Gene Loves Jezebel Desire You!

Gene Loves Jezebel Desire You!

Harold DeMuir

“There’s a lot of people in this hotel who’ve flown in just for our New York date,” reveals blonde-tressed Michael Aston. “Every time we come to New York, we get lots of really strange people. And then we’ll arrive at our next hotel and find that some girls have flown in from Japan to see us. The first thing you always hear is, ‘I’m not a groupie, but ..”

I’m sitting with Mike, his dark-haired brother Jay (sometimes spelled J.), and guitarist/keyboardist/co-writer James Stevenson—three-fifths of the current Gene Loves Jezebel line-up—in the restaurant of the upscale Manhattan hotel where the band is staying. We’re discussing the truly fanatical ardor displayed by the band’s persistent female admirers, while our fellow diners shoot politely inquisitive glances at the Aston boys, who are looking exotic and mysterious even without their stage finery.

After half a decade of pursuing a musical career with varying degrees of seriousness, the brothers are rising international pop idols, whose enigmatically kinky musical and personal magnetism has driven all manner of young females to pursue them in hopes of attaining sexual fulfillment and spiritual enlightenment. “It freaks out a lot of people,” says Jay. “A lot of journalists who’ve witnessed it find it very strange, but this is the only group Mike and I have ever been in, so we tend to accept it as the norm.

“We make obsessive music for obsessive people,” he continues. “We deal in communication, and obviously we’re getting through to people. I always believe that all you put out comes back to you, and that’s the difference between us and a very large percentage of other groups. Groups like New Order and the Cult come on very dark, and the audience will stand back, whereas we draw people in. I think it’s a positive thing.”

I’m not buying this rationalization at all—and, as it happens, neither is Mike. “But they’re obsessive, they’re nuts, Jay,” he counters. “They follow us around and they’re in our hotels all night—that’s certainly a nutty thing to do, isn’t it? It’s harmless to us, but it’s just not healthy.”

The twins’ present teen-love-god status stems from GLJ’s early days in the British indie scene, when the pair coyly manipulated their sexually-ambiguous image to build an alluring mystique. “Some of the weird signals that we’ve sent out over the years have been confusing to people, I’m sure,” admits Jay. “A lot of poeple thought, ‘Oh, Gene Loves Jezebel, a couple of weird twins, la la.’ We made a lot of mistakes early on, and we’ve got a jot of ground to make up in that area.”

“We’re rational heterosexuals, and we get off on the music we play,” protests Mike. “We’re a sexy band, and we’re comfortable with that. The worst thing is, because the band is so visual, people don’t always look at how strong we are musically. A lot of people who don’t know anything about us have assumed that we’re a packaging of someone else’s notion of us. But that’s never been true. We’ve always been responsible for everything we’ve done.”

“People can be very superficial about what they regard as our superficiality,” agrees Jay. “But by sticking together and working at it, we’re proving that we mean what we’re doing. As soon as people see us live, I think they get the message that we are serious about what we do, and that it is everything to us.

“We started out as inarticulate musicians with great songs in our heads, and gradually developed into this group, Gene Loves Jezebel. We’ve played with loads of musicians, and through a course of events we’ve discovered this group thing, this chemistry, which I think is obvious to anyone who sees us.”

“Before, there was always this twins thing being thrust at everybody,” adds Mike. “People saw us as a curio, a novelty. But now we’re pushing the band forward much more, because we’re confident that the band will stay together and that we’ll make our best records in this lineup. We’re saying that this is the definitive Gene Loves Jezebel, if there is such a thing.”

The Aston brothers grew up in Porthcawl, South Wales, so poor that they had to use colored pipecleaners and rubberbands to improvise their various hairstyles. The siblings began gigging with fellow Porthcawler Ian Hudson as guitarist and co-writer, moved to London in 1982, and recorded the first Gene Loves Jezebel LP, Promise, the following year.

Bassist Peter Rizzo joined in ’84, in time for a second album, Immigrant (released stateside on the small Relativity label). Stevenson replaced Hudson in 1985, after the latter bailed out mid-tour in New York. Drummer Chris Bell (not to be confused with the dead Big Star guy of the same name) is the newest recruit, having stepped in for the legendarily trouble-prone Marcus Gilvear after the recording of the current GLJ disc, Discover.

Discover, the group’s first release under a new U.S. deal with Geffen, is their most focused, consistent effort to date. The twins credit James—a young veteran of stints with Chelsea, Gen X and Kim Wilde—with a major role in the band’s leap forward. “We’ve become so prolific since we’ve run into James,” states Jay. “It’s unbelievable how well it all fits together now. Before, Mike and I would write 10 or 12 songs a year, and they would all go on vinyl. But now, we’re spinning these works which just explode anything we’ve done before.”

According to Mike, “It was too diverse before. There were too many different directions, because Jay and I would indulge ourselves as writers. Now that James is involved in the writing, there’s more direction and it’s less self-indulgent.”

“Everyone in this group is a phenomenally good musician,” says James. “There is not a better rhythm section around than Pete and Chris. In the past, the twins have always been the focal point, but I think now that the line-up is stable, the rest of the band is really gonna start shining through, and people are gonna realize that this is a great rock band. There’s a stigma attached to being a rock band in England, but that’s what we are.”

“Now that we’ve got the band that we think is perfect,” says Mike, “our goal is to make better records, records that really communicate. I think we’ve written a lot of really interesting, great songs in the past, but I don’t think they were always performed right, because we didn’t have the expertise. Now we do, and we want to make records that reflect that.

“We’re conscious that what we have now is a rarity. We’re aware of how rare and valuable it is, and it’s very important now to make records and tour while we’re all together. We want to be recognized for being good at what we do, and we want to be thought of as a serious band—that’s how we’ll get into the history books. There’s no rock ’n’ roll swindle in Gene Loves Jezebel.”

Which is not to say that the blond dude is above a bit of good-natured self-promotion. When asked what he’d think if he was an American kid seeing GLJ on MTV for the first time, he replies, “I’d be stunned by it, like I’d just seen Elvis Presley or something. I mean, how many bands do you see that are as dynamic as us, really? I’d think, ‘My God, where has this been all my life? Our saviors have finally arrived.’ ”