Interview with Johnathan Rice :: Wessex Scene Online

Interview with Johnathan Rice

28th November 2005
Alice Cheung

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Oct 07 - The Man, the Mission, the Cabinet Position
Dec 05 - Interview with Pure Reason Revolution
Dec 05 - Exclusive Mew Interview
Nov 05 - The Ordinary Boys
Nov 05 - Clor

When Johnathan Rice played at the Southampton Joiners, The Edge went along to talk to him about religion, education and flatmates you should sue your landlord for...

This 22 year old musician chatted in an American accent with twangs of Scottish. I ask him about his musical influences...
Animal Collective, really freaked out folk music, kinda like heavily psychedelic. Arcade Fire, Willy Mason and Bright Eyes. The ones we all go back to are the old records, I still listen to Neil Young and Bob Dylan more than anything else.

This guy has spent 9 out of the last 12 months touring. Also, with Scottish ex-pats for parents moving between Glasgow and the USA, I had to ask which side of the pond he preferred and his experiences in education...
I dont think I prefer either...all it did really was create a feeling of not belonging in either place, I felt at home travelling. In the school yard, I was always a yank in Glasgow and William Wallace in the city. I was able to experience quite a few different educational systems during my childhood and adolescence - I went to comprehensive school in Glasgow and I went to a private catholic school (I will have scars for life) in America and then I went to an all boy Jesuit preparatory school in Washington DC. It was high school. I certainly remember looking at my watch a lot, waiting, years at a time. Waiting around to move on to other things.

I queried his parents reaction to his decision on moving out at 18 to pursue music rather than a degree...
Passionate concern. Because I am the 1st born, it is hard to send your 1st born off with no money to New York to try and become a musician when you have spent your life trying to educate him. But I consider the way I have been living for the past 4 years to have been just about as good an education as I could have got from living in Edinburgh for 4 years reading books. I have seen the world that people write about in the books.

Talking about education and Uni, we have all had flatmates, and I questioned him about his experiences of shared accommodation...
Yeah, I basically was living in gay hell. Well, not because I have a problem with that lifestyle, I most certainly do not, it was just that I was witness to the homosexual underworld of New York, the darkest heart of that community which was all the drugs, prostitution, dangerous sex...and in my own apartment. I was living with these prostitutes who were making just these incredulous amounts of money having sex with corporate executives, stock brokers and lawyers men with wives and children. Just imagine the effects of that when I was 18 years old, never lived on my own before seeing really hard drugs up close for the first time.

Now, if going through something like that does not do something to you, nothing will. I asked him if his song So Sweet had got anything to do with that...
Yeah absolutely. That song is about it all. I always liked the way people could write catchy pop songs about terrible things. It is about a night that I spent wondering whether or not I was going to have to drive one of the prostitutes living with me to the hospital because he was going to OD on cocaine. So if you are going to write about the world around you or inside you, it is important to let as much scenery pass through you as possible

OK, some flatmates are bad, but not THAT bad (if they are, our Uni has a help line). From the gist of a few of the somewhat sardonic songs on the album, I presumed he was not religious...
No. You do not have to be religious to sing about God. Unlike Europe which is becoming more secular, it seems like America is plummeting back into the nonsense and magical imagery of religion of the complete maniac. A religious maniac is the president of our country. He is using it to paralyse our nation and he is completely obsessed. He is a complete idiot that guy and he is reversing all the progress that America has made over the pas 2 decades. It is not his generation that is suffering, it is my age, the 19 to 22 year olds, those are the majority of kids who are dying, used as cannon fodder in this holy war. Weve got a bunch of holy warriors in the White House.

I think I pushed a button there, but I in true student fashion of randomness, I finally inquired if he had to pick one of the many neon lights in New York, which one would he be?
Discount Hot Dogs!