{"id":74119,"date":"2022-02-28T20:25:28","date_gmt":"2022-02-28T20:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/essentiallypop.com\/epop\/?p=74119"},"modified":"2022-03-03T11:31:08","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T11:31:08","slug":"interview-with-rem-producer-jacknife-lee-on-new-telefis-collaboration-with-microdisneys-cathal-coughlan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/essentiallypop.com\/epop\/2022\/02\/interview-with-rem-producer-jacknife-lee-on-new-telefis-collaboration-with-microdisneys-cathal-coughlan\/","title":{"rendered":"LORD OF MISRULE – REM Producer Jacknife Lee On New Mischief-Making Telefis Collaboration With Microdisney’s Cathal Coughlan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“I’m not very good socially. I find it kind of a waste of time. I like making music and if I can do that with people and I want to be in a room with somebody, then that’s great.”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Matt Catchpole<\/strong> talks to award-winning producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee about working with REM<\/strong> and U2<\/strong> and his new collaboration with fellow Irishman Cathal Coughlan<\/strong>, of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Zooming from a damp and dreary London, I’m confronted by the sight of a blue-haired man in his 50s dressed in T-shirt and shorts in a room packed to the rafters with vinyl.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It’s some ungodly hour in LA and Jacknife Lee is just getting up, but already there’s music on the turntable.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

“Some guy from London called Alabaster de Plume<\/strong>,” he says by way of explanation, “I think he plays like an alto sax – beautiful, jazz is kicking off!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s the first of a bewildering array of artists, he’ll go on to namecheck during our chat and it becomes immediately obvious why the likes of REM<\/strong>, The Killers<\/strong> and U2<\/strong> want to work with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man is just obsessed with music and finding new sounds – ‘fresh’ is a favourite word – and his boundless enthusiasm is both disarming and infectious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re here to talk about Telefis<\/strong>, his new project with Cathal Coughlan<\/mark><\/strong>,<\/a> frontman of Microdisney<\/strong> and Fatima Mansions<\/strong>, who’s riding high off the back of an acclaimed comeback solo album<\/mark><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And boy can he talk…. my first question illicits a 20-minute response and I wonder if I’ll get another in before the 35 minutes originally set down for the interview is up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he’s generous with his time and we end up chewing the fat for the best part of a couple of hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He admits to being a ‘ridiculous fan’ of Cathal’s since seeing an early incarnation of Microdisney support Siouxsie and the Banshees<\/strong> as a wide-eyed 11-year-old in Dublin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It was amazing like angry [Captain] Beefheart. You know, that strange Cork thing that was going on. He was pretty brutal.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jacknife would go to support a two-piece Microdisney himself as a teenager and saw Cathal as a figure to look up to on the Irish music scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jacknife (centre) in ’90s band Compulsion – ‘Drunken reprobates who took way too much speed’<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

“His music was on in our house all the time, and we’d go and see Microdisney every time they played, so his voice was just always there and he seemed so much smarter and wittier than anybody else and he knew things no-one else seemed to know about the world.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As their respective careers developed, the pair lost touch, until recently when they were reunited by Luke Haines<\/strong>, of the Auteurs<\/strong> and Black Box Recorder<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I work a lot with Peter Buck <\/strong> from REM and he’d made a record with Luke and I was just mangling it up, re-imagining it. I did something quite outrageous to it and I’d heard Luke was quite difficult to please. But he liked it and it’s coming out in April<\/mark><\/a><\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Luke had played on Cathal’s new record and told him he’d been working with someone who knew him, which was me. I said: ‘Please get me his email!’.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The email led to a call and Jacknife “reverting to a kid again, just blurted out that I wanted to make a record with him”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He’s just an extraordinary artist, one of the great lyricists, and really underrated. Somebody like Nick Cave<\/strong>, and Nick is great, knows how to brand himself. And I don’t know if it’s an Irish thing, or just a Cathal thing, but he doesn’t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He almost does a thing that I did for a long time, which was sabotage myself. There was a bit of that in Microdisney and certainly a lot of that in Fatima Mansions. Just when it looked like something would break through, he would deliberately set fire to it. So he never really gets gets the accolades he deserves, but maybe he doesn’t want them, I don’t know.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though separated by thousands of miles, the pair quickly bonded over their shared Irish history, having both left the mother country at around the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We both left in the ’80s and it was shit and it was like it was like surviving something and it wasn’t that traumatic, but it was like: ‘Fucking hell, that was mental, wasn’t it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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