When I meet Jutebox frontman Dan Richardson on Dundee’s Dock Street, he’s proper wound up.
“Someone’s covered my bloody gig poster already!” he huffs, baggy cargo shorts and corduroy jacket incongruous against his delicately-held cup of tea.
“I spent ages putting them all up, but I did it with Sellotape. Then my mate told me you can make wall paste with water and flour? Well, wish I’d known that!”
The 23-year-old brings this kind of frenetic, DIY energy (“four coffees today, I feel, like, a bit floaty”) to his whole Jutebox project, which he hopes will bring “funk, soul, reggae, ska and jazz back into the mainstream”.
The first Dundee-based iteration of Jutebox formed back in 2022 after Dan established himself as a stylish piano man on the local scene with now-disbanded outfit Corde Du Roi.
“When we started, we were playing free-entry, showcase-type gigs round about The Lowdown (on Perth Road), Clarks on Lindsay Street, and Roots.
“Then we started ticketing and we were pretty consistently selling tickets around Dundee.”
Jutebox ‘needed to freshen things up’
But after a couple of years, the independent outfit became “creatively stagnated” and Dan admits he didn’t know whether Jutebox would continue to exist, never mind break out of the local circuit.
“I was pretty uncertain for a while. It’s one of those things, it’s like you hit this mind block and you can’t get past it. So you need to freshen things up.”
Now, Jutebox is back with Aberdeenshire-born Dan remaining as the frontman, but with an otherwise entirely new line-up.
“We’ve now got Cameron Hill on drums, Alex Thornton on guitar, Kai Murdoch on bass, Rachel Dunn on saxophone, and Chris Murray on trumpet. They’re all Glasgow based, so hopefully that’ll let us have a draw there.
“The patter is good in the room, it’s dead comfortable writing together – that’s the way it should be. It’s the first time we’ve had a horn section too, so that’s really exciting.”
New tune inspired by late Lexi Campbell
Among the band’s new tunes is a song called Forever Young, which Dan tells me was inspired by late Dundee musician and his Corde Du Roi bandmate Lexi Campbell, who died aged 25 in 2022.
“I was thinking about how Lex’s liveliness, the lust for life they had when they were around,” Dan explains. “For everyone that knew Lex, they’ll stay like that. So that one’s quite personal to me.
“Plus, it’s in that kind of reggae/ska realm, and they loved all that.”
Now with a group of musicians behind him whom he believes “would drop everything for a chance to make in the music industry”, keys man Dan’s ready to take centre stage in his own project – literally.
Inspired by his “idol” Freddie Mercury, as well as Madness, Led Zeppelin and Steely Dan, the multi-instrumentalist is adding a heavy dollop of showmanship to the musical geekery at the band’s core.
“When we first started playing in 2022, I’d be sat down at the side, but still singing – it didn’t bring the right vibe,” he explains.
“People want a focal point. If the singer’s sitting stage left and you can’t see him, it doesn’t give the same buzz. Whereas if I’m stood in the middle with a massive f****** piano, then it’s like: whoa!
“I’ve even considered putting fluorescent decals or glittery bits on my piano. I don’t want people just coming to see us playing song after song. I want to make our gigs an event, an experience.”
Frontman ‘butted heads’ with teacher
Among his early influences (a folk musician dad and classically trained mum meant Dan’s ear for rhythm was inbuilt from birth) the frontman counts a former Mintlaw Academy music teacher, “Mr Gale”.
“I thought at the time he was a bit up himself,” grins Dan, who works at Lidl in Dundee city centre to fund his musical ambitions.
“He was like a doctor of jazz or something, had a PhD.
“Anyway, he was arrogant and played piano, and I was arrogant and played piano, so we butted heads a lot. But he probably had quite a big influence on me.”
“Arrogant” is certainly one way to describe the frontman’s artistic temperament.
He may be young, but his cocktail of haughtiness, brattiness, determination and swaggering confidence is reminiscent of old school rock n roll.
How much of that is an act, I wonder?
“I think it’s like 70%, 30% put on,” he laughs.
“I’ve always been good with words, a good communicator and quite confident. I think a lot of the time, people mistake confidence for being an egotistical p****. And there’s a fine line!
“But also, I’m a frontman – it’s my job to sell the show, so sure, I have to do a wee bit of a ‘thing’. I don’t really care what people think of me.
“I’m doing what I enjoy, and if you don’t like it, you can kind of go f*** yourself.”
I don’t believe him. I think that’s part of the fun.
Jutebox are playing a headline show at Roots, Dundee, with support from Roomfore and the Triple A’s on April 12.
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