Sunna interview

Wednesday 29th July 2009

It was a good line and it was one which stopped Simon Cowell in his tracks, blowing a hole in his one-size-fits-all plan for a young band.

Sizing up the singer – a dead ringer for Hollywood’s Robert Downey Jr – he could see the pound signs materialising, if only the singer would jump through the necessary hoops. They could be another Take That. “Great, great,” said Cowell with a huge grin. “We’ll have you back-flipping across the stage in no time.” Pause. The singer fixes Cowell with a steely stare. “I’m a musician, not a gymnast.”

That was 1996, when Cowell was head of A&R (Artist and Repertoire) with the music group BMG. Within months of the run-in, the music-mogul-in-the-making had bounced the young frontman, Jon Harris, off the label, unwittingly setting him on the road to worldwide success and critical acclaim with his band Sunna – because like other setbacks that would come his way, the bitter experience served only to make Harris more determined.

At their peak, Sunna played to adoring audiences of 20,000, supporting bands like Smashing Pumpkins and A Perfect Circle; their debut album One Minute Science, with its stand-out singles Power Struggle and I’m Not Trading, sold 150,000 copies and Power Struggle featured in the hit Kevin Bacon movie The Hollow Man.

Record companies and music critics struggled to pigeonhole the band. Trying to pin down their sound – unsettling and comforting at the same time, guitar-drenched, deconstructed, dance crossover – was like trying to catch mercury between your fingers. But fans loved their quicksilver sound, the way they eased effortlessly between genres and styles.

The first album was a triumph, fulfilling all the promise they were showing in their live gigs, with Jon’s muscular but delicate vocals and open-heart lyrics filling – for many fans – that aching void left by one of his own heroes, Kurt Cobain. Then ... a sudden nothing, like the deafening silence after an explosion. Now, at long last, after an eight-year vanishing act, they are on the eve of their long-awaited comeback – much to the delight of their die-hard fans around the world, who have shown astonishing loyalty to a band who only ever released one album, on Massive Attack’s Virgin-subsidiary Melankolik label.

Jon and long-time musical partner-in-crime Ian MacLaren have mastered the new album Two Minute Terror and are in the process of putting together a band to tour again.

So ... One Minute Science, Nine Year Silence – what happened?!

Jon: “Virgin and EMI were going to merge, because Virgin were having problems. They sacked the head of A&R, who was a biker who loved and understood rock music – so obviously he had to go. And they brought in a French guy who didn’t get it, didn’t like rock music, and his job was to come in a save money. We had spent £1million of Virgin’s money on touring, promotion, photo sessions, recording sessions and crew wages. That was why we were dropped.”

Overnight, everything stopped – the juggernaut of momentum that had been building up just shuddered to a halt. The record company’s excitement and enthusiasm about the band’s new material, the tours, the crowds, the deal to provide the theme tune to the second Spiderman movie – everything. Jon was devastated and fell into a self-destructive spiral of drink and drugs.

“It hit me really hard when we lost that deal,” remembers Jon, who lives in Portbury, near Bristol. “That second album would have really taken off for us. Everything was really bubbling away. Literally a week before we were due to deliver the track for the Spiderman movie, we were dropped. Every phone call just ended. It went completely silent. From steaming along, always in motion, always something happening – to absolutely nothing.

“We had already been using drugs to prolong our working hours when we were on the road and recording. I was already in that place where I was dabbling. But I just fell into a pit, really. I nearly drowned myself in gin. There was a period of about eight months when I just nose-dived. Took any drug I could get my hands on. I was drinking neat gin in the morning, just to get me out of bed.”

What pulled him out of his nosedive before he headed into the ultimate crash-landing was his five-year-old son. I woke up one morning and suddenly realised that my life was slipping away from me and that I had a bigger responsibility – a responsibility to other people.

“I understand that many people have a lot of problems giving up drugs, coming off things, having to use methadone or whatever they take to come down, but I’ve always been ‘all or nothing’. I either throw myself into something completely or just remove myself from it – and that’s what I did. I just applied the same mentality. I didn’t take any medication – that was it.”

Jon threw himself back into the creative process, writing every day and recording in the home studio system he had installed in his son’s bedroom.

“Since we’ve been away I’ve largely ignored the music industry,” he says. “I’ve shut down to it and just carried on writing my own stuff, been in my own bubble as far as music is concerned. I’ve been getting into bluegrass and hillbilly (Jon has a bluegrass side project band, Aereoplane, which plays local gigs) because I just want to get as far away as possible from the industry side of things. I’d love to be able to drop some band names, and I’m sure there are bands out there who are doing something original, but I’m so far removed from the scene, especially the British scene. I still listen to all the stuff I used to listen to, but it’s difficult for me to comment on up-and-coming bands because I’m not really involved.”

So, back to Sunna – and the comeback.

“Sunna was always me and Ian. The record company wanted me to promote Sunna as just me and I was saying ‘no, I want a band’. Back in the day I was a bit nervous about it all, I didn’t want all the attention on me. If you look or read any old interviews with us, I’m quite horrible to the people doing the interviewing.

“I do a lot of writing on my own. Ian comes up with a lot of genius stuff and I write over. It’s always been like that and it’s always going to be that way.

“We will be getting a band together. And if the musicians that come on board are dedicated to it and they’ve got good ideas and they’re performing well then they will become band members. We hope to get a solid unit together that will become the permanent Sunna. If we don’t, it will just be me and Ian. We have created that sound.”

As before, the live show will be a big part of what they do – and Bristol looms large in their plans.

“Definitely – we are planning something before the end of the year,” promises Jon.

“And we’d like to do some Bristol gigs ... maybe some secret Bristol gigs! We’ll probably do several little gigs around Bristol to get ourselves ready. I think we need to something in the region of 10 gigs in Bristol before we actually go out on the road. I’d like to use those gigs as rehearsals, sort out the problems as they happen. Problems on stage can be quite funny, anyway.

“One time we were playing to a crowd of about 6,000 in New York and I just stopped it because we had made a mistake, so we started again – and people loved it. They can see you’re human, you’re not just some machine. It wasn’t embarrassing – it was real, and everyone was applauding.”

And he paid tribute to the “amazing fans” who stuck with the band – even when there wasn’t a band to stick to.

“I’ve been watching the internet over the years. Three years after we broke up, people were asking ‘where’s this new album?’. After five years, people are STILL asking about it. It’s mad – it does seem that there’s a cult following out there. Perhaps it’s because we didn’t go mainstream, but the loyal fans that we have – they’ve stuck with it. Hopefully we won’t let them down with this album.”

To keep tabs on news about Sunna’s forthcoming album and secret Bristol gigs, go to www.myspace.com/sunnauk or follow them via Twitter: www.twitter.com/sunna2009