The Velvet Hearts: Cockney Vibes

Exclusive Interview with Into The World songwriting partners

Nov 1, 2009

Steve Jones and John James Newman talk to Suite 101 about concept albums, cockney humour and their former frustration with the covers circuit.

It’s no secret that The Velvet Hearts’ album Into the World is a brilliant and assured debut, with all the combined musicianship of the band’s accomplished members. However those who know the band’s live performances will notice the absence of a certain Hearts trademark. Suite 101 joins the band’s John James Newman and Steve Jones to find out why the Blur-style cockney humour of tracks 'Dear Johnny' and ‘Win Some Lose Some’ never found their way on to the album.

East End Humour and Playing Covers

Suite 101: When you’re performing live you can see that you are all having a lot of fun together. ‘Dear Johnny’ and all those tracks, they’re great fun to watch. There’s a really fun, cockney vibe that you put across live, which isn’t so strong in the album. Has that whole vibe come since the album was produced? Or was it always there but just didn’t find its way onto the album?

JJN: For me, a lot of that has come from Steve. He has a pet project that he did called White Boy.

SJ: It was sort of more based on humour. And then ‘Win Some Lose Some’ kind of came out of that.

JJN: You know I sing with an American accent, absolutely naturally. My dad sings like that too. So it’s been really interesting to come up with more of this British cockney stuff, all the ‘Alright, mate’, ‘Oi oi’ stuff, it’s fun, and it just gets carried through.

SJ: But back to ‘Dear Johnny’, we’d just got back from Italy, where we’d been playing covers, every night. And that whole song is about getting p%$$£d off with playing covers. It’s about being a musician, but how people don’t want to hear anything new. That’s why we sing “Give ‘em something new, they won’t know what to do”. That’s what’s frustrating about being an artist as well as a musician. You want to do something different, and people are saying “Sing another one that we know”.

Suite 101: Kind of ironic then that you fill the mid-section with mini-covers?!

Bono, Irish Jigs and Theatre Within Boundaries

SJ: The whole cockney thing, it doesn’t always fit in to ‘The Velvet Hearts’.

SJ: You wouldn’t catch Bono breaking into an Irish jig! I wish we could do it, I wish the world was ready for that, but really it’s theatre. It’s theatre within boundaries. You wouldn’t get an actor coming on stage in one scene, and then in the next he’s a completely different character.

Suite 101: But at the same time, any given thing can have a number of different facets without losing its identity.

Concept Albums and Tricky Decisions

SJ: Yeh, I guess we could do a kind of concept album, where people do different things. But they are bold statements, they are gambles. People might think “that’s not what I listen to The Velvet Hearts for!” But equally you could win a whole new load of fans. It’s a tricky one. We love playing all different sorts of music, we love to write and create, and I’m equally as happy in the studio as I am performing live. They’re two different beings. In fact, performing live can be quite stressful. It’s fine when you’ve got the sound man and roadies on board, then you know everything’s going to be ok.