|
After the breakup of
John's Children, Hewlett went to work for Apple in the publishing division. Then,
when Apple started falling apart, he went into management with Gallagher &
Lyle and later McGuiness Flint. He soon lost interest working with all these
singer songwriters and it wasn't really the sort of music he liked.
So
Jook
was a conscious attempt to get back to he really wanted.
And that's what
Jook
was about: a 70's John's Children, complete with futuristic Mod
clothes. They made 5 45's in a year, powerful records with Slade-like
production, teen rebellion lyrics and Townshend-styled guitar.
Some of the songs were great,
from the debut "Alright With Me" to the tremendous flip side of their last
single "Crazy Kids" (later remade by Trevor White, both versions are among
the all-time classic teenage anthems).
As it was, the records were relative flops, and White left
with
lan Hampton to join the Sparks Propaganda
band after
Martin Gordon (Radio Stars was
fired. Gordon in turn got together with
Peter
Oxendale, Sparks session key-boardist, and formed Jet with
Andy Ellison, Chris Townson and David O'List from the Nice.
A few
years later, John Hewlett with Joseph Fleury made a production company "J-J",
the first "J-J" releases were
Milk 'n' Cookies, Earle
Mankey (former Sparks and famous producer), the Mumps
(led by Kristian Hoffman who would record an Earle Mankey
produced duet with Russell Mael in 2002) and a 4-song
Jook
EP of unreleased stuff.
The complete
Jook singles
have never been re-issued to this day on CD.
I did a transfer from my
singles to cd-r in 2005 (with SoundForge
7.0), and i revamped the original
sleeve in order to get the pictures you can see
|
