We promised you this when their album was released on the excellent Toulouse label Rogue Records! Well, at Les Monstres Sacrés, we keep our word. So here's the Mourning After interview ! First of all, could you introduce yourselves? Hi I’m Chris Blackburn & I’m the guitarist/singer/songwriter in The Mourning After. Have you played in other bands before? I was the bass player in The Tenants which were formed at our high school when we were 15 years old. We were all huge fans of The Beatles after the BBC aired their films at Christmas 1978. From then on we all started listening to other 60’s beat band’s such as The Kinks , Pretty Things , Yardbirds to name a few and covered many of their tunes as well as penning our own. first Line Up What brought you to the music you play together? The Tenant’s disbanded when the members went off to University but we all remained good friends and stayed in contact. By this time we’d spread our musical wings into the realms of 60’s garage wh

  Since when do you exist? Chris: Our first gig as The Jackets was on the 11th of January 2008 so we are approaching 15 years! Were you in other bands before?  Chris: Yes, we all have been in bands before The Jackets . Jackie had an all-girl band called  The Mad Cowgirl Disease  and before that she was the singer in a band called  The Fox when she lived in Zürich. Both bands have made recordings. Sam played guitar in a band called  The Budget Boozers who still do the occasional show. I played and recorded with  Beat-Man ( The Monsters , etc.) as his drummer during his Lightning Beat-Man days (1990’s) and in the beginning of the  Reverend Beat-Man phase (early 2000’s). I also played with the singer and the bass player of the legendary Miracle Workers in a band called  The Get Lost in the early 2000’s.  What made you meet and form The Jackets? Chris: Jackie and I started writing songs and rehearsing together as a two-piece, drums and guitar in 2006. But we really wanted a bigger

C'est à travers le FAN CLUB consacré à TV SMITH et aux ADVERTS que nous avons eu la chance d'entrer en contact avec Dave Thompson. Ce journaliste a collaboré à MOJO, GOLDMINE, Q, ROLLING STONE, MELODY MAKER et beaucoup d'autres magasines. Il a également publié énormément de livres consacrés à beaucoup d'artistes que nous adorons (voir la bibliographie après l'interview). Merci à Tim de nous avoir mis en contact avec Dave et merci à Dave pour le temps qu'il nous a accordé. Let's start at the beginning, you were born in the 60's, so you were surely rocked by the wonderful music of all those English bands of the time. What are your memories of it ? Can you tell us about your discovery of the world of childhood through your musical memories? Music was always on in the house, either the radio… I grew up on pirate radio and BBC radio comedies; or my mother playing records ( Merseybeat , Cliff Richard , etc), One of my earliest memories… I’d have been three, g

  Maggots 1998 Why I love garagerock As a young boy in the early 70’s me and my friends mostly listened to Sweet and Kiss. Other groups  of interest was Slade , Nazareth and Uriah Heep but music was not my main interest – I wanted to be  a cartoonist. All that changed during summer of 1980 when my parents sent me England on a language travel  course in Bude, Cornwall. There I got in touch with the embryonic mod- and skinhead culture and I  discovered SKA-music. Back home in Stockholm me and some other friends directly became mods  and soon realized that maybe SKA wasn’t the real deal as it was mostly favoured by our arch  enemies, the skinheads. Stomachmouths. In Orbit session 1987 So from there we instead turned to The Jam , The Chords , Purple Hearts etc and from there back to  the 60’s with groups such as The Who , Small Faces , Kinks and so on. For me my mod days ended in  1982 because I was fed up with the narrow minded scene and also had found other kind of musical  influc