Jonny's Norman Blake and Euros Childs Make Their Own Musical History

Back in early January, some weeks before its release date, the first review of Jonny's much-buzzed-about debut album appeared on the web. It was, it's fair to say, a somewhat ambivalent appraisal. The critic bemoaned the LP's frequent whimsical flourishes -- opener 'Wich is Wich,' for instance, with its glam-pop approach to the vexed question of sorceress identification ('Has she got a green nose? Well, I suppose') or 'Cave Dance''s mid-album left-turn from jaunty boogie to sleepy prog freak-out -- while lauding its more superficially appealing forays into dreamy folk-pop as an example of what could have been achieved if (paraphrasing here) the two protagonists had pulled their socks up and stopped playing silly buggers.

One can only hope the reviewer skipped Jonny's debut London gig a few days later. Before a sold-out crowd, Norman Blake and Euros Childs offered a deliriously ramshackle run-through of their creation, veering from shimmering beauty to Flight of the Conchords-esque bumbling, often in the space of a single chorus. Highlights included a running battle with a misfiring drum machine and an a capella encore of Geoff Goddard's oddball 1963 hit 'Sky Men' that was notable for both being utterly lovely and missing half of the correct lyrics. Jonny, it was becoming abundantly clear, do not take themselves too seriously.

"We can be a bit more eclectic with the Jonny stuff," Blake tells Spinner the next afternoon, over coffee in a Shoreditch bar. "There are funny songs on the album. It's an enjoyable thing, not angsty at all." A distinct lack of angst is evident in conversation, too, as the pair giggle at each other's jokes, and happily indulge requests to name their favourite other Jonnies. (Blake offers up Morris, Weismuller and Noakes, who is vetoed on the grounds of being strictly a 'John'; Childs plumps for a more musical selection of Marr, Rotten and Hallyday).

The germ of Jonny took shape more than a decade ago. Childs' then band Gorky's Zygotic Mynci supported Teenage Fanclub on tour; Fannies frontman Blake returned the favour by providing harmonies on Gorky's sun-woozy 2001 masterpiece 'How I Long to Feel That Summer in My Heart.' The pair kept in touch over the years, before sitting down with the idea of writing a couple of songs and possibly putting out a 7-inch single. The concept quickly expanded to an album as a twopiece and eventually turned into a full band endeavour a couple of days before they were due to commence work at Chemikal Underground's recording studio in Glasgow.

"I'm friendly with Paul Savage who runs that studio, and he gave me some time," Blake explains. "We thought it was a nice space and they had a room to set up a band." A rhythm section of ex-BMX Bandit Stuart Kidd (Blake: "he's a big fan of Euros' music, and we thought he'd be perfect person to play drums") and Teenage Fanclub's Dave McGowan was thus recruited. "They'd hear the song about once or twice, and then -- I couldn't believe it -- by the second or third take of every song the song was all ready to go," says Childs. "They were only there for about two days." The entire album was completed in a week.

The result is a charming sliver of a record, with supergroup pomposity (as if that was ever a possibility with this most low-key of duos) cast aside in favour of 40 minutes of cheerfully scattergun pop treats. 'You Was Me' is a chugging American road trip anthem from the 1970s reworked for pottering around the misty Celtic countryside in a Morris Minor; 'Circling the Sun' a three-minute morsel of gorgeous, swooning country pop that ranks alongside the best of its creators' esteemed back catalogues. More esoterically, there is 'Bread,' an endearingly loopy nursery rhyme about a "lonely baker" that culminates in a chant of "spin round, round, round butter on."

"My wife had bought me a book about breads of the world," says Blake. "I thought maybe it would be a nice idea to start baking some bread because I'd gotten into my forties, and that's what's you do when you get into your forties." Unless you're indie rock godfather Norman Blake, it seems, in which case you instead compose a frankly bonkers ditty about the boulanger's arts: "It's really a discussion about bread and its merits. There's a band called Bread but nobody's written a song about bread." ("Actually, I tell a lie," he adds, before breaking into Paul Young's dreadful '70s novelty hit 'Toast.')

'Cave Dance,' meanwhile, is at least the best song about the Neolithic cutting of rugs since Wu-Tang Clan's 'Gravel Pit.' According to Childs, the pair were "talking about what video we were going to watch one night, and Norman suggested 'Cave Dance' (Blake: "a film which doesn't exist"). So we set the task of 'tomorrow, we will write 'Cave Dance'.' We sat down and by the end of the day, musical history had been made."

As the pair fall about laughing at Childs' faux grandeur, there seems little chance of Jonny adopting a more sober approach to their collaborative art, whatever their detractors might hope for. When they can knock out an album as surprising and delightful as this in barely a week, why would they?