ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, FEB. 17, 2000
By Steve Newton
It’s high noon (or thereabouts) in Texas when Cliff Jones, who’s lounging in his band’s tour bus outside the Austin Music Hall, answers his cellphone. He’s playing there that night—if he makes it past sundown in one piece.
“I’ve never been to Texas before,” says the Englishman, “and I’m happy ’cause the sun is out—and I haven’t seen any cowboys yet. I don’t hope to run into many, either. I don’t think they’ll appreciate the Limey faggot look.”
Nope. I don’t reckon they would. And when they found out that Jones sings and plays guitar for a British quintet called Gay Dad, he’d be in a spot of trouble. Lord knows what would happen if one of ’em managed to come across a copy of the Gay Dad CD, Leisure Noise, and take a listen to the “neuwavediscorock” of the opening track, “Dim Star”. Those cowpokes just might ambush the foreigner and try to force him to ’fess up to something:
“Hey Jesse, getta load of this one! Hold on a second there, fancypants. Me an’ Jesse here wanna know something, and you best be tellin’ us the truth. You’re from that there rock band Gay Dad, ain’tcha? Well, what we wanna know is, with a name like that, are ya’ll really… I mean, are you the kind of men who… Well, dang-blast it. Are you guys really dads?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to take it literally,” Jones says about the moniker. “Or you can take it literally if you want, but… I mean, you don’t expect Radiohead to have aerials and tuning knobs on their heads, so why expect Gay Dad to be either gay or dads—or both. But we may be, and that’s the point.”
If Jones makes it past the rednecks down south—not to mention the tight-ass guards at the B.C. border—he and his mates will open for the Pretenders at the Orpheum on Saturday (February 19). Chrissie Hynde offered Gay Dad the warm-up slot on her band’s North American tour after they appeared together on the BBC program Later With Jools Holland.
“They have this giant studio at the BBC-TV centre in London,” explains Jones, “and they line up maybe five or so bands—all very different. So when we played, there was the Pretenders, us, Steve Earle, and Los Lobos—I can’t remember who the other people were. You play one after another in a big circle, so the cameras are in the middle, and Chrissie was opposite us. She just came over and started dancing, so I guess it was then that she got into us.”
Before his current group hit it big in England with the single “To Earth With Love”, Jones played with Gay Dad drummer Nicholas “Baz” Crowe in such bands as the Nektons and Astral Projection Society. In fact, they’ve been playing together since they were 12, when Crowe took a liking to Jones’s, er, instrument.
“My grandfather was a jazz drummer,” notes Jones, “and he bought me a drum kit when I was 10 or something. Then I got to know Baz, and basically I had the kit for about a week before he kinda stole it away, and he’s been playing it ever since. I kind of knew then that we’d end up doing something together. It’s one of those things.”