“The only skill I've got is my enthusiasm for this”: 'A's Jason Perry on getting kicked in the face, being intimidated by Mike Patton and getting high on music

There’s a famous quote from the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs that explains why he, despite not being a coder or an engineer, was so important to the company’s astronomical success: “Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.”

Those words come to mind when speaking to Jason Perry, frontman of 'A' and highly sought-after, (Latin) Grammy-winning producer. By his own admission, the 54-year-old has no formal music training and can’t play an instrument. Yet he has something intangible that’s difficult to quantify in the AI age: a discerning ear that helps him to know what a band needs to maximise the possibilities of their sound.

“The only skill I’ve got is my enthusiasm for music,” suggests Jason. “I want to make something [with a band] that we didn’t have before the day began. Then I can go to bed happy.”

Despite helming records by the likes of Don Broco, McFly and The Molotovs in recent years, the context for today’s chat is Prang, the forthcoming fifth album from 'A'. The Suffolk rockers formed in 1993, founded by Jason, his brothers Adam and Giles, guitarist Mark Chapman and, since 2022, completed by bassist Richard Trigg. The band’s peak, to date, came with the release of their third album, Hi-Fi Serious in 2002, which featured the single Nothing, their first and only Top 10 hit, and the iconic Starbucks.

Remarkably, Prang is 'A’s first album in 21 years, though it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given Jason’s many responsibilities, which aside from being a production powerhouse also include being a father of four and the creator/co-presenter of a new music show called Song Cake.

There’s much to cover, then, which Jason does in entertaining detail, during a conversation that spans going on the sesh with Faith No More, bickering with siblings in your fifties, and his connection to Eastenders…

Your name is Jason, but have you, as the lyrics to 'A’s early song Cheeky Monkey suggests, ever rocked someone’s face in?
“My own face, really. I’d get kicked in the face a lot at gigs. I’ve lost a few teeth. This shows how long we’ve been doing this, but before they had barriers, you’d get the crowd come to the edge of the stage, to stage dive, and I’d put my head right in the crowd, which often resulted in my mic getting kicked in my face. So, yeah, I’ve lost a few facial parts due to rock, which I’m proud to say.”

In the early 2000s, you toured with a huge range of very big and successful bands. Who did you learn the most from?
“In Europe, we’d be on these very diverse festival bills, so playing with Black Eyed Peas one minute, then Rammstein the next. I loved a bit of everything, and I liked to learn stuff. I think, as people, I learned the most from [German punk rock veterans] Die Toten Hosen. Despite being a huge, stadium-sized band, on our first day with them on tour, the whole band and crew came into our dressing room and introduced themselves to us all, telling us that we could use all the PA we wanted, all the lights we wanted. Campino, their singer, even said he’d come out on stage and introduce us if we wanted. They were just the most down-to-earth, accommodating band you could ever meet. Same with Faith No More…”

We need to hear more about that…
“Faith No More were the first big band we’d ever toured with, and I was terrified to meet them. When we were in Glasgow, the night before the first gig there, we were sitting in the hotel bar, when [Faith No More bassist] Billy Gould walks in. He said, ‘You’re Jason from 'A', I’m Billy from Faith No More and I’ve come to hang out, so that tomorrow, when you get to the gig, you have a friend.’ I just couldn’t believe it, one of my heroes was saying this to me. He took us out that night in Glasgow and we got really drunk. The next day when we got to the gig, we met Billy, who introduced us to the rest of the band.”

How was your Mike Patton experience?
“Intimidating. And I think he knows that and gets off on it in a way.”

How has being in a band with your brothers changed over the years? Do you annoy each other in different ways these days?
“Me and Adam [Perry, 'A’s drummer and Jason’s identical twin] annoy each other all the time, because we’re so close. We’re the only ones who can say the things we say to each other and get away with it. Same with Giles [Perry, keyboard player]. It’s come to blows between the three of us, but we can laugh about it the week later. We’re always able to take the piss out of ourselves, which is a good way of getting over things.”

Are you able to go to Starbucks now without someone taking the piss?
“I can now, but back in the day I got thrown out of one Starbucks by some kid working there. I said to him, ‘First off, the lyrics are not actually knocking Starbucks. Secondly, do you own Starbucks? Why do you care so much?’ So I stole an apron on the way out and wore it for a photoshoot.”

Your new record is called Prang, a word that has several meanings. You can ‘prang’ a car, for instance, but you can get scared and end up ‘pranging out’. So which is it in this instance?
“It is a car crash thing. A lot of this album was influenced by Suffolk. There are a lot of lyrics about growing up in Southwold and Lowestoft. Mark, our guitarist, and Trigg, our bass player, have both got sheds down the bottom of their gardens, so a lot of it was recorded in their sheds. I’d just go up there, have a barbecue, a few beers, then get my little laptop out and record some parts. So we were trying to think of the most Suffolk word we could for the album. Prang is a very Suffolk word. And it looked cool when we wrote it out.”

That sounds like a fairly lo-fi way of working. Given that you’ve worked on big productions making records, was this your way of getting away from the bells-and-whistles stuff?
“A lot of it is practicing what I preach. I go to big studios with bands like Don Broco and the first thing I say to that band is, ‘We’re going to use so much of the original demo that you won’t believe it.’ At first bands can be surprised by that, but now bands like Broco get it and trust me. I think the magic is in the demo. That’s when a song has a life of its own, before anyone’s tinkered with it. If it’s a good song, it’ll come alive in that demo and make itself known. We’ve had big hits with Don Broco where I’d say 80 per cent of the vocals were Matt [Donnelly, drummer and singer] sat in his bedroom, singing into his phone. That kind of lo-fi recording is a big part of what I do.”

You’ve worked with bands that have subsequently worked with other producers. Is that something you as a producer take personally? How much ego is involved?
“It’s bad for the bank balance, but when bands do that it’s fine, as you don’t want to end up saying the same thing to bands all the time. I’ve worked with McFly for 20 years now, on and off, and they work with other producers as well, but they always seem to come back. But I love finding new bands as well.”

Do you often tell a band that you don’t want to work with them?
“There were a couple of bands recently that I had meetings with and thought, ‘I don’t want to work with them’, because you’re telling them the truth about their songs and they don’t want to hear it. And that’s fine. They don’t have to hear it. I work with a band that literally comes to the studio after playing four nights at Wembley, then I’ve got to tell them that the chorus doesn’t work the next day. But they don’t care. They say, ‘OK, we’ll try something else.’ Everyone’s got egos, and everyone wants their ideas to win, but even big bands realise how hard it is. I’m sure Green Day would like to write something like American Idiot again. If it was that easy, they’d be churning that out every day. It’s really not easy. These things are gifts from the gods, and you need to be in the right frame of mind to embrace them.”

You won a Latin Grammy in 2014 for your work on [Mexican rock band] Molotov’s album, Agua Maldita – not to be confused with Brit punks The Molotovs, who you've also worked with. Where do you keep your award?
“I keep it on a shelf in my office. The ceremony was nuts. I was in my dinner jacket and got out of my seat to collect the award, did a speech, posed for pictures and all that. But when I went to go back to my seat, there was this glamorous lady in a very beautiful evening dress sitting in my seat. What happens is, because it’s on TV, they can’t be seen to have any empty seats, so when someone gets up, they put a seat-filler in. The problem was that this woman wouldn’t let me have my seat back, because she refused to believe that it was me up on stage. So I left and went to get some fish and chips.”

Your partner, Emma Barton, is an actor who plays Honey Mitchell in Eastenders. You’re both creative people, but are your skills transferable enough for you to be able to help each other out?
“I read her Eastenders scripts. Sometimes on a Sunday, we have a little script meeting and I pretend to be Billy [Mitchell], her onscreen husband. I’m a terrible actor, though. I’m too self-conscious to be an actor, so I’ve got so much respect for her. She’s amazing, and a great singer as well. In fact, she sings on the new album. She did some backing vocals on a song. We’re going to work on a few projects together as well. She works really hard. She’s up at 5:30 every morning, driving to work to be in make-up by 7. It’s a bit like being on tour for her, being part of that machine every day.”

You host the TV programme/podcast/live experience, Song Cake, with music journalist Philip Wilding, which looks at the ingredients that go into making songs and has featured the likes of Claudio Sanchez from Coheed & Cambria and Wolfgang Van Halen. It’s brilliantly nerdy – did that make it a tough sell?
“The tricky thing was to sell it as a live show. The show we did last week was sold out and the atmosphere was amazing. Then it becomes a different show, as the guests start playing to the audience a little bit. And Philip is brilliant as a co-presenter. I deal with all the music stuff, and he deals with the life of the band type stuff. It’s sort of been 30 years in the making for me.”

Who, then, would your dream Song Cake guest be?

“Rush!”

Prang is released on May 22 via Cooking Vinyl. Order your K! exclusive signed orange splatter vinyl edition now!

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