How are things in Moco?
 | | Moco's Steve Jones |
"The feeling is very positive at the moment. We’ve been enjoying quite a bit of success, we’ve answered a lot of questions in our own minds about where the next step is and grown up a lot with the music we’re doing. The mini-album has got a lot of radio play and all we’ve wanted to do is raise our profile before our next single, In Love With Two People, comes out on One Little Indian at the end of the year." So this album is a bit of a stop-gap… "The point of it was just so people didn’t forget that we’re out there and busy, but we’ve got a number of other things we need to be getting on with. It might not end up as number one in the charts, but with Top Of The Pops disappearing, who can tell?" Twice Bitten, Once Shy takes its name from the song. What’s the song about?
 | | Moco |
"I guess it’s best to not look too deeply into the meanings of any of my songs. It was just supposed to be a pretty song. I like it better when people tell me what it means. I wrote it to carry some peace and love values in it, but the rest of the band did an interview and they said they thought it was a pretty dark song!" Are you happy with the album? "The greatest thing about that album is that it was done ridiculously quickly with very little money and very little time to go back and redo anything. So we took some bits and pieces that we’d recorded in San Francisco and pieced it together with some things we put together in the actual heart of rock and roll that is Wigan." You’re working on a new album now, how are the new songs coming on? | "We were listening to Northern Soul music, which obviously is linked to here. Let’s face it, Wigan Casino is probably more legendary than our pies!" | | Steve Jones explains where Moco's new brass sound came from |
"Really, really well. We use a brass element and that’s not losing anything, it’s just gaining. We were worried that they might turn people away from us, but the standard of music around Wigan is really great, with so many bands playing so many different sorts of instruments. It's good that bands, us included, are using more than simple guitars and organs to make music." What made you go down a brass route? "There’s a big jazz scene in Wigan and we also found that we were listening to a lot of Northern Soul music, which obviously is linked to here. Let’s face it, Wigan Casino is probably more legendary than our pies are! So we thought it’d be ace to do something like that. "As a kid, I used to work at the Jazz Festival and see all these great musicians coming in. So I spoke to Ian Darrington, who is Mr Jazz in Wigan, and asked him what he could do to help. He gave us some contacts, they came together and it sounds really good. I just can’t wait for more people to start hearing it." With a new style, does that mean you’re cutting down on your headstands on stage?
 | | Moco's Steve Jones (pic: Stefan Klenke) |
"I’m tending not to do quite so many. I think people think it’s still quite a crazy show, but when we started off, I used to fake my own death on stage and people would come over quite concerned because I had blood coming out of my mouth – it was just from capsules – so I guess I’m getting more into the music and less into the shock value. But if everything goes right, it should be better now than it was back then, so come and check us out!" |
