Taken from rock-city.co.uk

Claire Dyer interviews Neds' Jonn and Alex at The Longest Day festival 2001.

Your little outings doing these gigs, is it just a reunion or are you reforming?

Jonn: It’s a reunion.

Wrong answer! Are there no plans to get back together then?

Jonn: The beauty of doing this is that it’s fun and here’s no pressure of any kind. We’re doing this because we can and because people ask us to. And that’s why it’s fun. Speaking for myself personally I wouldn’t really want the pressure of wanting to please peoples musical tastes at this point.

People would have such high expectations.

Alex: I think we’ve learned never to say never from the irony of last years statement “one more no more” and then here we are. So it’s like a farewell tour of Status Quo style.

What made you decide to reunite?

Jonn: It all came from last year, there’s a local club by us called JB’s , which is one of the longest standing clubs and they were celebrating 30 years of being together and we’ve known the guy who runs it since the year dot and he’s helped us out a lot and he just said “Any chance you could do a one off quick reformation fo me for my party?” so I said I’ll give it a go and see if anyone else is up for it, and I talked Alex and Dan into it and we thought well it wouldn’t matter it wouldn’t hurt and we hadn’t done our last Neds gig in this country, we did the last one in America. So we did that and lo and behold 5000 people turned up.

Is the gig your next gig in London your last one?

Jonn: Well we’re going to do a show in New York and then we’re going to do a couple of hometown shows in Dudley and then we’re finishing up at the Astoria at the end of September.

How easy was it getting back into doing the band after so long out? Could you remember the songs?

Alex: Yeah it was pretty easy after a bit. It was just funny really, the whole thing was really quite funny the way it’s worked out.

Jonn: I think at times you’re stepping back and look at yourself as a bit of a characature of yourself. It’s weird because it has been a decent amount of time so it’s funny but it is like riding bike.

Alex: And I think as you get older as well your musical eras change so much and have developed so much and we’re playing songs that we wrote when we were 16 and rhythmically they’re all over he shop and it’s like “How did I play that?” especially with a bit of arthritis in the fingers cuz I’m nearly 30 now!

Jonn: It’s quite funny because the way we ended up sounding was because we didn’t know what we were doing!

Where did you see yourselves fitting into that whole late 80’/early 90’s indie scene?

Jonn: We just did what we did, we were moving around so much that I don’t think we tried to position ourselves in any way. I think we succeeded and failed equally in the fact that we did our own thing. We didn’t pay perhaps enough attention to the way things were moving, and the kinda t-shirts and shorts we were selling and that kind of stuff and the lack of image. But in the same respect it was healthy not to be paying too much attention so we would do our own thing.

Do you realise just how much trouble your fans got into for copying your haircuts?

Jonn: I used to apologise to parents in the street. They’d be walking down the street with little Jonny with his Ned cut and I’d apologise to his mom and say “I’m really sorry about that!”

What do you reckon to the Stuffies reunion?

Jonn: Kind of inevitable really.

I don’t know, when I last interviewed Miles he said that he hated being in The Wonder Stuff for the last 2 years.

Jonn: When bands split up it’s rare that anyone’s that diplomatic about it, you have strong feelings and that’s why a band will split up so I’m not surprised.

Why was it that you split up?

Jonn: Me and Alex couldn’t stop punching each other.

Alex: We’ve learnt to control it though! But any minute now it could kick off.

So what have you all been doing since the split?

Jonn: I had an aborted attempt of getting another band going and we did a little tour of England and America. We were called Groundswell but there wasn’t a lot of interest and the live scene’s pretty much dead over here so we jacked that in about a year ago and that’s pretty much exactly when the phone call came about the Neds thing, which is quite uncanny. And the thing was I had a list of reasons why we couldn’t get back together and the JB’s guy said “That’s alright because you can rehearse here, that’s alright because we’ll do this, that’s alright because we’ll do that” and then these had a load of reasons why we couldn’t do it and I’d go “That’s alright because we can do this…” and it got there in the end.

If you were starting out in a band today what kind of music do you think you’d make or who would you be influenced by?

Alex: I think that would be hard for any of us to say as when we were asked what our influences were they were all so totally different for each member of the band, and I think now probably even more so. We never listened to each others music at the time let alone now, it’s gone more extreme I think as the years have gone on.

Come September then after your last show, what will you do? Alex: I’m going to India, Tailand and Vietnam for 8 months to bum around.

Jonn: Four days later I go back to University. I’m doing Multi-Media Communication at Wolverhampton. I’ve finished my first year, I was teachers pet you know!

Claire Dyer