Play that Funky Music White Boy

It’s easy to be sceptical about Jay Kay. It could always be argued that the Jamiroquai frontman has seemed to be that bit too cool for skool, too right-on to be alright, too full of his own self-importance to be truly important and too damn funky for a skinny white boy.

Fourteen years ago, he was a skin-and-bone skateboard kid, living rough on the streets of London. Today he is a thin, flare-wearing multi-millionaire, multi-million selling superstar, who lives in a bona fide mansion and estate just outside London (Horsenden Manor) which once belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury. High profile relationships and breakups with fellow celebrities lingerie designer Tamsin Greenhill and TV presenter Denise Van Outen, a public love of fast cars (he has a private collection of vintage sports cars) and a deep-rooted concern for the environment have all meant that Jay tends to evoke strong emotions in people.

We’re sitting in the Penthouse Suite of London’s ultra-trendy Metropolitan Hotel, complete with a fine view over Hyde Park, and Jay is holding court through a series of interviews with the European media. He has already been talking to my continental colleagues for a couple of hours now so he should be nicely warmed up.

Jay bounds into the room, a five-foot something bundle of energy, shaking my hand and talking 90-to-the-dozen. Our scheduled 30-minute interview becomes an hour-and-a-half as Jay warms to every subject from the rebirth of disco to the burning of fossil fuels, and quite a few in between. A manic interviewee, Jay talks faster than anybody I have ever met, spraying out opinions at a ferocious pace, almost as if his mouth cannot keep up with the speed at which his brain processes thoughts, with the end result that a two-minute conversation can cover a multitude of topics as he skits and flits through ideas at a rate of knots.

Five minutes into our interview and I’m feeling guilty for ever being sceptical about Jay Kay. You can see it in his eyes, you can hear it in his voice: he doesn’t care what people think of him, he’s too busy being himself to notice.

So Jay, I wonder, motioning at the extravagance of the Met’s marvellous penthouse, as someone once asked George Best, where did it all go wrong?

"They [the record company] don’t often do this," he smiles. "It’s just a polite way of saying ‘get your press done’."

Seriously though, Jay’s Travelling Without Moving has seen him rise really high in British music circles, with four hugely successful albums in a decade that has seen him become a world-famous singer and very rich to boot. Did he ever think it would go this far?

"Well, you’ve gotta think it’s gonna go a long way, ’cos if you don’t, it won’t. I’m a climber in life," he admits. "I’ve always got something else that I want to do. It’s taken a lot of hard work, the last 10 years. It takes a lot out of you, emotionally, physically and sometimes spiritually as well.

"Sometimes, I don’t want to go to America. I don’t want to get out of bed and go on tour and leave my dogs and my garden, but I have to do it. So there are two different sides to it all," he pauses. "The last few months have been difficult on an emotional level and the only thing that has kept me going is that this is, without doubt, the most cracking album we’ve done."

The new album, A Funk Odyssey, named in part homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is being guarded by the Sony UK team with all the resilience of a highly trained anti-terrorist squad. Earlier in the day I got an album sampler (the six tracks that had been mixed) for half an hour to listen to and make notes, before handing it back. In fact, when I started humming the single ‘Little L’, unbeknowns to myself, later in the day, I thought the press team were going to drag me outside and try to remove my vocal chords with their clipboards.

Thankfully, Jay is far more accommodating about A Funk Odyssey than his record label, insisting at the end of our interview that I cannot go without hearing some of the album’s unfinished tracks, even singing live vocals to a couple of backing tracks. This public playing of the new material brings some of his press corps tearing into the room, wondering what he is doing. "I’m just flogging copies of the new album," he deadpans.

Very conscious of the fact that "every person making music on computers has the same boxes at home", Jay maintains that on the new album, Jamiroquai were "careful how we used the tools of everyday dance music: filters, modulation delays and the like, by investing in old echo units, old flangers, and mixing that with live instruments".

Jay avows that he changed his singing style to accommodate the new rhythms and melodies that were floating around his head for A Funk Odyssey. "It was a challenge," he says. "I mean, this is no ‘Virtual Insanity’: it’s a different fucking ballgame completely.

"Somebody said to me, ‘Did you ever think about doing an experimental album?’ I dunno what an experimental album is: everybody’s done everything before. If an experimental album is having six seconds of delay on your vocals, with cello in the background, accompanied by the Church of England Choir….," he pauses. "I feel there is an audience out there that didn’t get reached on the last album and I wanted to reach them, and I wanted to come back with a bit of a bang."

A bit of a bang is right. The first instalment in Jay’s Funk Odyssey is the single, ‘Little L’, a feel-good slice of disco-funk that is sure to be blasting out from radio stations and clubs all over Europe on its release date in early August.

"In terms of tracks like ‘Little L’ and ‘You Give Me Something’, I wanted what everybody wants, a hit," the singer admits. "I wanted to hear it played on radio. I wanted something that was instant. I wanted something that was a groove. I wanted something that would be taken by remixers and they would have to have no arms or legs to fuck it up."

The production on the new album is very sumptious and rich, with generous use of strings and orchestral swathes added to tracks like ‘Corner Of The Earth’ and the heart-breaking ‘Picture Of My Life’, a very personal song which seems to have been written at a time when Jay was feeling partcularly low. In fact, he admits that he nearly cried when he first sang it. Far be it from me to shy away from an obvious question: so Jay, is it about the breakup of your engagement to Denise [Van Outen]?

"No," he answers immediately and definitely. "It’s about drugs. It’s about using the wrong type of drugs, which I don’t do any more, although I had my moments – boy, did I have my fucking moments."

I found this surprising considering that the drug Jay would be most associated with would be marijuana, and he would be seen as more of a laid-back recreational weed-smoker than a man with a Class A for all seasons.

"Well, yeah," he agrees, "but I’ve had my ups and downs, like we all have. But it’s not just about drugs," he muses. "It’s about my lack of understanding of my own past: where I’m from, what my dad was like…" he drifts off, "and sometimes how I felt ‘Why am I doing this?’"

It’s not surprising that the man known as the Cat in the Hat felt a sense of rootlessness growing up. Jay never knew his father and, as a child, he and his mother, soul singer Karen Kay, moved all over the world, never settling long in one place ("I always seemed to get shifted around"), before moving to Ealing in London when Jay was 13, where he soon took to the streets, leaving home at 16, and allegedly living in squats until his first record deal arrived. Does he feel more settled now?

"Yeah, absolutely," he says, before qualifying it. "My house is this hive of activity, but then everyone goes home and I’m left on my own the dogs, the chickens and the cats, and it’s just me. I’ve got a longing inside me to start a family with the right person, but I have yet to find that person. I’m very scared of… [he trails off] I have my moments on my own but I’m a social animal. I like people around me. I have felt lost at times, wondering who’d be there for me if it all went wrong: all those people who love to dig around now, would they be there. I’m not so sure that if Jamiroquai sold few records, how many would still be around.

"Since I was 17 I’ve ran my own life: sometimes I’ve ran it very badly and sometimes I’ve ran it very well. I’m lucky I’m still here and that people are still interested. I’m lucky I’ve had 10 years in this game and hopefully I’ll have another 10 years. After that, who knows?"

‘Picture Of My Life’ is the closing track on the album, Jay reveals, adding with a wicked grin, "Wait ‘til you hear what you get before it? I’ll play it for you before you go as a special treat". The track in question, the penultimate ’20:01’ is a huge, pumping, thumping, whirring monster of a song, more Prodigy than P Funk Allstars, which is heavy on the BPM meter and as far away from the languid, plaintive ‘Picture Of My Life’ as you could get. So if variety is the spice of life, Jay Kay seems to have plenty of seasoning for every occasion. If this record is his most successful to date, the irony will not be lost on Sony, who more than hinted before he began to record this album that the time might be ripe for a ‘best of’ collection.

"When the record company came to me and said those incredibly dangerous and very nasty two words ‘Greatest Hits’, I gave them a very prompt ‘fuck you’," Jay stresses. "What message does that give to my fans? It tells people that I’ve got no more material. Who ever did a Greatest Hits and then came out with a cracking album afterwards? I told Sony categorically that they will not get a Greatest Hits record for the rest of my commitment, which is another three albums.

"Back in the ’60s and ’70s, people could put out two albums a year: now there is a whole record company machine that has to grind into action and it is a two-year thing. You can’t be as prolific as you used to be able to. You’d want to see the amount of single edits, TV edits, this mix, that mix: fucking hell, there are about seven or eight different mixes for one track, as well as the video."

Speaking of videos, Jay has always been seen as being one of the genre’s innovators, not content to mime along on a stage when he could be walking on a ceiling. In fact, the classic clip for ‘Virtual Insanity’ recently came a healthy 14th in a VH1 survey of the top 100 music videos ever.

"I’ve got that label now, haven’t I," he laughs, "and there’s no getting away from it. There is something about doing these videos that you’ve got to remember. Anybody out there wanna be a pop star or a rock star? Cool. There’s a huge great flashing floor as big as this room: get on it. You have 45 people standing around staring at you, and you’re thinking ‘Fuck me. Yesterday I was at home, patting the dog and giving him some tripe and biscuits, and now I’m here in the middle of a flashing dancefloor with this fucking great metal head-dress on, trying to be creative’."

This ‘fucking great metal head-dress’ is Jay’s latest cranium-covering creation, which this time round has a "space/Inca vibe". I’ve seen photographs and it is damn impressive, as in-yer-face as the man who will be wearing it.

"I feel aggressive about this year, and I feel like I wanna get out there," he says. "I’ve taken a lot of stick over the last few months and it has been hard. But I’m here on the other end of it and am moving onwards and upwards very slowly, which is a good feeling."

Much of the stick Jay is referring to is the fall-out following the break-up of his engagement to Denise Van Outen. The two enjoyed a highly public romance where, along with Zoe and Norman, they were the celebrity couple du jour, and when things went pear-shaped, the tabloids lapped it up. Things reached a head when Jay found a tabloid reporter and photographer on his property and lost his temper somewhat.

"The greatest day in my life is when I kicked that fucker’s car to fucking pieces? Wanna provoke me, do ya? Wanna look through my windows?," he is getting really riled just thinking about it. "What I love about it is the fact that I smashed every single panel in your car, smacked the pair of you in the fucking gob and you’re on my land so there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it."

Jay Kay has always had a funny relationship with the media. Lauded in some quarters as one of the innovators of acid-jazz, derided in others as a retro-wannabe, he and the press have never made the most accommodating of bed-fellows. Their relationship soured even further, however, as soon as Jay and Denise became an item, and his celebrity rating shot sky high.

"We have created that culture of catching celebrities doing things. Well, I’m not a celebrity, I’m a singer and you can catch me doing what you like, ‘cos there ain’t nothing to catch any more, ’cos it’s all stopped," he chuckles. "Another thing for those people [tabloid press] to realise is that I’ve won before you’ve even started because what I do makes people happy, and dance and groove around: it’s good karma stuff. What you do is is sit there and try to dig up people’s shit. You have to sniff people’s dirty underwear and do these negative things all day long."

But surely there is still going to be speculation in the tabloid press about who he is seeing next, are he and Denise really over each other etc.

"The thing is, Denise and I were very different people," he sighs. "Denise is a master manipulator of the press. I don’t know anybody else who can get themselves on the front cover like that, whether it’s showing your tits to Prince Charles or whatever. God bless her, very clever girl. I’ve seen that manipulation occur over the last three months, since we decided to say our goodbyes to each other. I don’t court publicity. I don’t court the press. I never have done."

If the tabloids do come hounding him in the future, though, Jay will be ready for them. No shrinking violet at the best of times, he is not afraid to take them on.

"If I see you on my property, the dogs will be your last problem, because I am not going to sit at home and be intimidated or scared by people like that," he snarls. "I’m not going to let them get in the way of my fucking life at all. And I shall protect my own interests at every turn. The trouble is they think everyone is so scared of them that they won’t tell ‘em to fuck off.

"I will follow you around all day. I’ll do it just for fun. I’ll have people follow you around, take photos of you, your wife, your mistress, your girlfriend, the whole fucking lot. I will fuck your brain up."

He’s not finished yet, either. "I’ve never liked people who stand on other people. I’ve always stuck up for the little guy and when I’m the little guy, then I really stand up for myself. All they do is have their moment, sell their newspaper, scrunch someone’s life up, it goes in the bin and they’re left on the floor," he stops, grins and starts to giggle, "But I’m not militant any more. I have calmed down – I’m a different Jay. Who ever said I had a temper on me?"

In fairness to Jay, he has never been afraid to put his hand on his heart and call it as he sees it, even in terms of his music. Mocked by some as a white boy’s homage to Stevie Wonder, Jay Kay rolled with the punches and sold over 12 million albums en route, and was never afraid to speak (or sing) his mind about everything from cloning to globalisation. For God’s sake, this man brought back disco-balls, flares and funk before they were viewed as retro chic. So is he ahead of his time or out of time, a lone white soul-dier on a funk odyssey to the parts other singers just can’t reach?

Jay’s own strong environmental and ecological viewpoint has not dimmed over the course of his career, despite protestations from some (begrudging) quarters that holding such views and driving a fuck-off Ferrari are mutually excusive.

"If you come to my house, you will see a guy who grows his own vegetables, who spends a lot of money looking after that land and cultivating the right natural environment with no hunting, no pesticides, no fucking anything," he insists. "I am literally self-sufficient up there. OK, I am lucky enough to do it, but that was my dream, to create my own environment.

"Some people say I’m not fucking ecologically aware. Well, I bloody well am. I recycle. I’m applying for wind-power, for hydro-electric power to run some of the electricity off the waterfalls, and I don’t drive to work – I walk 20 yards [his studio is in the grounds of his, eh, Manor – JW]. So in a way, my long-term view has worked out and I am not the hypocrite I look like.

"I may have 14 cars but that to me isn’t an argument. There are 25 million cars in this country and I can’t help it if I love a particular hobby. I may have 14 cars, but I can’t drive them all at once. If it’s just sitting under a cover, polished, in a garage, it’s not killing anybody. If you fly in a plane, that has more fuel in it than any of my cars will for the rest of my life. Let’s finish the argument there."

This line of reasoning, obviously enough, soon leads to the President of the United States. Within the space of one sentence, Jay’s talk of burning fuels led, via the Kyoto Agreement, to the American’s refusal to co-operate on ecological issues, which Jay attributes almost solely at the feet of one George Bush.

"He’s a Texan and Texans like oil. He’s a bad fucker. With him and the weapons companies, war means a strong dollar and a strong economy. So he is picking for a fight. Already he is alienating Europe, so he doesn’t have to get involved with our bullshit. He has already had conflict with China. All the guys at Rockwell International and General Dynamics are thinking ‘Great. More missiles. More war. More killing. More money’."

A long-time supporter of environmental issues, Jay has also been unafraid to speak out about globalisation in the past. I wondered how he felt about the new wave of anti-globalisation demonstrators rioting in the streets of London on May Day.

"It’s gonna get worse," he says rather sadly. "I do understand their point. Why do we need more McDonald’s? Do we need a big M from space? But let’s get to the meat on the bone: this is about war and weapons really. If you really want to go to the root of it, go and bang on General Dynamics’ door. It’s no good smashing up a street, we just gotta spend more money to put it right again.

"Anarchy doesn’t really get anybody anywhere. You say you’re about the environment, look at the fucking mess you’ve made of that beautiful square outside Parliament. [adopts hippy accent] ‘I’m planting a tree, man’. No, you’ve done too much fucking acid, that’s what you’ve done kiddo and you don’t give a fuck. They are not going to leave the tree there, so you haven’t planted a tree, you’ve fucking killed one. And you’ll still go and get your fucking dole check, won’t you? You like anarchy but you don’t mind going to get the organised dole system cheque. You’re doing fuck all about anything. Running down the street throwing petrol bombs is the piss-easy bit. You’ve got to think a bit harder. Come up with a better fucking solution that that."

When you listen to the man talking from the heart about subjects like this, it is hard not to really warm to him. He’s not faking it, he’s not adopting causes as his own. He calls it as he sees it, lives it and believes it.

"I was very naïve to begin with," Jay admits. "I thought I could change things and I got shot at for that. People don’t understand me. I’m not perfect. I’m not the greatest guy in the world, but I do care. Half these people who criticise me, will they be able to raise £45,000 for Shelter tomorrow by organising a gig and taking no money for it? Will they be able to raise £90,000 for Task Force to try and save the elephants and the whales?"

No Jay, they probably won’t. More power to ya, Cat.