I first became aware of Spygenius in 2020, with their album Man On The Sea a delightful double album that introduced me to a wonderful band. Then it was Blow Your Covers in 2021, an album I really like, and now Jobbernowl which is more subtle psychedelic rock, but with an edge and a lot going on below the surface, which is something I like a lot.

Peter Watts, the lead singer and songwriter in the band, was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

Andrea Weiss: I like your sense of whimsy and irony in your lyrics. Do you always write that way?

Peter Watts: Speaking for myself, yes, I suppose I do, at least in as much as I think life is like that. Loads of stuff all floating about at the same time. It’s good to write about what you know, so my lyrics are almost always notes to self – if there’s something bothering me, a thought or a question or an experience or a worry or a feeling, I’ll try to work out what to do with it through composing a lyric. But a lyric isn’t a treatise, you know, it’s not about coming up with a final philosophically cogent and legally binding point of view on an issue, it’s an opportunity to open things up, to explore the different ways that you might approach something, whatever it may be… and it’s not just a matter of what the words mean, but also how they resonate, what they evoke, how they feel to say or sing, their rhythm, what they don’t mean but might mean, what they remind you of and so on. I know irony gets a bad press sometimes but I think it can be really useful for expressing an openness to more than one point of view, to the contradictions and absurdities of existence (ha ha!) – it’s like “I think I know I mean ah yes but it’s all wrong” versus “Gimme some truth,”  and I’m firmly rooted in "Strawberry Fields." Nothing wrong with a bit of uncertainty, I reckon, because it makes spaces for the listener, makes the lyric less of a declamation and more of an unfinished conversation between singer and listener.

AW: Do you have any influences you want to note?

PW: A is for Absurdism! B is for Beatles and Byrds, Bonzos and Buffalos (Springfield), Beach Boys and beach balls and "beach baby, beach baby give me your hand give me something that I can remember." C is for Croydon and Claptrap the Venue (Stourbridge, England)… and Covid… which reminds me, I once caught a virus and had a fever so high that it altered my consciousness more or less forever, which might explain why I write lyrics the way I do, so I suppose you could say that I was influenced by influenza?

AW: I hear a lot of Robyn Hitchcock in your music. Is he an inspiration for you?

PW: I got quite heavily into his music when I was younger, but I think as much as anything that was because I was delighted to find someone whose general orientation to things seemed somewhat aligned to mine… a fellow traveler, if you will, albeit a much more successful one. More a case of convergent evolution than anything -  like two crabs. See what I did there? We’ve met him a couple of times and had some nice chats, about leaves and the order of the universe and stuff like that, but he never remembers us the next time we meet. Perhaps we’re just one of his hallucinations? That would explain a lot.

AW: Your lyrics are dreamy, but the music lends gravity that grounds everything in reality, which is great. Is that balance your intention?

PW: We rock! I always think that ideally a song should form a sympathetic dialogue between the music and the lyric, so the music has to have as much character as the words do. You know, the tunes have to be good enough so that if Herb Alpert decides to do a Tijuana Brass instrumental album of Spygenius’s greatest hits, they’ll stand up. Herb Alpert Presents Spygenius 65! And catchy melodies are great. You can get away with all kinds of outrageous lyrical stuff if you’ve got a catchy tune and good beat.

AW: Man on the Sea, your album from 2020, was a concept album. Does your new album have a concept as well?

PW: We told everyone that ‘Pacéphale (the album before Man on the Sea) was a concept album, except we created the thing the wrong way around – we didn’t come up with a concept and then write appropriate songs, we had a bunch of songs and invented a story ex post facto to tie them together, and then everyone sort of expected and assumed that Man on the Sea was a concept album too, although I don’t think we ever meant it to be. It sort of became one because that’s what other people heard in it. I suppose the title sounds quite concepty, but it’s actually pinched from a children’s book. Jobbernowl isn’t explicitly a concept album, although there are some presiding themes – truth, belief, loss, self-deceit, other-deceit, making the absolute most of every fleeting moment you have on this earth, universal love, Apollo and Dionysus walking side by side, the irresolvable tension between darkness and light that makes existence delicious, all the usual Spygenius hokum… and not a few painful puns.

AW: Are there any bands or solo artists that people should pay attention to, especially if they figured in the making the album?

PW: Anyone and everyone on Big Stir Records!

AW: How did the pandemic affect your music?

PW: At a practical level we couldn’t get together to play for about a year. This is why we followed up Man On The Sea with Blow Their Covers, which was mostly recorded remotely. We didn’t want to work on new original material when we couldn’t meet to jam the songs through and develop the arrangements together, but we needed to do something to keep us musically connected. It came out OK. More existentially, 2020 was a pretty grim time in Casa Spygenius – we lost a lot of folks we loved, some directly due to the pandemic, some indirectly due to the pandemic, some just through bad luck. That whole experience is infused through Jobbernowl. D is for Death. E is for Emotional Exhaustion. F is for FFS. G is for OMG. H is for Hospitals. I is for Incomprehension. J is for Jobbernowl…

AW: Do you have any plans to tour the US?

PW: If everything goes according to plan most of us will be in California in August. We’ll be playing the International Pop Overthrow festival in San Francisco and are hoping to get some other dates set up, too. Watch this space!