Green is the colour of grass; green is the colour of leaves in spring; green is the colour of balance and harmony, at least people who believe in colour therapy say so. Green is also the colour that characterises Jim McCulloch’s solo project, the Green Peppers. McCulloch’s name is not new to fans of Scottish bands: he was in the Soup Dragons, had a spell in BMX Bandits and later in Superstar with Joe McAlinden, Alan Hutchison and Quentin McAfee. “All the bands I was in were different,” Jim says while we’re sitting in a café just a few steps away from Byres Road, in Glasgow’s West End, “in the Soup Dragons, we were all very young and we all learnt as we went along; in BMX Bandits we started sharing record collections and passing albums around and exchanged all these information we had. At the time I hadn’t really heard the Velvet Underground and they hadn’t heard the Beach Boys, so I would let them listen to records, and they would let me listen to other records. It was very organic and it was good. Superstar was a bit more expressive, there was more room in this band to express yourself. I think that all these past experiences helped me working on the Green Peppers’ debut album. It was while being in other bands that I learnt how to build songs and create atmospheres.”

The recently released Green Peppers’ album, “Joni’s Garden” (Neon Tetra), is a mish-mash of genres: there is a bit of pop (“Time Machine”), a bit of pastoralism (“The Sun and Moon and Stars”), a bit of bossa nova (“The Dreamer”), a bit of acoustic guitar music (“If I Gave It All Away”). Jim, who debuted with his band this summer when the Green Peppers’ track “I Get It!” came out on the compilation “Ave Marina” (Marina Records, 2004), wrote the album over a period of 18 months, “When Superstar split, I decided that I wanted to take a break for a while,“ Jim recounts, “Joe McAlinden started writing his own album after the band finished and for a while I worked on that and played the guitar for him. But then I asked myself ‘What do I want to do: do I want to just play or do I actually want to write music?’ It was then that I decided I wanted to go for it myself and to see what happened. I started playing the guitar again in the house and singing songs. I set myself challenges like trying to write two or three songs and see how they sounded like. All of a sudden I had quite a few songs, so I decided to do an album. I hadn’t really written many lyrics before, but I think you have to try to give folk something more rather than just words. I don’t think many people give lyrics enough thought. I listen to ‘Joni’s Garden’ all the time and I still can’t believe I managed to do it. I think my favourite song on the album is ‘Green’ because it’s just a wee story, it’s about me and a Harley Davidson who cut me up while I was cycling to work one morning. ‘Green’ is the song that gave me the idea to call the band the Green Peppers. I love the feeling of that song, I love playing the clarinet on it. It’s almost a bizarre song.”

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