News Jagwar Ma: ‘It Has To Feel Real And It Has To Connect’

It’s 9pm UK time and the weekend’s drawing to a close when we call Gabriel Winterfield, one half of emerging Sydney dance-pop duo, Jagwar Ma. For Gabriel, it’s a breezy midsummer Monday morning and he’s in relaxed form, so much so that we spend the first ten minutes of the interview chatting about the discrepancy in our respective climes, Hiberno-Australian immigration and the gentrification of East London. I’m not quite sure how we get waylaid so quickly, and I get the impression that Winterfield would engage on just about any topic with genuine interest. However, while he seems at ease, when I do eventually get around to asking him about Jagwar Ma I’m greeted with a candid excitement for the music that he makes with fellow Sydneysider Jono Ma. He mentally sifts through records, revealing a passion for popular music at large and hinting that the inspiration for Jagwar Ma extends far beyond late 80s Manchester. Before I get in to the nitty-gritty, though, I want to clear something up.

Is that you dancing in the video for ‘The Throw’?
Yeah.

You’re a good dancer.
You know what, I’m actually not a good dancer at all but I really like it. I think that if you just look like you’re enjoying yourself, I think that’s really infectious. I watched the hip-hop group Death Grips. They played the festival out here, the Big Day Out, and they went on after us so we got to see them play every show. I’m really into my hip-hop and they were just amazing. The way that Stefan moves, he just looks possessed. It’s like watching an exorcism. Obviously there’s a bit of a Shaun Ryder reference in the [‘The Throw’] performance, but I can actually sing. I think the thing with the bagginess of a lot of that – The Mondays and the Stone Roses and stuff - the performance was very like, devil may care. They don’t give a fuck, really, and we actually want to make sure that – I don’t know – if you see any footage of them live, the musical performance is pretty slack. Flat notes everywhere, people falling out of time.



What does the Jagwar Ma live show sound like?
There’s three of us that play live. I sing and play guitar and loop my vocals live. So all the harmonies and stuff, we actually do them live so there’s no vocal backing or anything. That keeps it nice and real. Jono’s obviously got a laptop for some incidental sounds and stuff, then he runs an 808 – which he’s tweaking constantly – he’s running it into this thing called a Sync-Gen. It’s this bit of techno that can swing. 808s are four to the floor, they don’t have any swing in them. With Sync-Gens you can swing the bass and the snare. So he does that and he’s constantly modulating. He’s kind of at the back, like DJ Hi-Tek, smashing it. And then a friend of ours, a guy called Jack Freeman, who actually lives in London, he plays bass and does some backing vocals with me. So it’s a three piece at the moment. We have played a few shows as a four piece as well. We played with Stella Mozgawa from Warpaint. She’s an old friend.

So you’re conscious of making sure it sounds live?
Of course. It has to feel real and it has to connect. When we were meeting with a lot of people [from the label] they were trying to work out if we were a band or an electronic artist. They were like, ‘So how are you going to do this? Are you going to be DJs?’ and we were trying to explain to them that it’s halfway in between. A lot of the songs started as a song written on a piano or on a guitar and then, oftentimes, the way Jono and I would work, I’d write a folk song, almost, on guitar and go, ‘What do you think of this?’ and he’d take it and put some 909 kick underneath it and be like, ‘This sounds sick’ and then double the tempo. And then other times he’d have these amazing beats that he’d make overnight and be like, ‘Try singing over this,’ and then we’d start riffing over it and dancing and shit. So we definitely met halfway.

How about influences? You’ve used the word ‘baggy’ already and it seems to be in every article I’ve read about you.
Maybe not an influence but we started seeing parallels halfway through doing what we were doing. We sort of stumbled upon it. It’s not that we didn’t know about the bands but I don’t think we set out originally to do ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches’. It happened by accident. At the end of the day, I think what it comes down to is that maybe we’re similar people. Vibe-wise, people gravitate towards the same sounds and stuff. Going into making the record, both Jono and I – there’s a bit of a crate-digging culture between the two of us. We were going in thinking about bands like the Avalanches and stuff like that and thinking, ‘What would their next album sound like? Why don’t we try and do that, but instead of using samples we’ll do all the samples ourselves and we’ll write songs that sound like they’re from the 60s but do it in a really electronic way?’

The production sounds very Phil Spector, especially on ‘The Throw’.
Jono just loves Spector reverb, and I love singing in Spector reverb. We’re both into that kind of vibe. Jono is very much into producers. Joe Meek and people like that. He loves people behind the microphone. Do you remember Donkey Kong Country? The soundtrack on that is amazing; I listen to it all the time. It stands alone as an album, almost. Look up the song, ‘Aquatic Ambience’. It’s so good, it’s one of those lush, dream-like, underwater levels. And I’m a big Sinatra fan; I love his delivery. And obviously Hendrix and stuff like that, I love the sound of his guitars.

What about the rest of the album?
‘Come Save Me’ is one of the more 50s, 60s-inspired songs, and then obviously ‘The Throw’ is more harking back to the 90s. The reason why the song’s called ‘The Throw’ is because it was the idea of getting a 12’ and frisbeeing it into the crowd and saying, ‘We hope you like it,’ because we didn’t know if anyone was going to. We’re about to release another single that’s different again and I think the album – it’s weird. There are songs that sound like all kinds of stuff. There’s the 60s thing, which we love, then both of us are massive fans of the Beastie Boys and shit like that. Their beats, the rhythms, and then the humour in it, which is really cool. And then there are parts that are like KLF – the techno. It kind of verges on that as well.

Why the name? Jono’s surname is Ma, obviously.
We were both playing in different bands and I was working on this project called The Jungle. It was a really 60s mod beat kind of thing. And then Jono had this picture of a jaguar in his room and we were all kind of looking at it. We were doing the song and I kept saying, ‘Check my walk.’ And then it kind of started going, ‘Walk my check’. And then I was just kind of riffing. And then we played it back and it kind of sounded like, ‘Jagwar Ma, Jagwar Ma.’ It’s just kind of how it came out.

Taking a wider perspective, do you think the Australian indie scene is finally getting the credit that it deserves with yourselves, Tame Impala and Royal Headache garnering acclaim around the world?
In some ways, but I don’t feel like, ‘Oh, thank god. Finally some people are starting to notice,’ because it is very far away. Geographically it’s very far away and there are things all around the world that people don’t hear about. Having said that, I know the Cut Copy guys quite well and I’ve met the Tame Impala guys, because obviously the scene here is quite small. It’s still quite intimate, and everyone knows everyone. It’s cool and I like it. Even when we were getting comparisons to Tame Impala - and I don’t think we sound anything like Tame Impala – but people think because we’re slightly psychedelic and we’re Australian, they keep it together because it keeps things simple. I think it’s just a birds of a feather kind of thing, it’s a strength in numbers kind of thing. As long as people don’t think it’s an invasion then it’s ok.

Sydney or Melbourne?
There is a keen rivalry. It’s kind of ridiculous and it’s been around for ages. It’s funny because every time I’m on my way to Melbourne, I say, ‘Fucking Melbourne. I hate Melbourne.’ And then I get there and I always have a really good time, because it’s a simple fact that there are things that Melbourne gets right that Sydney doesn’t and there are some things, arguably, that Sydney does right that Melbourne doesn’t. They’re both good and I think they’re complementary.



‘The Throw’ single is available now on iTunes.