Suits you, sir

Jerry Fish, aka Gerry Whelan, is not the first singer to swap the sound and the fury of rock ’n’ roll for a more cocktail driven torch/swing thing. David Johansen shape-shifted into Buster Poindexter after the Dolls; Gavin Friday did likewise post-Prunes. And for Whelan, the suits and spats fit a lot better than the baby Bono straitjacket he got lumbered with in An Emotional Fish. Fine band though that was, Jerry & The Mudbug Club’s new album Be Yourself is, well, there’s no other word for it: cooler.

Mr Fish is relishing his dirty thirties, with the new single ‘True Friends’ creeping into the daytime airwaves via a boost from a leading phone company ad. The tune accurately represents a collection that manages to be fiendish and feelgood in equal measure, showcasing its author’s barroom baritone to fine effect.

“Being down is a great way to see your friends,” Jerry/Gerry says, thinking back over the period that followed his previous band’s demise. “It’s actually when you really hit rock bottom that you meet your true friends. An Emotional Fish ended up in court with a record label and it really broke our hearts, end of story, y’know? This to me is more like the circus that rock ‘n’ roll is, this is a friends record.”

But if Be Yourself is a different kettle of Fish, anyone who’d listened closely to AEF would’ve recognised rogue elements – mad Spanish music, bits of Raindogs, a David Lynch fetish – that also crop up here. And as a freelance operator Whelan has no qualms about letting a phone company pay his bills.

“I’m an independent record labeller, d’ya know what I mean?” he says. “I come from the Andy Warhol school of somebody’s gotta pay the rent. I’ve got to keep this thing up and running. You’ve got people in radio stations that pick what are gonna be hits, and then you’ve got kids in advertising agencies who are going like, ‘This is a fuckin’ hot!’ There is cheese attached to it, but does it matter who discovers your record?’”

That would be a hypothetical question. And the new role is looking well on him. Sitting across from me on a wet afternoon in The Winding Stair, Whelan looks less the rock god of yore than a strapped actor auditioning for Ironweed, all sticky-uppy hair and three-day growth, Rat Pack on the bowery.

“The 40s has always inspired me musically,” he says, “Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong and Chet Baker, just for their simplicity of lyric and the warmth and character of that music. In between Sloper (the final AEF album) and thinking about making this record, the Tarantino kind of thing happened, and those soundtracks really impressed me, so I really approached this like a soundtrack album. You’ve got scenes.”

Certainly if Whelan ever decides to make a video for ‘Upside Down’, it should be lip-synched by a mafia heavy talking to a suit and tie strung up from a tree, growling, “Who’ll help you now when you’re upside down”. There’s a definite Sopranos thing going on, halfway between slapstick and violence.

“I suppose the biggest pop record that I’ve made is ‘Celebrate’, and if you listen to it, it’s dark as fuck,” Gerry reckons. “But I was extremely aware of delivering positive news making this record. I wanted people to feel at the end of it that the world is a good place and there are good people in it. It is a rough time, but I believe that in a way it’s my job to kind of show people that positivity. ‘It Don’t Get Much Better Than This’ on the record is about cycling into town and it’s raining and it’s a shitty day, but no matter how much of a shitty day you’re having you can be guaranteed there’s somebody else having a shittier day. You have to embrace the shitty days!”