A rock star’s life sometimes seems unfashionably complicated. Hang out with The Rapture for a bit and you’ll see why.
Emerging from beneath a cloud of epic changes Clash discovers an honest Luke Jenner; loosely in one piece after half a decade of pain and change. Whilst our ears were tuned to other frequencies his have been processing strife and upheaval.
So there’s been a few Rapture asides you should know about. Mattie Safer (recent songwriter) had been playing musical chairs (post-punk revival type) with Luke Jenner (former songwriter and band founder). This game saw Luke storm out of his own band (creatively stifled) before (sheepishly) coming back. Then Matt Safer left (in a power huff ) and we find ourselves Rapture-full-circle as Luke regains control (tentatively) leading the trio to delete the (“no good”) album they’d just written before penning a whole new long player, albeit after the suicide of Luke’s mother. Now he stands before us, letting it all flood out.
Five years on, one member down, how’s life in the Rapture?
Life’s really good. It’s been a strange four/five years – my mum died, my son was born, I left the band and another member left after I came back and we toured for two years. Then we wrote two records because the first one was no good, we just sort of scrapped it and then started over. It’s been eventful for us, it seems like we’ve just been completely off the map which we have been. But it hasn’t felt like a long time to me.
So why did you leave the band?
Well it’s a songwriting issue really, when I started the band I asked Vito to join. I had all these songs that I was writing and I had been in a couple of other bands with him and I wasn’t singing or writing songs as much as I would have liked to. I had all these songs and I was quite insecure about my writing because I had never had to write for a whole record before; we’d only done EPs before then. By the time the second record was out I just didn’t have enough space to say what I wanted to say in the band or enough time to work on my ideas. So after touring and taking some time off I realized that there wasn’t enough space. So there was some friction between Matt and me over stylistic issues, I wanted to go places that he didn’t really want to go. I felt that I didn’t have space to do what I wanted to do. I felt like ‘right I’m going to go off and do a solo record.’ I started to do that and I quickly realized that I had no business doing that and I really didn’t want to do that. I came back and said ‘I’m really sorry’ and I said ‘please come back into the band.’ They said they would, but in the meantime they were writing with Matt, so The Rapture was basically just going to be the three of them. I came back in and Matt was just miserable for like six months and he didn’t say ‘hi’ to anyone or ‘goodbye’ or anything. We couldn’t get him to talk about anything and I really didn’t want him to leave. We basically begged him to stay, and he just said ‘no’, then he left. Then we wrote this record.
The stylistic things that you wanted to pursue that Matt didn’t like, was that a singer/songwriter style, is that what you’re referring to?
A big contention point with us was that with the last record I got really into heavy metal. The two things that really influenced that record for me the fact that I got really into the Uli Jon Roth period of Scorpions and I got really into Depeche Mode. Matt just hated heavy metal, I just remember him hating Black Sabbath and all this stuff that I kind of grew up on. I mean I grew up in the grunge era; I loved bands like Helmet and Therapy? as a kid, and he just hated that music. I mean I wanted to combine that sound with dance music, there are other bands that have done that, for example Justice and Daft Punk to a point. I felt like I wanted to go off in this direction and he just completely frowned on that and it was hard for me because the band was started under the premise of ‘we can do whatever we want to do.’ Between the first record and the latest record he just kind of squashed that idea. I just didn’t know how to handle that and I was really confused by that, and I just didn’t know what to do.
Understandably. So when you went off and wanted to do a singer/songwriter thing, when did you realize that it wasn’t going to work? Was there a poignant moment?
Yeah, I guess I realized that I had a lot more to give than just being a singer/songwriter and that I had started the band up for a reason. I had always written songs since I picked up the guitar when I was 17. It was never the goal for me to be a singer/songwriter. The fact that I quit the band that I started felt like I had gone to this horrible dark place, I was just like ‘how the fuck did that happen? How did I get here?’
Although I do write songs in a very singer/songwritery way, a lot of times I don’t really want them to be like that. I mean I do enjoy Neil Young, Cat Stevens and all that stuff, it’s not really the kind of artists that I want to be. I remember being really inspired when I found out that ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order was actually a ballad. It was a long time ago when I figured that out. When they brought it in it was just a really somber acoustic ballad played on guitar, and then they turned it into ‘Blue Monday.’ I loved the idea of the album ‘Screamadelica’, the idea that you could go everywhere, that’s the kind of sprawling music that I loved like the first Roxy Music record which was just all over the map and The Beatles as well. It’s the whole idea of like ‘we’re into reggae so let’s write a reggae song.’ But it doesn’t sound like a reggae song, it sounds like The Beatles. I was very inspired by that.
I think the fact that it did get so bad for me that I did get quit the band was just a real indicator of the general health of the band, and my own personal health as well. It was kind of a sad state of affairs.
How much would you say your mum passing away affected your mind? Did that fuck your mind up a bit to leave the band or was it a completely separate issue?
It’s all connected really. My mum was severely emotionally ill and my grandmother took her own life as well, she walked out into the ocean in Swansea to escape from a mental institution. My mum was British and my family is from Wales, so that always had a big influence on me, I was always aware of British artists like David Bowie and all that kind of stuff. It was on a different level to the average kid from San Diego because my mum was English and very proud of it. She was born in Bristol. My grandfather was born in Wales and I’ve got family there.
Anyhow, so my grandmother escaped from a mental institution, took all her clothes off and walked into the ocean in Swansea, they found her body and my mum took her home. My mum and my grandmother were both severely bi polar. So that’s just been a huge thing for me. I’ve been trying to make sense of my mum being so ill and family illness. I felt that when she got sick that she had already died. When I was 6 years old she got ill after she had my sister, she was a completely different person, and she was like night and day. So in a way she died when I was 6 and then she finally died. It wasn’t the first time that she tried to take her own life, she went through horrible depressions where the lights would be out in the house for like three months and there’d be no food in the house and it was horrible.
As a kid I was trying to talk to people about it and it didn’t make any sense. I’d say ‘my mum’s crazy’, and other kids would say ‘Yeah my mum’s crazy too; she made me clean my room. She didn’t make what I wanted for lunch.’ And I’d say like ‘no she’s actually crazy’. So that forced me inward and music was an escape for me but also a way to create a safe place and a fantasy world where I could express what I couldn’t express to other people.
I know that the Ziggy Stardust record is all about mental illness and that’s one of the records that I’ve listened to more than anything else in my life. There’s definitely a really heavy mental illness undercurrent especially in modern music, you know? It’s all over the place. My generation is like Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Black Francis and the album ‘OK Computer’. For me a big part of the making of this record was my mum dying and I wanted to make something positive out of it and finally putting a cap on that experience. But with my son being born I felt like I didn’t want to just promote psychological damage, I wanted to try to trancscend that, you know what I mean? I didn’t want to necessarily ignore the feelings, if you block that one feeling, whether it’s anger or sadness you block everything.
A lot of people have been like ‘this is a record about breaking up with a woman.’ For me this record is about coming to terms with my mum dying but also just my entire life. The cover of the record is my dad surfing and for a few years, and for a few years in between albums I didn’t talk to my dad. Now I’m healing that relationship with my father and I’m talking to him. So a big part of that time out was allowing those things to shake out and not running from them and when you’re on tour you can’t deal with anything. I think that me quitting the band was a huge turning point for me. It was a case of ‘if I’m going to quit this most essential thing to me, the thing that’s really close to me, if I’m willing to just throw that on the slagheap and walk away then there’s something really wrong. I can’t just put a band aid on it. I have to go in and operate and really get in there otherwise it’s going to happen again’.
So, is it safe to say that the new album’s kind of embracing forgiveness to your mum, to Matt and to your relationship with your dad, is it all tied up?
Yeah, that’s exactly it. That’s the crux of the record for me.
Arguably ‘Pieces of the People We Love’ enjoyed the very end of the kind of post-punk revival, it very much fitted into that sound then, knowing that the musical wave that’s made you has subsided a lot, what did you do differently with this album? Because obviously there’s not that same sound ricocheting around New York presumably.
Well those records are very much of their time, also I’m 36 now, back then I was in my 20s and I was a lot more angry and it’s the sort thing of going down in flames sticking my middle fingers in the air in my own way. I guess even if I wanted to make that record again I couldn’t do it, it just wouldn’t work.
Can you just tell me a few of the words or phrases that were flying around between the three of you before you started writing? Presumably there was a dialogue about what you wanted to do; you know, reference points?
No, not really, that’s one of the strange things about this record. We had written a record with Matty and then we scrapped that. This is kind of a backlog of songs, we just kind of wrote them, and jammed them in different ways. Before there was too much dialogue about writing and I think this record was more about acceptance. Matty was so fixated on doing one particular thing so when he left it was like ‘let’s do the opposite of that.’ The thing that we really talked about a lot was trying to take care of the emotion of the song and really focus on the feeling rather than whatever influences it might have. With the first record with worked James Murphy, he just quotes things like ‘oh that song sounds like a certain period of David Bowie’ and he’s not afraid to quote things. ‘Echoes’ was very much like ‘this is the suicide song’ ‘this sounds like Roxy Music’; you know it’s all very tidy and air tight. This new record obviously does reference things there’s no armour on it, it’s not an armoured record.
With your last album obviously there were quite a few things going on behind the scenes with the start of the break-up of the band. Would you say that you put armaments onto that album to kind of pretend that everything was okay?
Yeah, the big thing that we talked to the press about was that we were making a party record. I got into the idea of how Van Halen was a party band and we were going to be a party band like that. I thought it was pretty funny but I also really liked it because I’m from California so part of my roots is the whole stoner, knucklehead, surfer dude Mudhoney thing, pretending that you’re more stupid than you are. I knew that there was a lot to cover up just because I was really fucking unhappy.
I didn’t really notice that at the time. You covered it up well.
Yeah we did a good job of covering that up.
After that album, running into this record, listening to it you can kind of see that it sounded a bit jaded and a bit of sarcasm on there. How would you honestly review ‘Pieces of the People We Love’ now? Now that you’ve got a new record out and you can be candid about it.
It’s difficult. I think Matty’s writing style lyrically is very jaded and sarcastic. A perfect example is how in between that record we put out a track and it became a big hit in Australia and it basically paid our rent. That song was about a real guy named Ben Rhymer but it’s really kind of a mean song, it’s just taking the piss. It’s about how he’s really fat and how he can’t get laid and stuff like that. That’s never really been my writing style and that’s how Matty writes, but I mean it’s a good song. This album is much more intimate and heartfelt, that’s always how I’ve written. The last record was mixed up between my songwriting and Matty’s songwriting. So the last album is like part of it is moving on from ‘Echoes’ and also some of it is just kind of a new thing.
‘Grace…’ seems a lot more emotional, almost wistful.
Yeah, I mean that’s the kind of person that I am. I’m a more reflective person and that’s naturally who I am. Matty’s not really like that as a person, it’s really hard to get out of him what he thinks. I still don’t know why he quit the band. He never really talked to any of us about anything. He just said that he wanted to win a grammy and then he left. It was like ‘ok, see you later’. He’s a very closed person, he’s difficult to understand, even the people who know him find that. Well he was at the time, I mean that was 2 years ago, he could be completely different now. At the time it was really awkward, he never really told us what he wanted to do. You had to sort of guess what he wanted to do. So it’s very freeing to be out of that relationship as I wasn’t happy.
The Rapture from our point of view over here, coming from DFA and New York, and they way that you came over was very much like a city band. Would you say that you still feel synonymous with New York or from a personal or band perspective that you’ve kind of sanded off those edges?
I think I know what you’re getting at, that kind of hardnosed city thing. I did move to Brooklyn and have a family and still live in the city. I live on a tree-lined street next to a park. I’ve brought up my five-year old son here and I coached his baseball team. I’m interested in what I’m going to eat for dinner instead of how fucked up I can get every day. So my life has changed quite a bit, I still feel like it’s a very New York life but a bit different than the last two records.
Obviously half a decade feels like a lot to you because so much has happened, but do you feel like you coming back with a new album is like you’re coming back to a similar musical space to the one you left on a kind of album cycle basis?
That’s a hard question. Do you mean in terms of like what everybody else is doing?
I mean that bands check in and check out of our lives with their albums, so do you feel that the New York you’re coming back to is the one that you left?
Not really. I’m 36, I don’t really go out very much, so like with the New York I left last time I was still trying really hard to be cool and put a lot of energy into what other people thought of me. Now I just don’t give a shit what other people think about me. So the thing is it’s a different New York for me, but I don’t know if that answers your question.
So you’ve listened to a lot of chill wave artists in your hiatus then?
(Laughs) Yeah.
Going back to the album ‘Echoes’ there seems to be a real community around that record if you look at who worked on it and the credits, it won so many awards. Would you say that the record has got the same momentum as ‘Echoes’? How would you describe it at this point?
The only thing I can go off of it is the first single; it feels like a return to the community in a lot of ways. We had a big split with DFA, which was really painful for me because that was my community, those were the people who believed in me from the beginning and they were my friends. Being friends with them again, and being part of the downtown New York art scene and things like that, because they’re incredibly connected to that. It’s like revisiting, like we’re coming home, but it feels very much like we’ve been around the world a bunch of times and now we’re settled. It feels different but it feels similar in a way. In terms of reception I have no idea how the record will be received, whether it will win awards or whatever. I kind of don’t care, I mean it’d be nice and it’d be cool if people like the record but at the same time with the last record I was just super worried about that stuff. It’s just a horrible way to live your life to look to other people for validation. One of the major themes of this record is not putting the emphasis on that and it’s more putting an emphasis on having a good time and having fun and asking ‘do I like the people I’m working with?’ The last record we did we had to work in the major label system and it’s fucking horrible. They send you these people who just don’t like music. It’s not the case with everyone, there are people we work with who love music, but they’re few and far between.
Sitting in a bedroom with someone trying to explain the validity of your record, or talking about your influences to a label manager isn’t much fun. I don’t ever want to explain what post-punk or dance music is ever again. It’s a horrible place to be when you’re trying to convince someone that they should be excited about your record when they’re just not.
Yeah. I spoke to James Murphy a couple of times and I did a feature once where I said give us your five things that you’d do to change the music industry and straight away he came up with them. Within fifteen seconds he’d given me ten, and one of them was that everyone who worries about getting fired should get fired immediately. Everyone should get tested on whether they love music or they’re just doing a job.
Yeah he’s brilliant at that kind of stuff. That’s the kind of stuff he does in his spare time. He’s waited for that kind of question for about ten years.
I got that impression. He was just like ‘these are some ones off the top of my head, how many more do you want?’ One of the other things he said was that he was at the end of LCD and I said ‘what are the biggest regrets of your career so far?’ One of the things he said was how when he was producing your album he made it a harrowing experience for everyone.
He also said how he was constantly trying to burn everything off, he described it as like a crucible, do you agree with that? What were your memories of that time?
I love that guy; I think our relationship has grown in positive ways even though we don’t talk to each other every day. That record meant so much to both of us. He used this analogy which summed it up for me and which kind of freaked me out a bit at the time. He uses a lot of analogies, he’s kind of poetic like that, thinks a lot in those terms. He said ‘we’re going to have our hands tied together with rope and then we’re going to have a knife and we’ll have to finish this record as otherwise we’ll just stab the shit out of each other.’ I thought ‘that doesn’t sound fun.’ It was a hard record to make and a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into it. The results were great. I think we don’t want to repeat the process and he doesn’t want to repeat the process either and we’re both at different points in our life. That was a fucking miserable record to make and it lasted for three years and neither of us had any pressure because no-one knew who we were.
It was a really interesting experience and I’m glad I went through it but it was a motherfucker making that record.
It sounds it, it sounds harsh.
Everything was just so intense and our influences were so intense, the time in New York was so intense. We were both starving and we didn’t have any money. I remember I didn’t have a place to live. I remember Tim Goldworthy bringing me socks one day because I didn’t have any socks. It was just fucked up, and we were very much the cliché of the starving artists afraid everyone’s going to fuck them over. We were afraid we were both going to fuck each other over. There was just so much fear. That whole record was just bathed in fear.
Does part of you worry that the cliché might be true, that you need to go through that harrowing process to come up with something truly great?
I think that this record proves that you don’t have to do that. I thought a lot of the time theoretically but I didn’t think I was capable of doing it. For me a big influence on this record was listening to a lot of old gospel music and I joined a church choir for a while and just really focused on making positive art. I grew up in the era of grunge where you had Kurt Cobain, I read every Nirvana book to see how it was done, how they made it. I loved Billy Corgan and Black Francis and the first John Lennon solo record. There’s the whole idea that in order to make something that beautiful you have to go through a horrible experience and it has to be excruciatingly painful. I feel that that’s not true and with this record it proves that although there is darkness there it’s not avoiding anything.
The process of this record was really great and working with Phillipe Zdar was really cool, he’s just a really euphoric dude. After fighting so much with Matty we were just like ‘let’s just be nice to each other.’ We were like ‘if you have an idea I’m not going to knock it down, and when you have an idea I’ll support you on it and when I have an idea you can support me on it and we’ll put it together and see what we have.’ As opposed to when we made ‘Echoes’ you had to defend your own ideas and you’d have 5-hour long conversations about the history of music and you had to defend everything. There was no real freedom, it was just like a fight the whole time. Living your life like that is just miserable, especially as you’re supposed to be living this rock and roll fantasy. You can do exactly what you want to do for a living and you’ve been given all this freedom but that freedom was turned into torture because you’re a damaged prisoner. That sucks. You just don’t want to do that anymore.
So this record’s very free and easy.
Yeah, with this record we just felt like ‘what happens if we let the reins of completely and let’s see what happens.’ This is what happened. A lot of feelings came out and things got resolved and I’ve always been a very controlling person and this record’s all about turning that on its head and not controlling anything. If we’re going to do something it’s not as if we’re going to be crippled. At the same time if it doesn’t go where you think it’s going to go then we’ll just try and appreciate it for whatever it is.
So if Murphy’s biggest regret was making the recording process with you such a torturous process, what would you say was your biggest regret with The Rapture up until this point and then after that?
My biggest regret was leaving DFA because I never wanted to leave DFA. As fucked up as our relationship was with James and the label was, I really love that guy. I felt like I wasn’t ready to pack it in. We are the first single on that label. I felt like I walked away from unfinished business and I felt like after sitting in on meetings with people who didn’t understand my music at all, I wanted to go back to people that did understand.
James was the first person I met in my life who understood everything; it was a really powerful experience because he was the first person I met who understood everything that I liked. All the records I liked he liked pretty much across the board. That doesn’t happen very often. You bump into people who like some of the music that you like but he liked everything that I liked. In terms of life experiences we had both come from very similar backgrounds, the whole American indie rock dream. My goal was to open for Fugazi. James was slightly older than me. It was quite magical the first time I met him and we trusted him a lot. He wanted to start this record label and we were already on Sub Pop and at the time DFA was like a step down from Sub Pop because they didn’t have distribution, they hadn’t put out any records, there was no history. Tim had had some experience with Mowack but that was it. It was like we were all going out on this mission to conquer the world together and it felt very hopeful. I think I lost a big part of my own personal motivations for making music when we left DFA, so that was my biggest regret for sure.
As soon as Matty left we said ‘let’s go back to DFA’. Matty was like the little brother, he’s 6 years younger than me and Vito. Dave wasn’t in the band until after ‘Echoes’. Matty was always told to shut up and he didn’t know as much about music as the rest of us. We treated him like shit. I have to go back and apologize for that wholeheartedly at some point. He just hated the DFA because he was like the little annoying brother. James had a really profound belief in me as an artist and as somebody who can write songs and all that stuff.
When we left DFA I lost that connection to something really important, to a really fundamental life altering experience. ‘Echoes’ wouldn’t have gone made without James and him and DFA. With that record we went from me working as a bar tender to just only playing music. That only happens once in your life and to be able to return to that has been a really settling and very satisfying experience, regardless of what happens in the future. To be able to have a second chance and to say ‘I’m sorry that we left’ is great. I know that it’s been hard in the past. It’s been a long time and I think it’s really helpful that it’s been a long time because we were arguing about money, but we all individually have money now, not because of each other or because we had to split something up but because we’ve gone off and made our own paths. To be able to come back and have that financial aspect taken out of it has just been really healing.
So it was a very strange band dynamic then if Matty was the bullied younger brother who then became the principal song-writer, and almost artistic director in a way.
Yeah, it kind of went backwards because I started the band and then it felt like Matty took the band over to the point where I felt like I had to quit because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in my band, so it’s really weird. I talked to James about it, I told him that I was going to make a solo record, he said ‘you don’t need to make a solo record. You need to get your fucking band back. You need to go and show up.’ I didn’t like that answer.
It seems like you and Matty are very different characters.
Yeah I think so. We’re very different characters and different people naturally. I like the guy but we’re very different.
So it sounds like James has been pivotal again in making this record happen and carrying on as it has.
Yeah I mean he hasn’t really been there that much in my life, but he was there at a crucial moment in my life.
That’s what old friends do.
I don’t get to talk to James very often anymore because if you’re not working with him you don’t hear from him. But he’s almost like a member of my family in a weird way, definitely part of musical DNA and is important as someone to check in with, just to see what’s going on, and to see what progress has been made or what progress hasn’t been made.
Words by Matthew Bennett
