic love, add up to a kind of big and quite Christian idea of a universal and redemptive love that has not actually anything to do with me. It’s kind of running on a completely different channel. I’ve continued to try and have both the little particular details of my life, hopefully in a way that doesn’t feel silly or pompous, reaching at something that is big and slightly beyond my understanding.

LVP: You just mentioned the process of writing, what about the narrative intention in the album? Would you say that there is a way for you to consume Party Album? For example, in a car at night or in an empty parking? Here, we listen to it at night on our bikes, loudly through our headphones. What would you recommend?

Jack: I honestly couldn’t say. The funny thing about making music is that the writer experiences the whole thing in little fragments. There’s the day you write that song and then the day you record that song. You sort of through that process become gradually more and more unfamiliar with your own work. You only see it in the little moment you’re in with it. By the end of it, it’s very hard to access what the experience might be like for someone just to put it on and listen to it all in one go. You never got to do that. By the time you could do it, you had too many other associations with all the songs to hear it like a normal person would. I spent a lot of time driving around at night. That’s a great time to listen to music generally, so I would recommend that. Or cycling, if that’s more your bag.

LVP: We’re trying to be more eco-friendly.

Jack: That’s good. I find cycling and listening to music too distracting. I’m going to cycle into a car (laughs).

LVP: What artists, works or people influenced you when you were writing the album? 

Jack: It’s very hard for me to imagine the stuff that I make without thinking of the things that have mattered. Musically, I spent a lot of the last year listening to classical music, broadly construed. In particular, there’s an English composer called John Taverner, who I found extremely powerful and informative. I was listening to choral music, particularly English choral music as well as Rachmaninoff. A huge influence for the album, and for me personally, particularly lyrically, was the singer-songwriter called Judee Sill. She wrote devastating love songs. She was from a very conservative religious background and grew up playing piano in churches. Her music has a wonderful hymnal inflection, but the imagery as she grew older, became progressively more abstract and dark. She died very young. She has been a great influence on me. In terms of literature, I’ll only name one novel that formed a great impact on me, that was Thomas Mann‘s Bunddenbrooks. The first novel that he wrote when he was 25. It was for me the most incisive and profound reflection on life in post-industrial Europe, and the quietly tragic life of the middle-class European. There was something incredibly powerful about that and it’s a reflection on family. It was his attempt to go back and set the record straight on his family. I’ve been doing that a little bit as well. Aside from these specifics, I certainly always go back to the music I listened to as a child, The Beatles and Elvis Presley in particular are never far away. And Lou Reed.

LVP: As an eclectic artist with many influences, how would you describe or present yourself? 

Jack: I play in a band because that’s what I did as a teenager, and I kept doing it. Famous is an attempt to fold as much of what else I like, other than playing in a band, into a band. Whether it’s audible or not, there’s this influence from a great variety of different music genres: whether it’s country, hip-hop, pop, classical music, jazz or traditional music. I try to fold that in, and I take an interest in the world in various ways. I’m always trying to find a way to, cat-candidly and unconvincingly, fold as much of what I love in the world, into the music. “I play in a band” is my simple answer.

LVP: How did the group dynamic influence the creation of Party Album?

Jack: I write the lyrics, much of the structures of the songs and the simple chords, certainly for Party Album that was the case. Beyond that, it’s very collaborative and the album sounds like the people who played it. I’m always very keen for whoever’s contributing to the music to play as they would play as if it was their project and they were trying to express themselves. I want it to be a full sense of expression for all involved. It’s very much marked by the people who played on it.

LVP: Did you struggle or maybe have a special relation with one of the songs you wrote for Party Album?

Jack: All of them were hard in their way. I think one that was particularly hard was Leaving Tottenham for me. It was very hard to finish because I tried to put in a lot of myself into the lyrics and there were very few words in it. If you actually look at the words written down, no song have I worked harder to make every word count. In terms of finishing the non-lyrical elements, What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life took us an unbelievably long time, based on the now probably incorrect assumption that it was going to be a worldwide hit (laughs). We were trying to get it right. We worked very hard on that song as well.

LVP: The music video of What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life was directed by James Ogram. How was the creation process collaborating with him?

Jack: James has been a long-time collaborator of ours and he’s an extremely talented guy. We worked on the concept for the video together. We were trying to create the impression of a grand story without it, without ever spelling out even to ourselves what the story was. I think there was something very Famous about that: reaching for something very big that ultimately even we didn’t understand in it. It was all sort of yearning for something big without knowing what it is. It was very special making the video, with a wonderful team and cast.

LVP: On stage, do you feel like playing a role or would you rather say that music allows you to be yourself?

Jack: There is an element of playing a role. It’s partly that, in a funny way, that through playing a character I can be myself. Like everyone else, I’m capable of feeling very shy or uncertain of myself. With this mask of someone who, at least in theory, goes out and moves with confidence, I’m able to say the things I’d like to say anyway – that I maybe wouldn’t be able to otherwise. You have to believe it yourself, for other people to believe it. Even though I get scared or I feel shy, I just try to focus on being as precise and as much the person I’m trying to be as I can. Just kind of will myself to be the kind of person who can do that, because it doesn’t always feel like I can.

LVP: The perception you have of yourself and the perception you give to the audience are two different worlds. Where do you see Famous going next musically and artistically?

Jack: No expectations. We’re going to release more music soon, as soon as we can. Hopefully go out and play for more people. I’m trying to focus on simply enjoying being able to do it, trying to get better at writing and think less about the long term future.

LVP: When you listen to music in general, do you pay more attention to the lyrics or the instrumental part?

Jack: The lyrics I would say. They sound out to me a lot. It’s hard to separate from the melody and the context and the voice in which they’re delivered – but yes, the lyrics.

LVP: If you could pick one track that really captures the essence of the project, which one would it be?

Jack: Maybe Modern Times.

LVP: You are cheating, it’s from the former album (laughs).

Jack: From the new album I would say Leaving Tottenham but my real answer is one that’s not been released yet…

LVP: We are curious to hear it. One last question to close this conversation, imagine you are stuck somewhere and you can listen to only one song for 24 hours, which one would you pick?

Jack: Disney girls by The Beach Boys. My favourite song. It’s beautiful.

And for those who would be curious to experience them live in France in the next weeks, Famous will be playing on the well-known 22 stage at Le Printemps de Bourges on Thursday, 17th April along with Knives, Gwendoline and Chloe Slater.