Interview by ANDREW DARLINGTON
The Seven Dials album is a flow of velvet words that pour like sweat across our uncivilised world.
Located in London’s West End, Seven Dials is a place that – back in the eighteenth-century, was one of the city’s roughest, most notorious slums, packed with gin-soaked chaos, crime, and desperate ambition. In the Jon Allen song it gets poeticised into a place to hide, ‘dressed in threads of silk and linen,’ where he’s lying in the gutter staring at the stars, with the shattered lights of Soho carried on tasteful strings.
With this album, Jon Allen has written himself into the iconography of London just as surely as the Kinks ‘Waterloo Sunset’ (or Muswell Hillbillies), Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’, Donovan’s ‘Sunny Goodge Street’, or Jimi Hendrix’ ‘Angel’ – which is a tube station on the Northern Line, right? ‘Thanks, I’ll take that, thank you very much’ he smiles. ‘It’s interesting because… a lot of the things that happen with people who do Rock ‘n’ Roll music – or whatever you call this kind of genre of music, Rock music, obviously we’re always looking over the Atlantic to America. A lot of the time American highways sound great in songs, you know what I mean? ‘Route 66’? ‘Ventura Boulevard’? ‘the New Jersey Turnpike?’ ‘Beale Street?’ What is great about bands like the Kinks is that they took something quintessentially English, and they brought something English to it. I thought it would be really nice to do something that was English even though my music has an American influence. I wanted to do something that was uniquely British, English and London. So, yes – it was nice to do that.’
But first, ‘I’m having some tech-idiot issues here’ Jon invisibly protests beyond the Zoom! screen. ‘Hold on a second, I’m on the app, you see.’ Then he’s there, onscreen, in heavy black spectacles and salt-&-pepper beard. He’s sitting in his kitchen, a Delonghi coffee-pod machine and plate-rack behind him. The window looks out over his garden with a white stepladder propped up against a tree. ‘Yes, I’m here in Ally-Pally (Alexandra Palace, adjacent to Muswell Hill), up in north-London – so again, some altitude up here.’ He indicates altitude with his hand.
He must be very pleased with new album, Seven Dials. ‘Yes, I am, I am. I like it’ he admits simply, lifting a banded cup of fresh coffee to his mouth and sipping. ‘I’m really excited about the record. I can’t wait to get out on the road to play it, as well, for people to hear it.’
So, hopefully expanding the commentary, with this album, Jon not only weaves a dark Dickensian vision of London, but it’s one that shows how those aspects are not time-locked in the past, but persist into now, as an ongoing continuity. ‘Well, yeah.’ He’s warming to the subject. ‘I took a trip to this place called the Bow Street Museum in Covent Garden, and I went into the cells. It actually used to be the Magistrates Court where they used to try the malefactors back in eighteenth-century London, and it was the place where the Bow Street Runners – who were the first professional Police Force, actually started from, trying to catch miscreants. London was a very crazy place back then, it was a very busy overcrowded place. A kind-of melting pot where all kinds of different people were coming together, rich people, poor people, artists, politicians, pickpockets, revolutionaries, everything. So, my mind started travelling to those places, and – I just thought it would be interesting to do something that was character-based and had a narrative around London. It felt like a really appropriate place to put the album. I felt like on this record I could draw things from now, and from the past.’
Like an anthology of short stories? ‘Yes, yeah. It was a chance for me to kinda write what I wanted to write, but in the context of some characters from that time, and it gave me a really good structure. It gave me a nice depth to the writing I was doing. I always think about things like – I remember, I heard ‘I Loves You Porgy’, you know, that song from a George Gershwin musical called Porgy And Bess – and I knew nothing about the characters, I just knew that song. But it has this depth because there’s an awareness of the story behind and around it. And I love the fact that although you can’t really understand a huge amount, you can feel and sense there’s a depth behind what you’re hearing.’
In ‘Nine Lives’ the crawling Blues rhythms pulse as hard times lead to the Newgate Prison hanging tree. The lyric speaks of a ‘John Wild’ who ‘loves making money,’ ‘Owen Woods’ to whom the protagonist was apprenticed, and the ‘Hayes Tavern’. Are these real people and places? ‘This is actually…’ he begins. Then switches direction. ‘I was looking at the story of a guy called Jack Shepherd, who was a sort of legendary eighteenth-century outlaw. He was a little guy who started out as an apprentice carpenter but ended by becoming a really accomplished thief. He was very good at stealing, but he was also very good at getting caught. He had all the vices… he would always end up at the same tavern, where he always got apprehended. He fell in with a woman of ill-repute, a woman of the night called Bessie, who betrayed him. But he was also a brilliant escapist. He escaped from prison four or five times! He sort-of became a folklore hero, a character that the people loved. I did a bit of reading about this Jack Shepherd character. So… he was just one of the characters that I leaned on for that particular song. He did come to a sticky end eventually…’
At the Newgate Hanging Tree? ‘Exactly. They caught up with him, but by then he’d became a kind of heroic figure. I mean – as he went through the streets of London on his way to his execution there were crowds, and he was cheered, and he maintained a good humour right through to the end. So yeah – if you want to do a bit of research, he’s an interesting character to read about!’
Jon owns up to having a magpie’s one-track mind. The song ‘White Gold’ is also a slice of history, a song inspired by the illegal trade of sugar in the eighteenth-century London docklands, with sharp shards of guitar to disrupt the hypnotic mood. It’s a song about temptation or desire, like a junkie analogy for sweet addiction and high stakes living. ‘I heard about this eighteenth-century trade in sugar, sugar was a prized commodity that was incredibly expensive, so it used to be stolen and it used to be traded. I googled ‘what did people call it?’ – and it was just like a lightbulb went off in my head…’ he gestures an explosion with his hands, ‘when they said it was called ‘White Gold’. I just thought that’s a great title for a song. Sugar in this country doesn’t exactly have a sweet history’ he points out, ‘these are dark stories that were fuelling our sweet tooth. And – obviously, it had all these other connotations as well, about illegal substances, y’know, the idea spun off in all kinds of directions, and it just felt like a great notion for a song. So – yes, that was the initial spark for the idea.’ In the Judge Dredd future, sugar is also a banned substance.
But the song is also a metaphor for the drugs trade. ‘Well – yeah, it’s also kind-of just temptation, something you can’t get enough of – that kind of thing, and obviously London, then as now, there’s plenty of that!’
Until the track ‘The Dealer’ strips away the figurative ‘White Gold’ symbolism into a more weary nakedness, the pretty acoustic guitar contrasting the ‘tired of dying for a living, tired of living on repeat’ lyric, in a place where there are ‘too many ghosts in this city.’ ‘Yes, ‘The Dealer’. I mean – I’m trying to think about the lyrical thought behind that! I think, for that song – ‘how do I thread this needle?’, I don’t know…’ he thumbs his glasses contemplatively further up his nose. ‘I don’t know, I suppose that one is a bit philosophical, about the path we take in life, the decisions that we make, and the fact that – y’know, we often live with a stacked deck, depending on which side of the road we grow up on. Whether we grow up with wealth or privilege or luck in our family.’ His chin rests thoughtfully on his fist. ‘So, it was kind-of from the point of view – again, of one of those criminal characters who starts out on the wrong side of the track… and couldn’t get out of it. He couldn’t get out of the gutter. Couldn’t get to a better life. But yes, that one had a bit of philosophical ideas on it as well.’
And while Jon admits to struggling to ‘think about the lyrical thought behind that’, it prompts the question, has that ever happened on stage, has he ever forgotten his lyrics during a performance? ‘Unfortunately, yes, it has happened on stage. Funnily enough, one of the worse times it ever happened was during the song ‘Last Orders’, because it is a story with no repeated words. It was the last song of the gig, and there’s a line in the last verse that I literally couldn’t remember, so I was completely like a robot that had blown a chip. I got through, and tried to endear myself to the audience, but it was an excruciating moment. So yes, I’ve been learning, I’ve been learning my lines this time…’
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He was born Jonathon Allen, 12 May 1977 in Winchester. At the age of six, his family relocated to Totnes, South Devon, where he spent his remaining childhood years, enduring piano lessons and singing in a choir. He started playing drums in school jam sessions, and wrote his first song aged sixteen. Later he moved to London, where he played support spots for Damien Rice, KT Tunstall, Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris, and Jose Gonzalez among others.
And he’s been prolific, releasing an album of new songs roughly every two years, since Dead Man’s Suit in 2009. ‘Well, yes’ he concedes warily. ‘I’ve also done quite a bit of staring out of windows in Coffee Shops. I guess I like writing. I feel – I dunno, I consider it a good day when I’ve had a day of writing, even if I don’t get anything completed. But yes, it’s great to be able to say I’ve made seven albums – hahaha – plus a load of extras that I’ve done as well. Yes, it’s a good feeling, I guess. But I also feel – now more than ever, that I’ve got to keep my foot on the pedal, and keep going with it.’
Are there failed songs that don’t survive onto the albums? Does he make notes towards songs, and some of them work out and some of them don’t? ‘I do. Back in the day it would obviously be just scribbled on notepads, but – as I’m talking to you now, I’ve got the notes-app going so I’ve always got my iPhone with a load of… sometimes it might be a title that comes to me. A lot of times I hear things, it can be an expression, it can be a phrase. There was a song from my previous album called ‘Above The Noise’, where I heard someone talking on a video just saying they were trying to get above the noise, and I thought ‘that’s a great title for something.’ So sometimes it can be just part of a conversation. And yeah – you’ve just got to be ready to grab them when they come to you…’ he makes a grabbing gesture, plucking ideas out of the air.
‘Going Home’, a track from his debut Dead Man’s Suit album, was picked to soundtrack an ‘off on a road trip’ TV-ad for Land Rover. ‘I’m still waiting on Land Rover to supply me with my sponsored vehicle for this song’ he complains jokily. How did that advert come about, was there an astute agent shopping Jon Allen songs around? ‘Well – the guy I was making the record with, he was connected to the business, and it was just one of those lucky coincidences that at the exact moment I was working with him they were looking for a quote-unquote ‘Nick Drake’-type song. So I had this song I was in the process of recording, and it was one of those synchronistic moments where I was working with somebody who had fingers in those pies. And yes – you just thank your lucky stars that those opportunities come along.’
A TV-slot is a way of reaching a wide audience. It’s surely ironic that the only no.1 hit that Clash ever enjoyed – ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’, came about through a TV-ad. While Jackie Wilson (‘Reet Petite’) and Nina Simone (‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’) both had their biggest UK chart hits through exposure as part of TV-advertising campaigns. ‘Was that when they had the Levi’s advert? Was that the one?’ he queries. ‘Obviously the media keeps changing so rapidly, doesn’t it? And for me – I remember those Levi’s adverts, they were big weren’t they, culturally, those sort of things were huge moments. I was lucky in that the particular advert I was a part of came when it did, at a point where TV audiences were still watching a lot of mainstream television. That ad was on all over the world. So yes, in that way it’s kinda harder and harder to get those connections. But I’m just glad that I was able to do it.’
There’s a wealth of talented people out there in the Indie or alternative zone, making and uploading their songs. The conundrum is how to break through into the wider world beyond. ‘You, me and everybody’ he laughs. ‘I even heard a major label rep saying ‘we don’t know how to break acts anymore.’ Generally speaking, even those big big companies, they wait until you’ve already reached this point where you’ve got all your Social Media and you’ve got all your streaming platforms at a certain level, and then – OK, we can amplify that, we can take it to the next point. But it’s… you know, I’m not one of those negative people… I’m an optimist, I’m an optimist about music, I’m an optimist about the fact that people need music, and they need art, and they crave art, and they crave music, and they do go the extra mile for things. People will get in their cars and they will make the effort to go to gigs. It’s just the way the industry is changing so quickly, that we’re all struggling to figure it out, you know?, and to find the audience again, and to connect with them. But I do think that we’ll find a way. We have to be careful that we don’t blame the consumer for the fact that they’re consuming music differently. We just have to try and adapt.’
Going back to the beginning, did Jon have a favourite venue when he was starting out? ‘I had a venue in south London – there’s a place called ‘The Bedford’ which is a Pub, but it’s kind-of a grand pub with a theatre in it. That was a place that I pretty-much stumbled across when I first got to London. And yeah, that’s kind-of a spiritual home for me, that was a place that’s been very good to me over the years. So that was a very nice place for me to get my start in London. They do great things down there. Including the ‘Banana Cabaret’ comedy nights. If you’re ever in that part of town, go check out the music there. It’s Balham SW12 9HD, in deepest darkest Balham, all the way down the Northern Line.’
Jon was presumably working solo when he started out. He’s since performed his own headlining shows across Europe, performing on stage with his band, the Luna Kings. ‘Yes, I actually met a lot of musicians during those early years. But funnily enough the band I have now are the band I was at college with. They were my compatriots in a college band. So it’s really great to actually be with them again, with the ego’s a little bit less heavy than we were when we were in our twenties. And yeah – the band is really great. Amazing musicians. We’ve got a guitar-player called Randell Breneman, he’s from Chicago, and he’s just a phenomenon, he’s such a great guitar-player and a great performer. So I can’t recommend the band highly enough. They are really really great.’
Working with a live band is different to working solo, it’s more of an interactive thing, more of a conversation. ‘It is. A lot of the time people say that I’m better with the band, that maybe my music breathes more, or there’s something about the live experience that works. The great thing about a live gig is that you can do something slightly different, you can let the guitar-player go off and improvise somewhere so that it’s different every single night. Earlier we were talking about the music business, but if you can connect with the audience and you can pull people into a venue, that’s THE most important thing to be able to achieve.’ Working solo it’s you against the world; as part of a band the gang-ethos takes over. ‘Yes Exactly. I do think that both things have something unique to offer. There are advantages to both things. There’s an intimacy when you’re on your own with just a piano or just an acoustic guitar, but often there’s a limit to it as well, certainly for an hour or two hours, there’s a limit to how much you can get across with one instrument. It’s great to be able to have a groove, great to have – it’s almost like having more gears, you know what I mean? Like you say, there’s a camaraderie, there’s that kind of energy that you can get with a band which is very hard to – even though I do my best to make my guitar do the bass, and hit the acoustic to make it like the snare drum…’ he plays air guitar, ‘but it’s very hard to fake it, y’know, unless you’ve got a band!’
There’s a trace of Bob Dylan in ‘Last Orders’ which Jon performed as part of a Glastonbury clip, with Mark Radcliffe and Jo Wiley paying close attention. ‘You’ve been doing some deep-diving on me, I can see that’ he laughs. ‘Yes – ‘Hold The Front Page’, there’s some Dylan in a lot of us. As a teenager I was introduced to his music, and for me he’s one of the greats. So that’s probably in the DNA to some extent, of what I’ve done through the years. Personally – for this album, there’s a bit more of a Classic Rock vibe. I’m sort-of leaning a bit less on the folkier side for this particular record, for Seven Dials, but yeah, there’s always been a huge love for what Dylan does.’
The album’s opening track ‘The Shadow’ is almost funereally slow-paced, with piano, weary late-night ‘trouble gon find me.’ The video, like a devil barefoot creeping, cruises London alleys, past ‘The Coach’ hostelry, along Great Ormond Street, to ‘The Duke’ on Roger Street. The track closes with an extended Blues-mournful guitar solo. On ‘The Glass Moon’ there’s fiddle, even though he confesses ‘maybe I’m a little jaded, maybe my song is out of tune’…, but no, it’s in perfect tune. Then ‘Down With The Tide’ is a rage against the dying of the light. When he says ‘this song and dance don’t last long’ he’s referring to the brevity of life itself, and in ‘ain’t going down with the tide,’ the tide is death. A cutting guitar break takes the track to a close.
‘Midnight Oil’ is populated by lowlife picaresques, to a cooing ‘knock knock knocking on heaven’s door’ backing voices. In the song, he and his friend Tommy are enjoying life’s transient pleasures in the bar. ‘Time’ says that love makes him forget the shadows in his dreams. The drunken strings of ‘Crooked Sky’ illustrate ‘crooked streets under a crooked sky’ where everyone he meets is looking for an alibi. ‘Bow Street Runners’ is a Chuck Berry word-tumble running on empty.
Does Jon Allen have ‘a magpie’s one-track mind’? ‘I remember – I think it was the presenter and writer Richard Osman who said there’s no such thing as originality. It’s just being able to find the right bits to combine, like a chef, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, throw some spice in – how do you cook it? That’s the trick, getting the right combination of influences so that you can create something that is… y’know, tasty.’
And the Seven Dials album is a flow of velvet words that pour like sweat across our uncivilised world.
.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
DEAD MAN’S SUIT (June 2009, Monologue Records NURTURECD1)
produced by Tristan Longworth,
the title-song is a macabre soul-jazz horror story, the album also
includes ‘Going Home’ which featured in the Land Rover TV-ad,
and the McCartney-style ‘Young Man’s Blues’.
SWEET DEFEAT (May 2011, Monologue Records MONOLGCD1)
the title-song is featured in the 2013 Fox sit-com ‘The Goodwin Games’, the album also
includes the single ‘No One Gets Out Of Here Alive’, ‘Love’s Made A Fool Out Of Me’, and early-Dylanesque ‘Last Orders’ which Jon performed at Glastonbury, and includes Elvis Presley ‘The King’ Love Me Tender references.
DEEP RIVER (July 2014, OK Good Records 90129-2)
all eleven tracks written and produced by Jon Allen,
includes ‘Night And Day’, ‘Lady Of The Water’, ‘Hummingbird Blues’ and ‘Fire In My Heart’.
BLUE FLAME (May 2018, Monologue Records MONOLGLP8/ US OK! Good Records)
includes ‘Jonah’s Whale’, ‘It’s Just The End Of The World’, ‘If You Change Your Mind’ and ‘Tightrope’.
…MEANWHILE (May 2021, Monologue MONOLGCD9, V2 Records)
includes ‘Blame It All On Me’, ‘Can’t Hold Back The Sun’, ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Western Shore’.
A HEIGHTENED SENSE OF EVERYTHING (August 2023, Monologue Records, V2 Records)
includes ‘Heat Of The Moment’, ‘Old Friends’, ‘Paranoia Blues’ and ‘Back To The River’.
SEVEN DIALS (May 2025, V2 Records)
1. ‘The Shadow’ 4:00
2. ‘Seven Dials’ 3:46
3. ‘White Gold’ 4:18
4. ‘The Glass Moon’ 3:34
5. ‘Down With The Tide’ 5:39
6. ‘Midnight Oil’ 3:34
7. ‘Nine Lives’ 3:26
8. ‘Time’ 3:32
9. ‘Crooked Sky’ 3:22
10. ‘Bow Street Runners’ 3:10
11. ‘The Dealer’ 3:23