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 Here I am, waiting for Jake Shillingford, the man behind flamboyant 90s cult orchestral outfit My Life Story and now pared down electronic ensemble ExileInside.
Fortunately for me, I have known Jake for many many years, remembering his modest debut and the hard work that deservedly paid off!
At times I’ve been following his musical path from up close and then from afar, mainly due to his decision to leave London.
As we haven’t seen each other for a few years, I am very much looking forward to a very special time and when Jake turns up at our meeting point we both exclaim that the other one hasn’t changed at all!!
According to the law of averages, one of us is fibbing....
but it’s not me!!!!
Having released albums with major record companies and then deciding to set up his own Brighton based label, Exilophone Records, Jake has an endless source of knowledge to dig into and is one of the most interesting people one can wish to talk to...[that should be, listen to]
A genuinely talented artist, Jake has more than one project on the go and is more than happy to revisit the past, keep us up to date with the present and let us in on the future....
Florence: My Life Story was very successful, a seminal band of the 90s, yet you felt the need to stop and take a break...
 Jake: There came a time in my life when I was perceived as an artist having a career that was part of a scene, even though that wasn’t strictly true. As you well know My Life Story was around for many years before Brit pop came along.
We did three albums and released many records with very good B-sides and other extra tracks, as the bands in the mid 90s were required to do. In our case we would put three extra tracks on two formatted cds, effectively bringing out six B-sides for every A-side.
We did a sort of alternative/ melodic song-writing coupled with my love for huge orchestral music, but there are only so many times you can do that.
For me, coming out of that in the year 2000 was an interesting thing.
I couldn’t really get down to the Job Centre and ask if there was a job for an East End barrow boy fronting an orchestral pop band!
Until the last five or six years, most bands that were dropped by a major label would find it pretty much impossible to find another record deal. On two counts really and mainly to do with stigma.
When the media hears about a band being dropped they automatically assume that said band is rubbish and suddenly it loses its artistic capabilities.
Regarding the music industry, no good business would come along and look at you after you’ve been dropped by someone else.
It doesn’t matter how many records you’ve sold, it’s about the balance of the books. If you’ve sold a million records but you’ve spent 100 millions, the company will drop you but if you’ve only sold 10 records having spent £100 it’s still ok.
Florence: I always say that record companies are run by accountants and it’s little to do with artistic talent.
 Jake: A&R men do genuinely run the record labels but the final decision is with the accountant’s department.
I love every aspect of the music industry, obviously songwriting is probably my passion, but I remember having our very first record made when we were eighteen. We went down to watch it being pressed!!
As a frontman I got used to doing interviews and press, I learned about journalism and marketing, promotion, PR....I was genuinely interested.
But it’s really odd to come out of that, with all this knowledge and skills and know that no-one is really gonna want you.
But it happens to a lot of people.
I wanted to re-evaluate why I was making music....
All the albums I put out were almost like children. There is a conceiving and birthing process and a lot of nurturing and I knew that I wanted to carry on making music, but I also thought about the restrictions you have when you’re signed to a major label.
Once I made the decision to carry on making music, I realised I was gonna be a pauper for the rest of my life!
Despite my passion for real instruments like strings quartet, I’ve always been interested in technology.
I have a real love for psychedelic music where bands will embrace technology, getting into faze pedals and weird studio trickery and it’s no different now but with our equivalent we can make music in our bedrooms on our Mac.
The actual recording of the last ExileInside album cost me £1500 from start to finish!
My Life Story’s album ‘The Golden Mile’ which spurned most of the hits cost £750 000!!
Florence: Wow! You could have fed a lot of African children with that money!
Jake: Don’t say that I feel really bad now. I should have done an acoustic record and given the money away.
Florence: You still don’t care, you’re stuffing your face with apple pie swimming in cream!
Jake: I just wanted to do something very English in front of you!!
Anyway, to get down to the transitional process for me....the financial side is very important and we all know that with record labels, an advance is a loan of money to be paid back through the sale of your records which they will help promote.
That’s when I thought well I know everything about the industry, I’ve got all the connections so why don’t I cut out the middle man and try and raise some money.
That’s when a friend of mine, Anthony Hill, who was in the first MLS’ line-up offered to give me £500 so I could make a demo and start again, but on one condition, that I would expose the songwriting process to him, the record making process...the deal was that I had to take him right through where the inspiration came from, how did the melody come about, how the chords match my vision...and as I am a very confident song writer I don’t have a problem with my songs being deconstructed so I thought that was interesting.
I thought to myself that there must be many more people that feel like Anthony. So I designed a very basic website, put up the tracks that Anthony had funded and I contacted my small data base of MLS’ fans asking if they would be interested in investing some money and we ended up with about twelve investors, from all different walks of life.
My theory was that these people are like benefactors. This is like patronage of the art.
All the great French painters were taken in by rich benefactors, had a roof over their heads and they could just concentrate on painting.
That was great patronage and I though “why doesn’t this ever happen in music?”.
Now people don’t think twice about investing millions of their own money into low budget movies but no-one does it in music.
In my case, part of the investment scheme is a sort of ‘work in progress’ demos which I would send out to the investors. Just like A&R men would do by watching their band in the studio, my investors would hear the songs change and progress.
This also helped me create a community that is really behind ExileInside. We get financial help from the fans and other people who help us in other ways, like artist Dix who provided us with art work for the album and website. We provided him with a viewing platform for his art.
It’s a small community but it sits very well with what I do.
My Life Story is more of a cult band with a small but very dedicated following. Sometimes you’ve got a band who has that one record that will make millions and millions and that’s it and sometimes you’ve got a band like mine which consistently, just about managed to get in the charts, but that’s ok with me as long as I know that there is a group of people who really like what I do.
Now I can provide my music to them but with their help and I love that kind of inclusivity!
Florence: You had a six year break from My Life Story, working on your other band ExileInside, and then sometime this year you put MLS back together...
When did you realise that there was life left in My Life Story?
Jake: Once I realised that I’d set up the structure for my record label, Exilophone Records, and started putting out Exile Inside records out, I got more and more confident.
Obviously you can’t record a band like My Life Story in your bedroom, on your Apple Mac. We never go below thirteen members and the cost is totally prohibitive.
However I heard through the grapevine that all three MLS albums were now deleted. Although two are available on i-Tunes, the actual Cds have been withdrawn.
Florence: That must be quite hurtful?
Jake: I guess so!
It just never occurred to me that records just stop being made, I suppose.
One of the unique aspect of MLS is that we released three albums but on three completely different record labels.
It was a lot of work to talk to all the labels concerned and bring it all together but I have to say that having left the labels on good terms, as soon as I made the phone calls I was able to make a deal with them where I would get enough tracks to release a ‘best of’ and that’s ‘Sex And Violins’ [ named after our fan club from 1990].
It was a really cathartic process. It was lovely to get everything on the same record, plus a couple of old songs we never managed to release.
But once I did that, people started asking for a live show!!!
Florence: You managed to get together the original line-up, surely that’s no small feat ?
Jake: Obviously with a band of such a size we operated like a football team, like a squad but for the reunion concert in May we ended up with thirteen of us and it was quite funny getting back together.
It was like the return of the magnificent seven when they contact each other and get each other on board.
Once I’d got Simon Wray, our drummer, on board I could tell the next person that Simon had agreed to it and so the more people came on board the easier it got!!
Florence: Was it an emotional time for you ?
Jake: It was strange because I never felt so detached in my life.
I think that my brain went into shock but I got some incredible help from Kumar, our tour manager.
I failed to say that we didn’t just reform the band but our entire road crew, including my original agent, everyone backstage....
Florence: Why the need to get the whole team back together ?
Is there some sort of magic, bond that you needed, to get yourself back into that frame of mind.
Jake: Absolutely but at the same time I can’t quite explain it.
My first thought was that a reunion is a dangerous road to go down.
Many bands have almost ruined people’s good memories of what they used to be like.
People get upset when a band is reforming for a gig and it’s just the original singer and drummer and a bunch of session musicians. To me that’s not on!
MLS is not Jake Shillingford and a bunch of people that can change at any given moment. It’s true to a certain extend but I built MLS from the ground up. You remember the times when I would go to people on the tube and say “you play the cello, would you like to be in a Rock’n’Roll band?”.
I love the band’s ethos, being part of a small community which we were because there were so many of us.
As far as the reunion was concerned it was just as much about MLS and the members as it was about me.
I didn’t even feature on the promo pictures.
We sold the show out just from our ‘myspace’ page.
MLS is a live band, it’s about the celebration of life and it was a moving experience with the audience singing along from beginning to end.
One fan flew in from Australia and two others from LA!!
Of course I invited them backstage to hang out with us!
Florence: You’ve also announced a Christmas gig on the 8th of December at The London Astoria, so are you back for good!
Jake: It’s difficult to say because of logistics.
MLS is not a band that’s gonna go touring in a transit van again like we did when we were in our early 20s.
The band was always about going that step further, the bigger gesture, the bigger sound, the bigger shows but you can’t do that on a shoestring DIY budget like I do with ExileInside.
Right now I would be happy with one show a year, probably in London around Christmas time, so people can also do a little shopping!!
With ExileInside, which is an electronic band I can’t do those big shows and maybe that’s missing from my life as a performer.
Florence: As just mentioned, with ExileInside you have taken a totally different path musically. You’ve pretty much downsized!
Is it symbolic of how you felt at the end of your adventure with MLS ?
Did your influences change as well ?
What about the writing process?
Jake: I’ve always been influenced by electronic music.
It’s impossible not to, having grown up in Essex during the 80s I was exposed to fantastic bands like Depeche Mode, Yazoo, whose members my dad [an art teacher] taught.
Also it’s no secret that I am a massive Soft Cell fan. I’ve worked with Marc Almond on an album and he’s a fantastic talent....
So the writing for ExileInside is just effortless to me.
With MLS often what would happen when I was writing a song is that the string line would be played on a synthesiser...
If you listen to a MLS demo you’d think we were Ladytron, almost.
Everything was done on synth. because that’s all I could do at home then I would take it into the studio and use the orchestra.
To me it was just getting back to being a bedroom writer again and also the idea of using synthesisers was interesting because it allowed me to be more emotive with my voice. It was nice to have more of a stark platform for me to get my lyrics across.
The idea of ExileInside is very much lyrics based. I’d like people to listen to the lyrics rather than the arrangements.
Florence: Between My Life Story and ExileInside we can really see two sides of a same person.
ExileInside shows a side of your personality I could never have imagined was there until you started the band. To write tracks so simple, bare and yet so stunning.
Jake: You couldn’t ignore MLS because it was so over the top and so we got a record deal and we made good records and bad records, like most bands but there are subtleties to me, as a person,
The relief of moving on and having a new platform like ExileInside was feeling like an actor without the face paint.
It’s a dreadful cliché but it was an attempt to lay some of my soul bare!
Let’s face it with ExileInside there is no attempt to try and get in the charts, there isn’t a lot of money behind and I knew that the people buying the record would be the people who would have heard of me and would be interested in what I do.
With MLS we could bring out a ridiculous song like ‘The King Of Kissingdom’ which is just a pop song almost in the same genre as ‘Yellow Submarine’, it’s just a stupid song and there is nothing wrong with that but it’s a lot easier to release when you’re on a major label, and on TV, on the radio...and you know that millions of people listen to what you do.
To strip my stuff down, to get more lyrical felt better by being a smaller operation. I don’t know if I could have done it with MLS, even though I did hint at it with ‘Claret’ on ‘The Golden Mile’ album. It’s a song about my mother’s addiction to alcohol and there are a lot of other very personal songs, but most were confined to the B-sides.
Florence: You are always busy but what are your immediate projects?
Have you been writing new tracks for MLS ?
Jake: Funnily enough I am compiling a B-sides and rarities album that I want to release in time for the Christmas’ gig.
I always write but I’ve had a little bit of a quiet patch for the last couple of months.
However I’ve pretty much got enough for another ExileInside album, even though I still write songs that wouldn’t be suitable as sometimes, I still hear huge brass sections.
So I’ve got some potential MLS’ songs that are knocking around!
I will never discount doing another MLS album but right now it’s financially impossible.
Lately we’ve been doing a lot of acoustic gigs with Toni Krause, my piano player, and really enjoying stripping the songs even more.
I would like to release an acoustic album which would be a mix of ExileInside and My Life Story songs and again bring song-writing to the fore.
I guess that’s for next year.
Florence: What do you listen to right now ?
Jake: I’m really into quite a few things and on different levels.
I really liked The Secret Machines’ album.
I like bands like The Faint, Jimmy Eat World and also Brighton bands like Waxed Apple, and also a great band called The Girls, a kind of New York/ New Wave Punk who are putting out an album in 2007.
So all sorts of stuff really!
Florence: Would you consider signing other artists to your label ?
Jake: Absolutely. I won’t be able to do super high leg kicks for ever!
I do genuinely love going out and seeing up and coming bands.
That’s when you really see the heart of a band and see the process going through their mind...
There will be other artists on Exilophone Records but not just yet.
Florence: What would be your message to the world ?
Jake: Oh no! What a horrible question!!
In order to find out if you’ve met the right partner, for life, go on holiday and hire out a tandem bicycle. If you’ve only argued fifty times in a week then that’s your life partner!!
And I am talking from personal experience...it’s called ‘The tandem holiday theory’.
Words: Florence ACHERY
www.exileinside.com
www.myspace.com/mylifestoryspace
www.myspace.com/exileinside |
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