Another day in space

Jim Noir mixes science fiction with the humdrum on his latest album

Star gazer: Jim Noir uses retro synth sounds to evoke spacey exotica

The World Cup in 2006 was another forgettable performance by England, especially in the anthem stakes. Embrace’s uninspiring official recording “World At Your Feet” was overshadowed by a way more uplifting track, “Eenie Meany”, featured on a football boot ad and a perfect introduction to Mancunian solo artist Jim Noir’s playful, innocent ditties.

Two years on and the European championships are due, this time without England, and probably also sans a Noir composition, for the bedroom wizard has retuned with what has been heralded as a space travel-inspired concept album, light years away not only from his debut, but from this summer’s grass-based dramas in Switzerland and Austria.

Then again, for Alan Roberts, who works under this pseudonym, to have timed his arrival with the World Cup would have betrayed a perceptive marketing genius worthy of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren combined, except it was all chance. He only put out the three EPs that formed the bulk of Tower Of Love as a laugh. His main thrust at the time was pure electronica, though combined with a pop aesthetic.

“I didn’t have any expectations because it was a side project to what I was doing. It was almost a joke record, so for it to blow up into all that was quite odd.” As Noir explains this, a distracting clank of coins suggests someone has won big on a fruit machine, just as three cherries came up for his pop persona’s first album. “Apparently you have more success doing Beatles music. I always wanted to do it, but didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. Then again, it was the period when all the best electronic people started going crap. I was getting a bit bored of it.”

We meet in a traditional Mancunian boozer, down a quiet side street away from the hip bars of his home city’s regenerated northern quarter. Noir fits in fine among the daytime drinkers, even in his over-sized Nuts In May bobble hat.

We are here to discuss his eponymous follow up album, with its more melancholy strains and richer palette of electronic squiggles and clanging guitars that smudge the melodies. You might assume Noir had deliberately turned his back on the success of Tower. Certainly, Atlantic Records have not leapt to offer a distribution deal in the manner they did with the debut album, facilitating wider availability in the UK and an opportunity to make inroads in the States, where he toured with the likes of Sean Lennon. This, though, is something he firmly denies. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is make it sound good to me and this one, if I knew then what I know now about production, this is what Tower Of Love would have sounded like.”

At the time, Noir was embarrassed about having his tunes all over TV, but has since come to terms with what he needs to do to cement his position as a defiantly independent-minded artist. “It’s such a surreal thing that the big corporation chose a song I recorded when I didn’t even have a microphone – I used a pair of headphones. The cheapest song ever recorded. It’s very, very funny.”

Promo copies of Jim Noir have come out with a screed that explains it is about how the astronaut protagonist, name checked in opening number “Welcome Commander Jameson” says goodbye to his folks and heads off for space on what he believes to be a hopeless, one-way mission. While in his ship, Jameson has time to mull over his life. This gives Noir a chance to return to that most productive source of inspiration for him, childhood, as on the charmingly naïve “Same Place Holiday”, a reminiscence about annual family vacations that constantly return to the same resort. Not that this is a problem for the young Noir/Jameson, whose only drama is getting a quid off his dad for spends.

Other tracks, though, don’t quite fit into his template. Take “Good Old Vinyl”, a paen to seemingly obsolete musical formats, including cassettes and even CDs. Surely an astronaut, involved in a hi-tech career and concerned about weight in his space-born baggage would be most impressed with digital files? Noir comes clean and admits that the concept is a playful red herring. “I’m flitting between the idea that it is and it isn’t. I mean, what’s the concept of Sgt Pepper’s? He gets introduced, Billy Shears comes on and there’s nothing to do with him ’til the reprise.” Shears is how Ringo Starr is introduced as the singer of “With A Little Help From My Friends” in the preceding, opening number.

“I found that funny when I watched them talk about it. Everybody goes on about it being a big concept album, but John Lennon especially is like, we got to track two and we didn’t know what we were doing. It’s pretty much the same thing with my album. Commander Jameson gets introduced, he goes into space and that’s the end.

“I wouldn’t want to be that, er, point-making,” he adds, “because it’s contrived and that’s not what I’m about. I’m about total spontaneity in everything I do, straight off the cuff to keep that freshness. To sit down and think of a story would be boring for me. I prefer to record it and think, oh, that’s what it’s about.”

His album combines the retro chic of Air’s Moon Safari and the fuzzy warmth of recent touring mates Super Furry Animals. There are brief excursions into wonky Joe Meek exotica and the space age symphonies of Gallic pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey, though Noir claims ignorance about Meek, the Fifties synth pioneer. “I don’t know him, but I love the Sixties Moog music, because it’s so stupid. I’m just trying to make what I think pop songs should sound like. There’s one form that is the clean, over-produced rubbish and then there’s the same thing, with slightly less shite involved. Some of those old sounds are still brilliant.”

For such an expansive record, one fact stands out from the sleeve notes: “Everything by Jim Noir”. He still records at home, now in inner city Hulme rather than leafy Chorlton, and admits to being a geeky collector of vintage synthesisers. Older listeners may recognise on “Same Place Holiday” what sounds like the classic educational toy Speak & Spell. “It’s actually a Speak & Maths, which is just as cool,” Noir corrects me. “I did have one room as a studio and one as a bedroom, but it’s kind of merged now, back to how it was. I live in a flat so probably should have egg boxes, but I’ve not had any complaints since I’ve moved.”

He does not spend too much time labouring over lyrics. He has the freedom of singing words off the top of his head, then finding the ones that make most sense. “To me, it’s funny and glib, so when people talk about them, it makes them more than I thought they were.”

Just as the best science fiction is really about how we live today, so Jim Noir’s concept album is less about space travel, and more a celebration of everyday life, and in his hands, it is a thrilling ride.

‘Jim Noir’ is out now on My Dad Recordings. Noir plays two nights at Islington Bar Academy, 19 and 20 June