The new upcoming album from Beans on Toast, Giving Everything, is going to be “same old, same old. Sex, drugs and politics in the same three chords.”
I catch up with the self-proclaimed drunken folk singer – real name Jay – before his gig at Art Bar (formerly The Bullingdon), which he has had some experience of before, playing here as a teenager in a band back in 1999. He also mentions with clear fondness a tour he did with bands on barges sailing up the canals and eventually making it to Oxford.
He seems keen to correct some possible misconceptions. Songs like ‘The Price of Rice’, ‘Protest Song’ and ‘Dirty Paki’ have clear political themes, and Beans, somewhat predictably, took a particular dislike to George Bush while he was in power, but, he claims, “I’m still not interested in politics. I don’t shy away from people saying I’m a political songwriter, but I’m completely uneducated in it. I still have zero interest in what you might call political affairs. It depends on what level that is, whether it’s who’s in power and who’s not or the politics of which way a spliff goes round the room. I’m just here for the good times. Say what you see. I just sing about what I know. I’ve certainly never had an open interest in politics and I don’t think I ever will.”
He clearly takes a very humble approach to his songwriting, and recognizes that just because he’s written songs about things, “I’m not claiming I’m right in any of my opinions” and goes on to relate a story about a song called ‘The Great Big Fucking Hole’, in which he connected the hole in the ozone layer to global warming, only to be informed by several concerned fans that the two were actually completely unrelated and that the ozone layer had in fact been fixed. “But no one ever got thanked!” he insists. “We should’ve got together and celebrated that! A lot!” The purpose of this story, he explains, is to show that people shouldn’t take his songs too seriously. “I don’t take ‘em seriously!”
Giving Everything will keep things topical, covering topics from “Prince Harry, Glastonbury and fracking” to “the future of the music business”, and with Jay now in a committed relationship, there will be “less whimsical songs about getting laid and more love songs”.
Despite occasionally seeming to disapprove of elements of Britain’s drinking culture, Jay’s as much a fan of pubs as anyone else, if not more. He becomes introspective, searching his soul as he tells the story of how he “sent a text the other day saying ‘We’re in Wetherspoon’s if you want to come and join us’ before realizing he’d sent the same text to the same person about four or five times in the last week or so. If Beans on Toast stopped drinking, there would be no hope for the rest of us.
Later on during his set, Jay is his typical exuberant self, at one point summoning all the female members of the audience up on stage to dance with him, and spending the rest of the time roaming through the crowd with the microphone. A lot of his music sounds quite serious, but he clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously at all, and thinks you shouldn’t either.
