The Velvet Hearts: Old School Roots
Exclusive Interview with Indie Suite’s band of the year 2009
Oct 18, 2009
John James Newman and Steve Jones met at school where they went from hating each other to being firm friends after discovering a mutual love of music. They form the major songwriting partnership of The Velvet Hearts which only came together in late 2007.
Not that it shows, for this is a group that feels as though they know every nuance, every twist of each other’s style. They trust each other so well they can cheekily improvise at a moment’s notice, laugh and joke on stage and look they’ve been together for years.
With their full length album Into the World shining as one of the best British indie releases this year, Indie Suite spent some time with the guys, finding out about the roots of the band.
Classroom Beginnings and Music in Newcastle
Suite 101: Tell me about the history of TVH, how did you all come together?
JJN: Steve and I went to secondary school together. For the first 3 years, we hated each other’s guts, vehemently. I think that was probably due to the fact that we were quite similar. We had a bit of a rivalry…
SJ: Yeh we kept out of each other’s way really.
JJN: Yeh there was a bit of musical ‘not sure what’s really going on there’.
SJ: We both did music in the same class.
Suite 101: Who was the geek and who was the bully?
JJN: Steve was the geek…. no he was a bully
SJ: Yeh I was a bully. Actually we were both bullies.
JJN: I think we hit the fourth or fifth year and Steve was putting this band together. He needed a bass player and was like “John come and play”. So we ended up becoming friends. We rehearsed in nursery schools, and classrooms. We became mates, then Steve went off to music college. I did about 3 months of A-levels before I decided I hated all the coursework. So I followed him up a year later, to Newcastle College, but he’d gone. I stayed there for a couple of years. And we kind of went our separate ways for a good number of years.
Early Friendship and Blues Club Legends
Suite 101: So how old were you when you first became friends?
SJ: When we put together our first band I guess we were 14 or 15.
JJN: It was called Jacob’s Bladder. It was lots and lots of fun. And my first real band.
SJ: It was great fun. And then my dad used to take us down to a blues club. It was sort of a jam night, and that’s where we got a real bug for it all, because there were so many great, phenomenal musicians there.
JJN: Yeh, Denny Laine from Wings, Gary Nuttall who ended up playing with Robbie [Williams]. Roger Daltrey of The Who.
SJ: Yeh, proper rock legends. It was a similar environment to Uncle Tom’s Cabin but …
JJN: Much much cooler… So that was when we were kind of 15-17. Then Steve went to college. Then I came up to college but we didn’t really see each other there did we? Steve was in to his techno then, he had a skinhead. After college I moved to Kent where I had this band called Mosey with some other guys that I’d met at college. Steve was still at Newcastle doing a Higher Diploma in music production. Then I went to the States, lived there for a few years. When I came back from the US we started working together properly.
SJ: We were writing lots. I went part time at work. I was doing an album, John was doing an album, but we’d always write together.
Little Whispers and the Birth of The Velvet Hearts
JJN: For a while we had the same manager. My solo album, Little Whispers, kind of spawned into a band with Ollie [Richmond Jones] and Lidia [Cascarino Close, both members of what would become TVH] in Bournemouth. So we were doing a lot of open mics down in Bournemouth, at Mr. Smith’s which is sadly no longer there. And Questy [Quinton, also of TVH] who was with his band Radiate, was playing on the same night that I was playing. He came up to me in the most energetic way, the most enthusiastic person you’ve ever met: “I love your music man, I wanna play with you, let’s have a jam”. I was like “OK”. So I was writing with Steve, had this little band with Ollie and Lid, and I was jamming with Questy. Steve and I were working on the Newman and Jones Project which was this big chillout thing, and we had 3 or 4 bands on the go.
SJ: We’d just signed a management contract for a studio project that we’d suddenly got loads of interest in. So we were doing showcases too… and it just became a bit daft. That’s when we just thought we’d forget everything, and put it all into one band. That became The Velvet Hearts. So you see we’ve got such a diverse mix and such a history there of all these things that we’ve done together.
JJN: From the acoustic solo ballads, to chilled out reggae, to rock. We had all these things going on, and we still do.
Suite 101: So it sounds like you’ve been circling round each other for quite a long time.
SJ: Yeh. I mean we did write songs when we were like 14, 15.
JJN: ‘Sugar glider’, and ‘Basically’.
SJ: Yeh we’ve got loads of crazy old demos! Well, my mum and dad have got them, that’s where you keep all that sort of stuff.
JJN: A long history. And I still don’t like him very much…
Further Reading
Read Indie Suite’s review of the brilliant Into The World.
Check out this live review of The Velvet Hearts at Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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