Johnny Foreigner

I'm really excited about this band I discovered the other day as the support act for Hundred Reasons. They're not really very close to the kind of thing that I would normally consider within the sphere of my music taste, but they have such an infectious sincerity and passion that I fell in love with them instantly. They strike me as an embodiment of everything that's good about the British music scene at the moment. The music is boundlessly creative and emotional, but there is an overpowering sense of realness and just-normal-people-doing-awesome-things-not-because-they're-awesome-but-because-it-comes-naturally. As an example of what I mean, read this bio in their own words:

hello this is the ongoing interactive story of johnny foreigner. there are 3 of us, we come from birmingham, we dont go out too much and we have a tendency to overcompensate. we write noisy pop songs for people what like the same bands as we do. last year we put out two 7" records on Laundrette Records. they both sold out and got played on the rah-dio and stuffs. we were pretty fucking proud. last summer we signed a proper record deal, with cone-tracts and everything, for Best Before Records. we recorded an eepee called arcs across the city at southern studios, it got mega good reviews from magazines we'd almost stopped buying and a lot more people started listening to us. we went to new york to make a proper album at the end of last year, it came out in spring and we had like, 4 months living in a van and peoples floors touring it round the country (with the occasional overseas holiday/show). we spent the summer alternately jetting around the world and vanning around the uk playing festivals. we just finished a yookay tour with some awesome other bands, if you weren't there you so missed out.. junior lost his ipod, alexei went crowdsurfing and kelly got totally bloody.
After that, there was a headline tour of the UK (again) with Dananananakroyd (yay) and then the end of 2008 saw us playing the biggest places we've ever played in support of the Futureheads, who are all amazing, and equally very, very tall. In 2009 - this year - we sat and wrote songs and songs and more songs. Then we did our first tour of Europe with Sky Larkin. That too was good. Show great. Repetition. Show amazing. Repetition. We like gigging. On 8th March we flew from Sweden to Heathrow, we then didnt leave Heathrow and got on another plane to NYC which is where we are right now recording ALBUM NUMBER TWO. You'll be hearing more about that real soon. After we're done we're playing more gigs with 100 Reasons and then... TBC. But obviously it will involve more gigs. Obviously...
Anyway, the plan is to keep playing shows and making records until we explode or run out of fingers. we're permanently achey but its still the best job we'll ever have..we do what we can...


Exactly.

Johnny Foreigner get exactly the right ratio of all the worrying things that make Britain so terrible, and the exciting things that make it so wonderful and inspiring. I am particularly struck by their lyrics to the song "Cranes and cranes and cranes and cranes": we make our own mythologies...if I had the guts I promise I would cut the power lines, tape the letterbox shut...I don't worry about these things, from one grey mess to another grey mess, distance knows a heavy heart less, every single night out...tear down our nightclubs, put up flats, burn down our pubs and put up flats...if I had the guts I promise I would.

I've actually been thinking quite a bit recently about how we live, and I think having guts is possibly much more important than I'd like it to be. What strikes me is that we are so uniform in the way we live. I don't mean that at all in a disparaging or accusatory way - it's just interesting and surprisingly uncommented on. Every alternative-leaning person in the western world, which is the vast majority actually, has heard the mantra of going against the flow, that we should be individuals and should live lives in our own way, not the way of everyone else. But what is assumed - always - is that the difference between being an individual and the ever-victimised "sheep" is a matter of details: trivia like clothes, eating habits and manners of speaking. Nobody even thinks about challenging major aspects of lives, like communication, walking or seeing things. When we talk about eccentric personalities that behave in apparently such outlandish fashion, nobody notices that in the vast majority of important manners of living, even such "individuals" are identical to everyone else.

What about the bubble boy who has such a weak immune system that he has been kept in a disinfected bubble from birth and can have contact with nothing because it would cause rapid death? Now that is a truly different manner of living. People talk of doing something crazy like...moving to a remote village somewhere and raising crops by themselves...wouldn't that be radical!? But you still walk, talk, use normal facial expressions, sleep in a lying down position probably on a soft surface under a roof, get up in the morning and eat and drink in the regular fashion in order to maintain your health. People consider themselves to be making a big statement by playing guitars, wearing colourful clothes, long hair and having sex with whomsoever they want. In the range of things, however, almost nobody has breached a tiny hairswidth of possibilities.

Sure, it takes very little thought to realise that trying to be truly radical in one's way of life will lead to a much less pleasant existence than sticking to the tried and tested means of living that humans have always utilised. We can't decide not to eat or sleep. We can't walk on our head. We live in uniform fashion for a good reason - the strict limits of physics. Even if we were able to be heedless of social pressure, our lives would all work in roughly the same way.

Still, I find it very difficult to concede that I should not try some form of experimentation and boundary pushing with my life. It just seems like something more should be possible. While my heart and my mind are more than content with the incredible range of inspiration to be found in human achievement, my soul yearns to be entirely different, to create something not good, but really really new. There is a part of me that is sickened by even this act of writing in such a normal way, with the conventional rules of spelling and grammar, and even with regular means of expression, as hundreds of writers have used before. Part of me wants to scrawl my messages in primal symbols, heedless of the fact that this would cease to be communication, and fulfill no aim at all. This part does not care about aims, and the normal way of doing something to achieve something else. This part of me rejects effect and cause as something unoriginal --- but even as it retreats into a firelit cave and howls at the storm - or whatever movements that are making the shadows on the walls - this part of me knows that even this desperate rejection of everything has itself been done before, that even it, which is desirous of nothing more than pure originality, is a creature of its inspiration, that it is incapable of not being in some tiny way a product of what it has previously experienced. It dies with the arrow of knowledge through its heart: the knowledge that originality seeps slowly through human history, it is not a thing that is instantly accessible to those who want to escape normal existence. The arrow was fired by another part of me, the part that embraces this system, that glories in inspiration and the slow, painstaking evolution of originality. It knows that what humanity eventually produces will be worth the wait - nay - will be better because of the wait.

---

Well we've come a long way from the raw lyrics of Johnny Foreigner, but the yearning for originality is still far from dead of course - it is immortal, and only grows stronger the longer it is frustrated, no matter how much I know that it is impossible.

I think that we should start with the small things, as identified by Johnny Foreigner. Can I even be original to the extent that people normally think originality requires? Do I even have the guts to live a marijuana-filled life on a Caribbean island somewhere? Or play folk music in tie-dye with friends called Starbeam and Lovesocks? Or give all my money to charity? Or cut the power lines and tape up the letterboxes? To be fair to me, I do have major disagreements with all these means of living, but still: do I have the guts to be even a little bit original? I want to be original in music making - but this requires no sacrifice at all. Every time, I simply take refuge in my inspirations, I live a elation-filled life and ignore the yearning which is defeated by cowardice - or is it actually that I don't want to be original? That I like my life, and really I am content? Now that I dare to think it, this makes a lot of sense. I do enjoy life. I don't want to change it that much. I have fair grounds for failing to be original.

The yearning seeps away into the horrific gaping chasm of anticlimax. But like a bad movie with a sequel, you never see it die.