By Anna Battista
“Joni’s Garden” is the first release by Neon Tetra, a small Glasgow based record company, “A friend of mine used to sing in the Cosmic Rough Riders and runs this label,” Jim explains, “He always said to me ‘If I get enough money, I’d love to put your album out’ and he actually did, so fair play to him.”
The cover for the Green Peppers’ album features a spot of land with a caravan in the distance, the blue and green colours highlight the drawing courtesy of Alan Hutchison, “Alan and I went through lots of ideas for the cover,“ Jim remembers, while we look at the album sleeve, “I definitely wanted to have a caravan on it, but at the beginning we thought we were going to have a photograph on the cover. We then realised it was going to be too expensive because of the copyright. So we thought we would design the sleeve ourselves. The caravan gives me a wee sense of going home to a bit of warmth, it looks kind of cosy, you feel the sun is going down, you’re sitting there, playing and being creative.”
Up to now, Jim received pretty good reviews, among the others that reviewed positively “Joni’s Garden” there are also music magazine Uncut and newspaper The Independent, “I think I’m quite happy with the response the album got,” Jim claims, “Mark Radcliffe has been playing it on Radio 2, so I can’t complain. I have a very small budget to promote it, so I have to grab with both hands anything that comes.”
Singer and songwriter Isobel Campbell contributed to “Joni’s Garden” by backing vocals on a few tracks and singing two songs penned by Jim, “The Dreamer” and “Blink of an Eye”, the latter has recently been picked by producer Youth to appear on his forthcoming compilation album. “After I wrote the song ‘Blink of an Eye’ I let Sushil K Dade hear a demo version of it,” Jim says, “He thought the song would have sounded great with a female singer and I agreed, but I didn’t know anybody who could do it. He knows Isobel quite well, so he said he would ask her for me. He did and Isobel and I ended up working together: she sang on my album and I recorded the guitar on her album. It was a good exchange of talents.”
One of the latest gigs by the Green Peppers was at Glasgow’s Brel Bar, at the beginning of December. Though sometimes Jim is joined on stage by Alan Hutchison during gigs, he mostly plays alone, “I don’t like to play with other musicians without being able to afford to pay them,” he explains, “so, right now, I keep it down, but I do want to go out with a band like a drummer and a piano player. I’ve only been playing gigs for a year and a half, I only did around 20 gigs up to now. It’s kind of scary playing live alone, because you can’t turn around and blame the drummer because there’s no drummer there, so if something goes wrong it’s all my fault! Playing gigs has been very liberating, because I’ve always been playing for somebody else, now this is my turn under the spotlight and I’m really enjoying it, I think it’s great!” he exclaims, “I still haven’t played that much outside Glasgow, but it would be nice to do it more often and get a real reaction now and again, since here you always bump into your cousins and sisters at gigs! I definitely want to do more gigs to promote this album. I’d like to get more contacts in places like Japan and America, stuff like that, and it will hopefully happen, perhaps by word of mouth.”