Chris Jagger On The Creative Interrelationship Of His Memoir ‘Talking To Myself’ and Album ‘Mixing Up The Medicine’ (INTERVIEW)

This autumn, Chris Jagger released two significant projects, including his personal memoir, Talking To Myself, and his first album since 2017’s All The Best, Mixing Up The Medicine. The creation of both took the pandemic in stride and honed in on the multi-talented artist’s goals that had been percolating for some time, with the idea for the memoir going back to the 1990s. The memoir takes in a wide-ranging life in theatre, journalism, music, and beyond, and naturally also encompasses Chris Jagger’s childhood in Kent alongside brother Mick Jagger. Brotherhood also plays a role in some of the songs and videos for Mixing Up The Medicine, including a vocal and visual cameo from Mick on “Anyone Seen My Heart?” and a thematic and visual call-out on “Hey Brother”. 

But the new album also has some literary and rather playful antecedents, drawing on a series of short writings called Death’s Jest Book by 19^th century author Thomas Lovell Beddoes, some of which were adapted into new songs like “Love’s Horn”. The wide range of genres evident on Mixing Up The Medicine show an ease with “crooner” traditions, as well as Jazz, Blues, and even Western sounds to deliver some haunting and emotive moments. I spoke with Chris Jagger about the development of both Talking to Myself and Mixing Up The Medicine as overlapping experiences drawing from his life and musical memories, something evidenced even in an album track also titled “Talking to Myself”. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: I’ve been really intrigued by the different Blues and early Rock elements I can hear on the new album. 

Chris Jagger: I wouldn’t say specifically that the new album is a Blues album, though there is a bit of that in there. With something like “Merry Go Round”, that’s kind of New Orleans-y, and the third track, “Love’s Around The Corner” is probably the most Blues-y. There are a few different influences there, I’d say. 

HMS: Can you tell me about coming to those traditions as a young person and the kind of impact they had on you?

Chris Jagger: When I was young, it was Skiffle. It was a kind of British invasion, a British take on Rockabilly, and that was around with Lonnie Donegan. That was fun and I listened to that. It was the entre for an awful lot of people, including my brother, because it was pretty simple and you could practically make your own instruments. It was washboards and tea-chest bass. 

The great thing about Folk music and some kinds of Pop music is that you don’t have to be overqualified for it. You have to be able to hold a tune and play a couple of chords. You haven’t got to go to a conservatory for ten years or read a lot of books. It’s popularistic, which is what’s good about it. It’s a bit like going to a cinema, it’s open to everybody. Some people get into it for a little while, some people hang with it, and some people move on. Blues is a little bit like that because although it can be quite sophisticated, it can also be basic, so it’s a good entry point. You need to get your fingers around A, B, and E, and you can start playing your own little Blues songs. 

But why did people turn onto Blues music? That’s an interesting question. I think one of the things in Britain is that although you might be hearing someone sing about the Mississippi Delta, it was in English. Also, for me, part of the attraction was that it was quite grown up. Obviously, these guys had had some quite serious sexual experiences and they didn’t mind singing about them. Whereas Pop music was a bit wet, “I took my baby to the movies, Ooo, Ooo, Ooo, Ooo, And we kissed, Ooo, Ooo, Ooo, Ooo.” 

Back then, they didn’t even mention sex in Pop music, or it probably would have been banned. Blues music was all about two-timing and getting drunk. It turned you on to another world. I mention this somewhere in the book, but the song, “Mannish Boy” by Muddy Waters, is something I asked my brother about. And he told me that it was about racial prejudice. You get a political education as well about what was going on. You got an inkling into the situation. You were seeing it from the situation of the “have-nots”, not the “haves”. 

HMS: Did you ever travel to the United States as a young person and encounter this music or these situations?

Chris Jagger: No, I did some touring in the early 70s. We were probably protected from it pretty well. I was playing music and stuff, but I did my traveling across Asia and India. I cover a lot of this in the book, but I was away for a year and a half. That was kind of like my university experience. We were the downtrodden hippies, really. The way that hippies travelled was different than the way that anyone had travelled before, because we would sit in these tea shops on the street and drink tea with ordinary people. Whereas tourists with money, though there weren’t many there then, would stay in luxury hotels. We sort of slummed it.

HMS: Obviously, that’s going to change how you see and feel about the world, to see it on the ground-level like that. Was there also musical stuff that was reaching you, causing you to think differently about music?

Chris Jagger: Yes, one of the reasons that I went to India was that I was intrigued by the music. I wanted to meet musicians and hear music. I was fascinated by it. It wasn’t a particularly deep or spiritual reason that I went to India, though you could say that music is a part of that. Throughout the book, there’s lots of music. I thought that might interest readers who are into music, so I include lots of musical stuff, whether it’s just thinking about music, hearing music, or meeting musicians. 

HMS: You seem to be open to a lot of musical traditions in your own music, so this helps explain that, too. And you like many stringed instruments, to judge from your album cover. 

Chris Jagger: My fiddle player set that up! That was entirely her idea. But yes, I’m really bad at playing quite a few different instruments. 

HMS: What about the title for the album, Mixing Up The Medicine? At first, I thought of the idea that music is like medicine for people. But then I realized there are different ways of reading that line, like maybe getting the medicine wrong? 

Chris Jagger: You sure could. I hadn’t thought about that. I was thinking, for the cover, of having a picture of me, sitting there with the jars labelled with groove, bassline, rhythm, and stuff like that. But a great friend of mine said not to be so literal. I came up with the title of the book, Talking to Myself, then wrote the song, “Talking to Myself”, kind of explaining the process you go through when writing a book. I thought that was original, since as far as I know, no one has ever created a song that has the same title as their book. So I was thinking of giving the album the same, title, too.  But very late in the day, with a bit of brinkmanship, I came up with the title. [Laughs] I came up with the title when shoved into a corner, but later realized it was a line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine.” I wasn’t consciously remembering that, but that’s quite often how things happen. In fact, the title of my book, Talking to Myself, had a few people saying, “I don’t know about that. Have you got anything else?” So I said, “What about ‘Relative Obscurity’?” 

HMS: [Laughs] That is pretty good! 

Chris Jagger: They said “no”! Then I heard a famous writer, Alan Bennett, who’s very respected over here, talking on the radio. He went to America with Beyond the Fringe, in 1963 or something with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and a whole bunch of these hip young guys. On the radio, he said, “Well, writing, it’s a bit like talking to yourself, really.” And I thought, “Yes. If Alan Bennett says it, I know that I’m onto a good thing.” But I thought I’d have a different title for the album. 

HMS: Well, music does really have a positive impact on the world, like medicine, and there’s a lot of energy and warmth to this album, so the title fits.

Chris Jagger: Yes, and there are no computers and no wrapping in the middle of the songs. 

HMS: How did the writing go on these songs? Was it a whole album process, or did it go song by song?

Chris Jagger: What happened was that I took 2019 off to write this book, so the idea was that I wasn’t going to do many gigs, though I did actually do some. The idea was that I’d start writing in the mornings. I’d get up and start writing on the book in the mornings, but only if I felt good. If I felt shitty, I wouldn’t go and write because I wouldn’t be in the right mood. I wanted it to be positive and enjoyable. I didn’t want it to be a task, even though I knew it was a discipline. I didn’t want it to be onerous. I did the writing, then around lunchtime, I would have done enough by then. I’d leave that because it was doing my head in. Then, in the afternoon, I could write some songs. 

So that worked well for writing songs. It just didn’t work well for playing gigs. With playing gigs, you have to drive somewhere, you have to fly somewhere, and you come back, and on Monday morning, you’re shattered and you don’t want to start writing a book. I got Charlie Hart involved, and I had a working title that was “Tales of Romance and Intrigue”. So as we came up with songs, I’d say, “That one goes in ‘Romance’”, or “That one goes in ‘Intrigue’”. He wasn’t particularly convinced by the title, but it’s good to have a working title, since it makes it real, even if you don’t end up using it in the end. 

HMS: How did the writer Thomas Beddoes come into it?

Chris Jagger: What happened was that I wasn’t really writing interesting words for the songs, but I had found this author, Thomas Beddoes. Beddoes was a kind of failed poet who had quite a famous father, who knew [Percy Bysshe] Shelley and everything. This was the beginning of the 19^th century, and I think he was gay, which was a stigma then. He struggled a lot and wrote this book called Death’s Jest Book, since he was intrigued by death. In fact, part of it was set to music around 1900 and I’ve actually heard that. I did do a version of it, “If There Were Dreams To Sell, What Would You Buy?” That was the first song I did of Beddoes. Then he goes into calling up ghosts and everything like this. He was quite seriously into it. I pulled out some other lyrics of his and started putting them to music. 

So there are three songs on the album that Beddoes wrote the lyrics for. I just found it really intriguing because he was writing stuff that, obviously, I would never write. It was quite archaic. Even when he was writing these lyrics, he was harking back to Shakespeare. I was also intrigued because it was harking back to before the Age of Reason, so there’s a bit of magic in there. There’s one song called “Wee Wee Taylor”, which is about this taylor who steals the eggs from this witch, and she turns him into a hen, and then he lays eggs. It’s a pretty weird story, and I thought, “This is quite dark”. When Charlie came down, it just so happened that Dr. John had just died, and we are big fans of Dr. John. So I said, “Let’s do a kind of Dr. John voodoo thing.” That was the inspiration behind it. 

The inspiration for the songs is that each song has a kind of vibe, which Indians would call “rasa” a flavor, or something like that. When we were doing a song, whatever we did in that song, it had to fit into that vibe. Some of the songs are kind of Swing. So then it had to swing. Whatever you added to it, it had to make it swing. If it didn’t make it swing, it had to go. Charlie had a song called “Merry Go Round”, which was quite straight, so I said, “No”. But then I said, “Let’s do a Professor Longhair on it.” So we changed the rhythm and I wrote some more words for it. It was the most collaborative album we’ve done together, and I’ve known Charlie for over 50 years. 

We both really dug Mose Allison, and in fact, Charlie had played bass with Mose Allison when he did gigs in London many years ago. We dig the piano thing, so we put together “Talking to Myself”. I sang the words to him, and he put the music together. Then I said, “We can’t just have one song like that, so let’s have a couple.” That’s when the other Swing songs came in. It harks back to the days of Bing Crosby. 

HMS: It seems like it must have been difficult to bring these genre elements together, but you make it sound so easy. With “Love’s Horn”, the lyrics are so archaic, and the images are so folkloric and interesting, but how do you put that to music? Did you cut any lyrics there?

Chris Jagger: It wasn’t easy. Yes, we cut the lyrics a little bit. And on “Wee Wee Taylor”, we just repeated “Wee Wee Taylor, Nobody was paler.” Especially with the other songs, and really all of them, we did work quite hard on the arrangement. Charlie came down here to visit me in the country, and I have a big kitchen. We set up a piano. I’d be in the kitchen cooking dinner, and Charlie would be on the piano, and I’d say, “No, not that.” That was the key to it. 

Also, I was trying to extend some of those songs, so they actually developed into something. If you listen to those classic songs, with Frank Sinatra and these guys, the arrangements in that are what makes them. I know Frank Sinatra was a classic singer, but the arrangements were really well worked out. They also go somewhere. Now, if you develop a lot of your music with machines, if you’re not careful, the computer will just lead you on. The only way to get it to stop is to hit the stop button.

HMS: Did you record Mixing Up The Medicine in a live way?

Chris Jagger: Yes, it was mostly recorded before lockdown. We went into a studio for two days and recorded seven tracks. The other three have been recorded at Charlie’s house with a slightly different line up. In January 2020, we put in the horns, and in March, there was lockdown. But I hadn’t done the vocals, so I had to do all the vocals myself, which was really good fun. I did bottom lines and double tracking myself, aside from one track, which I got Mick to sing on. 

I wanted to put him on something, but he was stuck in Italy, so I sent it over to him. But he didn’t have a studio set up, so someone came along and set one up for him, then he sent it back to me. I actually sent it back to him, saying, “It’s actually quite good, but it’s not enough. Can you do more?” [Laughs] And then I got it back and I think he did a really good job. I was really pleased with him. The thing is, when you have family relationships, that’s all very well, but you have to do things together, or it’s fairly empty. I do music and so does he, so the natural thing is for us to do music together. That’s a good thing.