Lemon Jelly Meet William Shatner

jmc

From this month’s The Observer Music Monthly magazine
Sunday, January 23rd ‘04
Q&A

Nick Franglen, one half of chill-out dance duo Lemon Jelly, speaks to 'Star Trek' star, recent Golden Globe winner and recording artist William Shatner about working together on two new albums, chaos theory and a great lost Esperanto movie...
Lemon Jelly bring their stunning live show and visual feast to Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre on Saturday, February 26th.
Lemon Jelly's new album '64-95' (XL Recordings), featuring William Shatner on the track 'Go', is released in Ireland on Friday week, February 4th.
Their new single, ‘The Shouty Track’ is out this Friday.

Nick Franglen: Hey Bill! We worked with you on your record ‘Has Been’ last year, and now you've helped us out with a track on our new album. Why on earth did you want to work with us again?

William Shatner: Well, you synthesised a poem my wife and I had written for my record, and I was so taken with it that I wanted to participate in another venture with you. How was it for you?

NF: Quite an experience. The track we did together, 'Go', is one of our favourites on the new album, and watching you perform was really a special moment for us.

WS: I was following your direction, which I found quite unique. The way you seem to work is so freeform, arriving at some place that you don't know in advance where you're going.

NF: ‘Has Been’ is much more personal than your previous record, ‘The Transformed Man’. Was this a conscious decision?

WS: Well, after the radio stations had taken tracks like 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' or 'Mr Tambourine Man' from ‘The Transformed Man’ and played them alone...

NF: I remember you explaining that the idea was the tracks should be played in pairs...

WS: Exactly. But they took away the companion element and people thought “What is Shatner doing?”... and fun was poked at my interpretations. I was working with the piano player Ben Folds [from Ben Folds Five] on the new album, so I asked him, 'What should I write about?'. He just said “Tell the truth”, and that pushed me in the direction of making it very personal.

NF: Nowhere more so than on the song, ‘What Have You Done’, which describes the death of your third wife in 1999. Was it difficult to expose yourself in such a raw manner?

WS: I thought long and hard after I'd written it. The song had been lying there for years, since the tragedy, and I wanted to tell my family, to distil for my loved ones, what my experience was. When I had finished, I realised that the song was being pulled from the bottom of my soul, and I thought long and hard about whether to include it on the album.

It occurred to me that if I was going to make this a personal album, then that event was as wrenching and as pivotal as anything that has happened to me, so I needed to include it. I've never done any publicity on it, I've never wanted to talk about it, but it is there, and it is what it is.

NF: You've never been too afraid to take chances in your career. You enjoyed the first interracial kiss to be seen on American TV - with Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek - which had an enormous impact. But looking further back than that, I'm interested in what made you want to make the film ‘Incubus’. You were already a Shakespearean actor...

WS: I spent my first honeymoon at the Edinburgh Festival with a production of Henry V!

NF: Now you took the lead in a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto! It was a foreign language film wherever it played!

WS: I'm a believer in Chaos Theory! I think you bounce off of things, and it's arrogant to think that you can plan something and events will transpire the way you plan them. When things come along that seem interesting, seem exciting, seem different, I just do them, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're bad. If you can survive the bad then that's good.

NF: Is it harder to experiment if you're so famous? I think Fred [Deakin] and I are lucky because the music we make as Lemon Jelly doesn't need a public face. We've been able to keep ourselves pretty anonymous.

WS: Well, that's interesting. But don't you tour?

NF: Oh, we tour all right, it's become one of our biggest buzzes - the Jellyheads are always up for a party!

Finally, Ben Folds told me you have a fantastic bull**** detector. Do you prefer the bull**** in LA, or the horse**** on your ranch?

WS: Well I'll tell you, the horse**** on the ranch serves a double purpose, it is a cleansing of the horse's internal system and it is fertiliser for potential crops. You can make use of horse****. The bull**** in Los Angeles cleanses nothing.

Lemon Jelly's new album '64-95' (XL Recordings), featuring William Shatner on the track 'Go', is released in Ireland on Friday week, February 4th. Lemon Jelly take their ’64 – 95’ Tour on the road next month kicking off at Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre on Saturday, February 26th.

William Shatner's latest album, 'Has Been' (Epic), is out now. Last Sunday, he won a Golden Globe award in America for his peformance in the drama series 'Boston Legal'.