THE SHINING - SIMON JONES Continued from page 1 © 2002 PHASE9 ENTERTAINMENT

The Shining already have a distinctive sound with some tangible influences. Do you have a particular method of writing your material or is it all a bit random? Well it’s a bit random at the moment cos we’re still developing organically how we play. The exciting thing about this band is that you’ve got a bunch of good musicians with no real leaders as such and we’re just letting our sound grow naturally rather than saying “right, we wanna sound a bit like The Stooges mixed with Led Zeppelin”. We’ve just been continually jamming and recording and buzzing off it. Naturally buzzing? When writing material does drug use help or hinder you? It depends what drug it is man. I’ve done a lot of experimentation over the years but mainly I’m a smoker and get stoned a lot. Do you not ever find that getting stoned makes your material sound a lot better than it actually is? (Laughs) That’s why we record everything! Some of it will be complete bullshit. But there are certain drugs that are terrible for writing music; cocaine being the main one… it’s just so counterproductive. Did you think up many other band names before settling on The Shining? Oh yeah, we went through a couple of months trying to get a name. It’s hard because you think of a good one then you check this band name registry website and there’ll be a band in Portland, Oregon or somewhere that’s already got it. There are actually a couple of other bands called The Shining but they haven’t released anything yet so we won’t have to add another word to our name. That’s what happened to The Soft Parade didn’t it? That’s right. The Electric Soft Parade and that band Liberty X (laughs). But we even had trouble with The Verve years ago - we had to put a ‘the’ in front of it. Nowadays so many band names have gone now that it’s getting difficult to come up with something original. Who would you say is the best band you’ve played with before? The Verve. (Laughs). No, it would probably have to be Beck. He’s an amazing artist. What was your first ever job? Oh God, the first job I ever did was when I left school and got a job picking up litter off the side of a motorway to get some Christmas money. It wasn’t a career I really wanted to go into. What are you going to be doing for the rest of the year? We’ll be playing some festivals in the summer - Glastonbury and Reading - then we’re off to the States for a few gigs in July, then a festival in Germany. We’re just playing live as much as we can really to get some experience behind us - that’s all we wanna do. We’re only at the start of our career as The Shining. This is just the first chapter in our book. Hopefully it’ll be a long one. Thank you for talking to PHASE9. PHASE9 Album Review of The Shining - True Skies Back to music interviews

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