A Conversation With Jack Valero
Jack Valero
Since signing to Modern Sky (Lottery Winners, Slow Readers Club, Jamie Webster) and unveiling his live band, Jack Valero has hit the ground running. His recent singles ‘Temporary Helplessness’ and ‘Pull Back The Hammer’ have powered up with a bigger, energising live sound without losing any of the astute, poetic lyricism of his initial releases – and that shines through on stage too, as shown by recent Glastonbury sets at the Greenpeace Stage and the Avalon Cafe.
Continuing that run of stellar form, Jack today shares the new single “Catch My Soul” as he heads towards the release of his debut EP later this summer.
‘Catch My Soul’ adds another layer to Jack’s increasingly eclectic mix of genres, this time going in hard and heavy with a ragged blues and rush of timeless rock ‘n’ roll at full throttle giving its retro style an intensity to connect with a new generation. The song’s urgency is matched by his voice, with Jack holding nothing back whether launching himself at soaring high notes, racing along with the track’s rhythmic strut, or letting loose with unrestrained abandon.
Jack says, “This song is about a more reckless time of my life when I was going out too much and doing too much. The idea of “Catch My Soul” is delving into the desperate point when I felt like it was taking over and I needed someone to ‘catch my soul’ and save me before it was too late.”
NSGs Billy Vitch caught up with Jack for a natter about his musical career to date, growing up as the son of a folk hero and making music with Liverpool’s own, Jamie Webster.
Billy: Good morning Jack and how are you, what have you been doing today, and how’s that going?
Jack: Hey Billy, thanks for having me. Actually, I’ve been in the studio working with the brilliant Jamie Webster on my next EP. He’s come in as producer along with his incredibly talented band mates and it’s an amazing experience. They’re all an absolute pleasure to work with and not only are they doing a brilliant job on the tracks, but I feel like I’m learning a lot from them about performance and songwriting. Honestly, I feel very lucky.
Billy: Where did you grow up and what was it like?
Jack: I grew up in London until I was 6 and then we moved to the sleepy & idyllic Dorset countryside, it was very beautiful and I’m very grateful for it but it was also quite sheltered and slow-paced. It all changed when I started secondary school and my experience there wasn’t the best, not to flog the dead horse of the misunderstood songwriting kid, but I really didn’t fit in and felt increasingly ostracised from the rest of my peers and made to feel very unwelcome and an outsider. It didn’t help that I wasn’t into football or anything sporty and my more sensitive temperament made me even more alienated.
As a result, I try to be honest about my struggle with anxiety and OCD in the hope that it may help someone else who might be feeling the same and struggling so that they don’t feel weird, or alone. Kids will be kids though to an extent, but I think that experience definitely encouraged me to embrace the music world I had grown up in, with my family as it was a place where the things that were ridiculed in school were not only accepted but celebrated.
Billy: How did your music journey begin?
Jack: Mine started in a way that I think is quite unique to my generation. I had already grown up in the music world with my dad ‘Billy Bragg’ being a successful musician himself and my mum being in the music industry since her late teens. However, I never really took my own steps into it until I came across an Xbox game. I was very into computer and console games like most 14-year-olds, but I remember coming across the game ‘Guitar Heroes 3‘ and I fell in love with so many of the songs on there. I then found a small group of kids at school who also loved the game, but they could also play actual guitar as well. I felt like I’d finally found my group and after feeling on my own for so long I was desperate to be a part of this music ‘gang‘. So I went to my parents and asked them about my favourite songs on the game and they then introduced me to the band’s full catalogue, I also set my sights on learning the guitar for real so I could cement my place with the music kids at school and it just snowballed from there and eventually became an identity. I don’t think it would’ve worked the same if my parents had pushed it onto me and I feel grateful that they allowed it to grow on its own and then worked to support and encourage it.
Billy: You’re currently signed to Liverpool-based ‘Modern Sky’ who also have some other big up-and-coming bands and artists signed to them like the Lottery Winners, Slow Readers Club and Jamie Webster. How does it feel being signed as opposed to unsigned, like what are the pros and cons?
Jack: Well, I guess the landscape has changed so much since the arrival of social media and loads of people have launched themselves just through gaining fans and growing an audience online. There are so many ways that any artist can now put their music out there on their own and hope they can find their tribe, but I think there will probably still be a need for labels to help artists grow and amplify what they have on an industry level.
It’s also different depending on what label you’ve signed to, but with ‘Modern Sky‘ it really feels like a family. When I wasn’t signed, I would source everything myself and do everything myself and you can be very much on your own and feel quite isolated, but through this signing, I’m lucky enough to be plugged straight into the amazing Liverpool Music scene with its historic and monumentally important legacy. It also put me together with incredibly talented people such as ‘Jamie Webster‘ and his crew who have been nothing but amazing to work with and their belief in my songs has made me believe in myself so much more. Not to mention the head of ‘Modern Sky‘, ‘Dave Pichilingi‘ who is a proper old-school music lover and has been so supportive and his enthusiasm for songwriting is so encouraging. I know that my life has improved since being with them because it has connected me with people that feel the same way about songwriting that I do and I think that’s the most important thing.
(Jack Valero)
Billy: Your father ‘Billy Bragg‘ is extremely well known, especially here in Liverpool, we adore him! Is it daunting at all following his footsteps and as an artist, how do you separate yourself from his fame and music?
Jack: Haha, good to know. All joking aside at first yes it was, teenager’s often butt heads with their parents anyway but when you’re trying to step into the same line of work and make a name for yourself it can be difficult. Don’t get me wrong both my parents have been unendingly supportive of me and I’m eternally grateful to have that. However at that young age when you’re still figuring yourself out and riddled with insecurities it’s tough when you feel constantly compared to something that is already well-established. I actually used to be so extreme that I wouldn’t let my dad come to my gigs back in the day and he once had to sneak in dressed as a security guard. That’s why I used a shortened version of my full last name ‘De Valero Bragg‘.
A lot of my family on my mum’s side use the Valero and I thought I’d do the same as firstly I thought it was a great stage name and secondly because it allowed me to have a chance at my own identity. I first changed it when I moved to Brighton for music school and registered as ‘Jack Valero‘, I completely re-invented myself and now that’s how almost everyone knows me. I’ve done enough now to feel confident enough in my own right and I’m glad I reached that point as it allowed me to also be a part of Dad’s music world and even got to help him write the song “Ten Mysterious Photo’s That Can’t Be Explained” on his latest album, that middle 8 is all me haha.
Billy: What made you want to be a musician as opposed to any other career? If you hadn’t become an artist, what other career path do you think you’d have followed?
Jack: Well I’m certain growing up around it had a huge influence on me, but I originally started out in film school. Though at the time I had started my first band called ‘Teenage Wasteland‘ and kept finding myself drawn to it. Making films is such an arduous and slow process, takes a lot of patience to get anything satisfyingly completed out of it and with music I was already on stages, playing in front of people and writing songs. It was such a quicker and frankly better rush, I was desperate to be on stage expressing myself to a crowd and music was allowing me that now. Not to mention I fitted into the scene far better I think, the music world was much more chaotic and in the moment compared to the sometimes slow and more regimented world of film school. I wanted to make something fast-paced, interesting, entertaining and more chaotic and that just didn’t fly there, I found it all pretty pretentious. Needless to say, my film lecturers didn’t like me or my approach and to be honest, I didn’t like them much either, so I left and never looked back, but now I put all that side of me into my music videos.
Billy: You have just released your new single titled “This Is A Nightmare“. We absolutely love it! Wanna tell us some more about it?
Jack: So glad you guys love it! So I’m very big on juxtapositions and what I was going for with this song was my usual very energetic and happy tune with a sad subject matter. It also plays on the usual break-up song formula of ‘Oh no, you’re gone. I’m sad, what will I ever do‘ and replaces it with a very blunt confronting and almost cathartic release of realising something is not working and needs to end. Instead of ‘woe is me’ it’s ‘thank god I’m outta here‘, can come across quite harsh but I hate it when people dance around a blatant truth and some situations need it. It takes what could be a very sad and crushing situation and instead makes it empowering.
Billy: If you could sit down with three people from history, past or present, who would they be and why?
Jack: Tom Petty, David Bowie & Marcus Aurelius. Tom Petty, because he was my idol growing up and was the ground zero for a lot of my influences. I was so upset when he died as I’d never have the chance to meet him. David Bowie for pretty much the same reason and his early works made me feel better about being othered at school. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor – he was a big part of the stoic philosophies based around virtue, trying to not be judgemental and living in synch with nature. Not just the natural world we live in, but also the nature of your own potential and virtue and living up to it. Would love to have a chat with him haha.
Billy: What are your views on the country at present, I mean politically we’re in a bit of a mess ain’t we? What do you think some of the key points are that we really need to focus on and fix as a society?
Jack: Oh wow, that’s a big question. I think we’re in bad times for sure and headed for darker if this course is stayed. We unfortunately seem to be inheriting some of the political landscape from our American cousins, with the rise of more radical groups and viewpoints. Our government continuously sleepwalks us into catastrophes making it very clear that their selfishness knows no bounds whilst then making us pay for it. Not to mention the Labour Party higher-ups and leadership who are supposed to be looking out for us being so blinded by a doctrine of win at all costs that they seem to have abandoned the very virtues that should supposedly make the core of what they stand for. Making them at times indistinguishable from the Tory opposition and leaving the working class and everyone in the lower ranks of the party trying to make a difference out to dry.
We have no one in power currently that we can rely on, so where do we start you ask? Our entire parliament system and its members need radical change. We need someone like Jeremy Corbyn or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in America. People who can see the system is broken and are stalwart in their actions and more importantly compassionate, really understanding the responsibility they have. Proper funding for the NHS and schools, more regulations on banks and tax dodging corporations, better damage control from Brexit, better poverty support, no more cuts, more public spending, rollback of some of the rampant privatisation and the one that’s targeted right at them…proportional representation. Both Tories & the old Blairites are trying to reset the game and establish a status quo we haven’t seen since Thatcher after Corbyn gave them a scare with. We’re a country run by greedy, selfish, callous careerists who couldn’t be more out of touch with the real lives of the people below them than if they lived on the moon, and they need to go!
(Jack Valero and his band)
Billy: How do you write a song? Do you have a specific process?
Jack: I think people are sometimes disappointed with this answer, but no not particularly. Often people expect you to say, oh yes I sit down and manifest this, that or the other but in reality, it’s a far more unconscious thing. It will come as a thought sometimes or just a sentence from myself or someone else and I’ll think ‘That sounds interesting‘ or I’ll be going through something and a line will pop into my head. I’ll feel the inspiration hit and have to very quickly start writing it down, I’ll often start with tunes first so I’ll find one that would fit with the lyric and then I keep going with it for as long as it lasts. Sometimes you can get several songs in under an hour, sometimes you never get past that first line. Sometimes you revisit something after years and suddenly know exactly what to write. In the words of Tom Petty, ‘I don’t like to look directly at it, in fear it would go away‘ and that’s exactly how I feel. I never know when it will strike but when it does I have to stop what I’m doing and do whatever I can to get it recorded on my phone or written down on whatever I can find. It’s a very mysterious thing and can come from anywhere.
Billy: How is the rest of 2023 looking for you and will you be playing here in Liverpool anytime soon?
Jack: Well all the tracks from my first EP are out and we’re now heading into some great Autumn tour dates such as my first-ever headline tour at the end of October and some support dates with the amazing Tom A. Smith. Also as previously mentioned I’m currently in the studio with the patron saint of Liverpool himself Jamie Webster working on the new EP and it’s sounding boss! Will actually be kicking off the tour in Liverpool on the 13th Oct at the Kazimier Stockroom – can’t wait and hopefully see you all there!
Thanks so much for the chat, Billy!
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