‘Welcome back to Joe Town’: The triumphant return of Lithium Joe
UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Lithium Joe are back
EXCLUSIVE by Nick Quantrill
The iconic ‘Welcome to Joe Town’ graffiti just outside of Hull train station may be a ghost sign now, but there’s something stirring again in the world of Lithium Joe.
One of the city’s most popular bands throughout the 1990s, they relentlessly toured the country and released countless singles, EPs and an album before calling it a day. Fast-forward twenty years and the punk-pop four-piece are back with new music and a Hull date later in the year.
For frontman Joe Solo, reforming the band was a step into the unknown. The plan was to initially play a gig to celebrate his 50th birthday just before the first lockdown.
“We were really careful when we got back into the rehearsal room again,” he says, speaking about the process.
“We wanted to play the songs in the right key and at the right speed, and we were conscious of needing to do it at some kind of level. You’re playing music, but you’re also playing memories.
‘A MANIC RUSH OF ENERGY’: Answer Machine by Lithium Joe is out now
“Casting back is definitely a double-edged thing. It’s not just songs, it’s also people’s thoughts and feelings. Once you put music out there, it takes on a life of its own. You can ask 100 people what a song means and they’ll all tell you something slightly different.”
Joe needn’t have worried. The 2019 reform gig at The Adelphi was a euphoric sell-out, a springboard for future endeavours. Answer Machine is the first in a planned series of new releases from the band, and like their earlier work, it’s a manic rush of energy fused with pop hooks and harmonies.
“It cost us a lot of money to do this at Fairview Studio, but we didn’t want to come back with something that was no good,” Joe says.
“It was a case of getting the performances right, getting the recording quality right, so it holds up against everything we was doing before.
“If we can put out a record that’s as good as we could do before, that’s still got that liveliness about it, and it sounds like us, then why not? Answer Machine felt like a good place to start because that would have been the next single back in 2002, and because you don’t really get answering machines now, and you don’t really have dialling tones, there’s a kind of a fun element to it as well.”
Revisiting the song certainly suggests there’s a degree of unfinished business about things for the band.
“Like everything, it’s dead easy to talk about doing something, it’s a lot harder to get it over the line,” Joe says.
“The work to get a band to take an idea through to getting it into the recording studio is huge. We all have families, full-time jobs and live in different towns. Getting into the rehearsal room, three or four times a week like we used to do, and bashing things into shape really quickly had gone, but I think we just got our game faces on and did it.
“The process was really hard, but when we got to the studio, we kind of knew the song beat by beat. We were so well-rehearsed when we went in, that bit was easy.”
The process of creating music isn’t the only thing that’s changed for the band. The music industry landscape has completely changed, too. Gone are the days of sending leaflets out to a mailing list, releasing music on cassette and fly-posting the streets with details of forthcoming gigs.
‘AMBITIOUS FOR THE MUSIC AND GIGS’: Lithium Joe in the band’s heyday
“Back in the day, we wanted to be an independent band, but we wanted to be the best independent band,” Joe says.
“We were always ambitious for the music and the gigs we were playing, but less ambitious for the industry itself. We’d seen the bands that were our peers hit that brick wall of deals and London, and it wasn’t really us.
“There are different ways to do things now. Nowadays, bands can be more savvy as to how they leverage the online world. I think the way social media works, most bands just release a song, and then three months later there’s maybe another one. You get as much traction and publicity off one song as you do from twelve.”
It’s a different way of thinking about things. A second song, I’ll See You When I Get There, was recorded during the same session with an initial plan of putting the songs out together, but the digital approach is different.
“If we stagger them, we get two shots at it. If we release them together, we only get one,” Joe says. “The more we thought about it, the more we thought we should separate them. It’s another chance to generate enough interest to fill those rooms at the end of the year.”
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The band’s plan is to play three gigs later in the year, including one at The Adelphi, and it promises to be a special occasion.
“The idea of touring and gigging on Wednesday and Thursdays, doing all the stuff that we used to do, that’s gone. Just the logistics that are necessary for that to happen would prevent it,” says Joe.
“We obviously we can’t produce new songs at a rate to fill up a new set, so the gigs this year will be based around the older songs, but the two new songs will definitely be in there and over time the set will evolve. It will just take longer than it used to, but it seems to me to be a natural thing to do if everyone else is in for it.
“The world needs young people to be the creative voices and to be driving it forward, but I think there’s a place for us. There’s still plenty of room out there for fifty-somethings who can still just about jump up and down for an hour. What we’re doing is good, it’s fun and it’s got a message, and there’s a story to us.”
Download Answer Machine here: https://joesolomusic.bandcamp.com/
View the Answer Machine video here: https://tinyurl.com/LithiumJoeVideo
Lithium Joe play The Adelphi on November 25. Tickets: https://tinyurl.com/LithiumJoeTickets