PERFECT MOMENT FOR SONG DUO

ALTHOUGH their recent single, Air Guitar, only scored minor chart success, London based duo BEN & JASON have actually notched up a best selling number one album thanks to an inexplicable partnership with the soapy smooth Martine McCutcheon.
“It was a strange one!” recounts Ben Parker. “Virgin Records called one day saying they’d like us to go in and talk to them about writing with someone. So we went in, had a chat, and they told us who it was and we thought ‘WHAT?!’”
“They said to give her a chance, go out to dinner with her and discuss the whole project. I don’t know why they picked us, but they said that she was starting out in a new career, and she needed other people around her in a similar position in their career. But we got together and she’s very charming.
“We had a writing session and wrote about ten songs together, four of which got on her debut album. It’s quite bizarre to think that 500,000 homes in the UK have four of our songs, which is a lot more than have our ‘proper’ music. We viewed it very much as side-line and we’ve written with other people, but she’s obviously the most famous.”
The duo have also been working with former Wet Wet Wet singer Marti Pellow, although Ben is keen to play down the project.
“We had a day with him before Christmas in Chris Difford’s studio, but not too sure what’s going to happen to that.”
Picking up tips working for a music publishers, the duo’s knack for a good tune places them at the forefront of a songwriting revival.
Despite a constant stream of beat-based dance tunes, Ben is pleased to find the charts featuring many good old fashioned, hum-able songs again.
“In the charts, the band stuff is a lot more of a higher quality than it was a few years ago. Even the Robbie Williams things are brilliantly written songs - it’s pop craft rather than shoe-gazing rock riffs knocked out in a basement studio.
“The great thing about the’90s was that all these different styles of music came together. People didn’t say they were into one particular style, you can easily have a collection that has Puff Daddy next to Robbie Williams, and that would never have happened 20 years ago. People are getting bored with no melody. There was a period where the tune lovers had to go back for inspiration rather than forward.”
Now expanded to a full band, Ben & Jason’s new single is Romeo & Juliet Are Drowning (out Feb 28), is another gorgeously lush slice of acoustic pop from their Emoticons album.
“It’s about bumping into someone you haven’t seen in a very long time, and you’ve almost built up a fear of meeting them, and you meet them and discover that they’re actually having a harder time than you are,” Ben says.
Having skipping their recent Birmingham Songwriters Festival appearance after Bernard Butler pulled out, they will be appearing in town on Saturday 26 February at the Alexandra Theatre as the unlikely support to Dr. John.
“It’s only over the last couple of years that I’ve started to listen to him more, as people like Gomez have name checked him,” Ben confesses
. “We’d played Paris and gone down pretty well in France. Dr John asked around and people were enthusiastic about us. I’m not sure it’s the best marriage live, but I think the people going to see him will be a bit more open minded than if we supported a lot younger band.”
Dave Freak, Go2Birmingham, February 2000