Punks Jump Up are in Australia at the moment embarking on their first tour for music and their second for pleasure. I was lucky enough to get Dave out of bed to have a chat about what they’ve been working on, their fusion of fashion and music and what they’re plotting this time around.

So I see Punks Jump Up on the road a lot of the time and now you’re coming to Australia. How do you get time to make new music, remix other artists, run Cassette Records and do the fashion side?

Ha! Well we don’t have time for it all. Cassette Records unfortunately is dormant. We’ve changed it around so we put our music out through other peoples labels. Now we’re not bound by our time on that business side of things. We also suffered when a lot of the vinyl distributors in the UK crashed a couple of years ago – our distributor was one of them. In the end we had to decide what to concentrate on so it’s producing, remixing and our fashion label.

We took some time off over December and January playing only a couple of gigs. You get a good flow going the more time you have, having to go to Europe for a few days breaks that up and makes it more difficult.

So what’s going to be the next release?

Well we’ve written a bunch of songs and now it’s about shaping them up and cutting them out. We’re hoping to put out a few Kitsune singles.

For the album we’re working with some really cool people, vocalists, who unfortunately I can’t really talk about. At the moment it’s all about conversations with friends who’ve agreed to it but we haven’t had the lawyers in there yet. But let’s just say they’re some of the people we dreamed about working with! And they’re big!

I guess we can announce that we’ve got Joel from Shitdisco on a couple of the tracks.

We’d have loved to do a track with Lykke Li [after the remix of Breaking It Up] but she’s on tour all the time now and there just isn’t any time.

We’re also hoping to work with [fellow Kitsune label mate] Beni while we’re in town, we’ll definitely find some time to work together with him.

How do these colaborations come together? Is it just through the music scene or is it a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes?

Well we’ve been running a club night in London which is a good start but whenever we’ve wanted to work with someone we’ve just sent them an email or myspace and got in touch that way. Or with Zongamin we know him because he did a remix on Cassette Records and so we’ve kept in touch. He’s quite close to finishing the album, we heard one of the tracks [unreleased] and got back in touch to get the stems and get cracking.

It would be great to have a label or a manager involved but financially… The machinery the big label has got makes it hard, we love to do it like this. You get to know the people more and their is that respect for DIY. We started our own club night, we did the label, we used to run a punk fanzine – you just get out there and do these things.

Punks Jump Up play La Di Da tonight, Friday the 20th of March (mention Electrorash for cheap entry), Saturday night at Empire in Brisbane and next weekend in Perth and Sydney. Do get a feel for their set check out this promo mixtape for the Australian tour and keep an eye out for the album towards the end of the year.

Punks Jump Up – Australian Tour Mixtape

xox
ned