Lean On Me

Joe Lean is the great grandson of Edward Bernays, the man considered to be the father of modern PR. It’s hard not to see a straight line connecting them when you look at the hype machine surrounding Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong, but when I mention this, Lean gets a bit defensive.

“I just wanted to have a band with the people I was hanging out with and getting on with,” he says. “So our manager is our 21-year-old mate who we asked to be in the band but can’t play anything. It’s really an excuse to hook up and make music together. It was all by chance really, there was no big masterplan. And we are a quintet, it’s not all about me. The hype has nothing to do with us and I find it ridiculous.”
Joe Lean was formerly the drummer with The Pippettes and will also be familiar to fans of Peep Show, Nathan Barley and The Tudors as an actor. He’s about to release his second single with his band Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong, and he says things like: “I’m really inspired by 19th century Victorian era culture. Beau Brummell [19th century dandy] is a particular hero of mine. I really like The Zombies – they’re really melodic and really beautiful and I like Dion and the Belmonts. I love David Lynch’s films and Magritte. I love surrealism. And all these things combined come together to form this band.”
Joe Lean gives good quote. And no offence to all of the other bands out there, but someone who drops Beau Brummell into a conversation is a lot more fun to interview than someone who says “well me and Tim were just jamming out some sounds in the garage, and then we just, you know, got a gig”. But such quotable lines also make me suspicious. There was a rumour circulating early last year that Pete Doherty was actually an invention of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty from the KLF, because he was such a perfect pop/tabloid sensation. This (unfortunately) wasn’t the case. But with his connections to the acting world, his recent dates with Peaches Geldof and his obscure reference points, I sometimes suspect that they maybe Drummond and Cauty are behind Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong.
He certainly has the party line on drug use.
“The thing that’s depressing about drugs is not the experience itself but the experience after it when you realise that it isn’t real,” he opines like a young Romantic poet dragged out of a Limehouse opium den. “Drugs themselves make you feel good but it’s when they run out and it’s over that you realise you don’t think everything is beautiful and you don’t think everything is great. I don’t really think art and drugs are connected but the reasons people do both are the same. It’s about escaping, whether you’re concentrating on writing a song or you’re off your box on drugs. The only thing I truly know is that I don’t truly know anything.”
But who cares what’s behind the Joe Lean phenomenon. Right now it’s just fun to enjoy him. And he certainly talks a good game.
“A lot of guitar bands look at pop music as if it’s something they’re not doing, that it’s something they’re in opposition to,” he says. “In fact contemporary chart pop music is probably the fastest moving, most progressive sound around at the moment, and actually what’s really boring is guitar-led music. These guitar bands think they’re interesting just because they’re whining about their own personal problems. It’s not interesting and I don’t want to hear it. It all sounds really flat and tepid. We’re not an indie band. We’re not a rock and roll band. We’re a pop band.”
Unfortunately, in actual fact Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong are a pretty average sounding indie band (so far). But Lean’s attitude fills me with hope.
“I had an idea in my head that I wanted to have a band which sounded like Smokey Robinson doing New Order up the arse,” he enthuses. “That was the dream. We got about half way, and got to sound like The Strokes having sex with The Drifters. But who knows what we’ll sound like tomorrow?”