Interview: Jimmy Watkins (Joyce/Running Punks)
The musician and athlete talks blasting Pere Ubu, joining Future Of The Left and forming new outfit Joyce
There aren’t many musicians who open an interview by breezily mentioning they’re running up a mountain the following day, but then there’s not many musicians like Jimmy Watkins.
If you’re a sports fan, his name might be familiar from his time as an international runner. As British champion he represented the UK in the 800m final at the World Championships in 2006.
If you’re a music fan, you might know him better from his time in Future Of The Left. During his five years in the indie rock band, contributing guitar, vocals and lyrics to 2012’s The Plot Against Common Sense and 2013’s How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident.
And if you’re a fan of both music and sports, his alternative exercise group Running Punks and hyper-enthusiastic reviews while running to a soundtrack of everyone from Lamb of God to Lizzo might just have appeared on your screen.
But soon he may be more familiar to everyone for being the driving force behind Joyce, who have already been getting airplay from BBC 6 Music in the UK and Seattle’s KEXP in the US.
“Even though music has always been my biggest passion, I'm aware that many people see me as a runner and, in some ways, I see myself as a sportsman who likes to write songs. So I do feel like I need this validation,” he told Fire Red Sky.
Jimmy, whose own running favourites range from Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz to pop music from Charli XCX, is in the Rhondda Valley in Wales when we connect via Zoom to talk about the post-punk soundtrack to his early training, his love for the Manic Street Preachers, working with a former member of The Cure, and more.
If we go right back to the beginning, what came first for you – music or sport?
They both came at the same time, really. As a kid, I was just really passionate and crazy about, not so much sport, but definitely running and music, those were my things, and I'd say maybe music was my biggest passion. That was always the thing that I wanted to do.
Like, as a kid, I would think what would I be like as a grown up and I could see myself with a leather jacket on or being in a band. So even though I loved sport, I knew a musician is what I wanted to be. That was the most appealing to me as a kid.
As you moved from thinking to doing, what were your first steps into music?
I had a really small nylon acoustic guitar when I was about four, off my grandma. I obviously didn't know how to play it, so I was just like, strumming open chords. And I distinctly remember writing a song about [comic character] Desperate Dan being stuck in a pigsty, and I remember singing that to my dad.
Then my mum and dad are massive music fans, so I grew up listening to a lot of David Bowie. My dad was, and he still is, into a band called Pere Ubu, so he used to play The Modern Dance an awful lot, and they had an EP called 30 Seconds Over Tokyo that we used to play a lot, and I really loved that and how noisy it was. My parents would drive me to sports, and we'd often turn up with Pere Ubu blasting in the family car. And then my first concert was actually David Bowie, supported by Morrissey in the Motorpoint [Arena] in Cardiff on the Outside tour. So I was 12 or 13.
What about when it came time to explore music of your own. What was the first album of your own?
The first album I bought was Everything Must Go by the Manic Street Preachers. I cut all my neighbours’ grass, saved up the money and then caught a train to Woolworths and bought that. I'd never heard them - I was just fascinated by the fact there was a local-ish band, and the guitarist had gone missing, and this was the first album they made since the guitarist went missing, and that was all I knew about them.
I played it non-stop - to the point where I wouldn't go to school unless I listened to it all the way through every morning.
From those first steps - buying your first album, having parents with great musical taste, obviously there's that part of your life bit where you were doing sports (and very successfully too), but if we focus in further on the music, when did you get into your first band?
I was in bands in schools. The first band I was in was a kind of Oasis cover band, and we wrote our own songs, and we just played, like, pubs and stuff in the valleys. I was 15-16, when I was doing that. [With] a couple of friends, we started our own punk band, and I played in that until I was about 18.
Then I stopped being in a band while I concentrated on my running. So from the ages of 18 to about 23 I didn't play any music at all. I was just an avid music fan, just listening to as much as I could.
Then when I was 24, I started a band again. So, while I was a world class athlete, I started writing music with a friend who was also a runner. So, the two of us had this little band. We'd go training together, and then we would be in a studio and write some songs. We supported Future Of The Left in London and Cardiff, and then I was asked to start writing with that band.
Bringing it up to date then, tell me about your latest musical incarnation, and also – why call it Joyce?
I'd really felt like I was done making music. I did Future Of The Left, and I had another band called The Vega Bodegas, and that kind of just fizzled out. Running Punks was really busy, I was doing my album reviews, and that kept me happy.
Then I bought a MacBook, and I just remember looking on my Mac at GarageBand and I started doing a few demos and sent them to Gwen, who plays bass in the band. I was sending her some of the demos and she was like, ‘This is really cool, you should do a solo project’.
Gwen was over the house with me one day and we were working on a song. We're talking about band names. I wanted it to be just like a really plain name, So we're thinking, ‘Let's call it Nigel’. And then she saw three James Joyce books on the shelf and said Joyce is a really good name for a band. It's quite funny, because for Christmas, I had a DNA kit to find your family tree, and I found a great, great, great grandmother called Joyce. So it was really nice doing the album, thinking, ‘Oh, this is more like my great, great, great grandmother I never met.
The music you make as Joyce is really eclectic and sees you sing, play guitar, bass, keys and synths. Did you come to the creative process with any particular approach in mind?
I just wrote whatever song felt appropriate for whatever I was trying to get across. I got this writing bug where it was a really intense two or three months of just writing and recording almost every day. And I could kind of sense the journey I wanted this album to go on. I've always before done a lot of humorous lyrics, and it's not really been personal songwriting. So I knew I wanted to do a personal album, and I literally just plotted the album in terms of where I wanted to go, and the types of music that would suit what I was trying to do.
So, I knew, it was going to start with some Hare Krishna monk singing, because I wanted it to start in a really calm way, because I felt like that's where the seed of the album came from, like a new calmness I found in my life since I stopped drinking. So, it needs to start quite calm, but then I need to remember there still is anger and bitterness there. So I knew the second song, which was ‘Voyce’, had to be really aggressive, almost like having the feel of, like a hip-hop diss track. Then I knew I wanted to follow it with an uplifting song about being sober. So I knew that had to have, like acoustic guitars and pop [melodies].
And I set myself little challenges to say, ‘Okay, let's try and write something like that’. And amazingly, it all seems to fit together.
That acoustic one about being sober, that'd be ‘Mr Blue Sky’, which is a great indie pop song – though no relation to the ELO track of the same name, right?
‘Mr Blue Sky’ was a working title, because if I'm writing on acoustic guitar, I just played chords and sing whatever comes to my head, and I kept singing, ‘Mr Blue Sky’. I was writing it in the house and my daughter was singing along with me every time I said, ‘Mr Blue Sky’. I was going to change it, but everybody's like, you’ve just got to do it. And it’s got Phil Thornalley from The Cure on lead guitar, which blows my mind, really. He's the one who co-wrote [Natalie Imbruglia’s] ‘Torn’. He produced Pornography by The Cure.
He also played the bass line on ‘Love Cats’ didn’t he – just how good is your book of contacts! How that you get him on the record?
The Phil Thornalley one is really random. Me and him were both guests on a mental health podcast during lockdown. I was there talking about the benefits of running and listening to music, and he was talking about his life as a producer, as a songwriter. And he said, ‘I remember you running for Great Britain’. So me and him just went off on a tangent in the middle of this podcast, talking about his love of running. And then when the call finished, we kept in touch.
So, me and Tom, who I recorded the album with, we were listening back to ‘Mr Blue Sky’ in the studio, and he said, ‘This really reminds me of The Cure’. And I was like, ‘This is pretty mad, but I've actually got Phil Thornalley from The Cure’s phone number’. And a couple of weeks later, we had him recording guitars on it, and it just totally transformed that song. His guitar lines are amazing. It was a master class for us, really, because what he did seems so simple, but then when we put it with the song [it was like], ‘This is how The Cure do it’.
Listening to the album, it feels like the lyrics are really open, that you're not trying to hide. There's a bit of humour, but not to the point where you’re hiding behind it. Is there a particular song on the album that means the most to you?
It's probably ‘Hum Hotline’, the penultimate one. I can't listen to that song without feeling super emotional. I wrote that during quite a tough period in my life. It was the last song to be finished for the album. And I knew it had to be about something big, because the song itself is so big.
Then I was chatting to Joe from Big Special about that song, and I sent him an instrumental to it, and I said, ‘Look, I'm really trying to write a song that feels like you've had your final party, and it's time to kind of face up to all the all the stupid things you've done as a drunk person or wherever’. And he wrote that first verse, so me and him went to studio - he did that verse and then I took it away, and then I thought about what, what I could add for my verse. For me, it feels like the moment on the album where you realise that it's time to move forward, even though it's a really ferocious song
In terms of the story of the album, for me, that's the bit where you realise the most important thing in the world - your kids for me. So, the album starts on voices, like trying to look for a bit of fame, trying to make some money, then you end with just like, ‘Do I know I've got everything I need?’. I got two children, and then my son finishes the last song on the album for me.
Going back to Running Punks, clearly that had a big impact on the music community and the running community over lockdown and is still going strong today. Were you surprised by the support it had or did you always think you could bring music and running together?
It really surprised me because I just thought not many people who like the music that I do would be into running. So it was amazing to discover there's loads of people who like obscure music and love to run as well. Running Punks has been really good because I did need a bunch of people who were supportive, a community really, for me to get away from drinking so much and the things in my lifestyle I didn't like. I needed the responsibility of this community.
I wanted to do videos to inspire them to run, so I needed that. But I think the most important thing for me was the running reviews – in the space of two years, I ran and reviewed so many albums, that I really felt like I started to understand what makes a good album. It was almost like doing an apprenticeship in albums. People were sending me stuff to do, so I was running to stuff I'd never usually listen to and being exposed to all different types of music and working out how different types of albums worked.
Then, a couple of years later, I was thinking I could put some of this into practice and make an album of my own and the Running Punks community have been really, really vocal about looking forward to hearing it, which is really nice.
Finally, can you tell me if you see any similarities between the punk community and your running community.
One of the reasons we called the running community Running Punks is because I noticed that lots of people got really angry about the fact that they didn't run their best every single day. My way of explaining it to people was, ‘When I played guitar in Future Of The Left or any punk band, every venue you played in sounded different. So, you adjust whatever you're doing so it suits the sound of the room you play in it. Running should be like that, but rather than thinking about the room, you should just think about your own body’.
For me, that was the punk ethos – adapting to wherever situation you find yourself in. Like, that seems really punk to me, and that's definitely something that went through the making of this album. Like ‘Mr Blue Sky’ – the acoustic guitar was found in the hallway in the studio, like a really old, broken acoustic guitar, but it sounded good. ‘Déjà Vu’ was written on a guitar with only four strings - it was constantly just adapting to what we had around us in the studio. So, for me, that's the punk way.
• Joyce’s debut album Voyce will be released Friday 13 September, 2024 (pre-order it here) and you can follow Jimmy on Instagram here and here, on YouTube, and on Facebook