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Thirty years into their career, Jump have made their most charged album to date. In a candid conversation, John Dexter Jones takes Prog to the dark heart of Breaking Point.
Words: Grant Moon Portrait: Sound Marketing
John Dexter Jones and Ronnie Rundle, photographed for Prog. The rest of the band were in lockdown so unable to attend the shoot. Sign o’ the times, eh?
“We had domestic politics to worry about in Wales in the 80s,” says Jump’s singer and polemicist-in-chief, Bangor-born John Dexter Jones, “with Thatcher and [the Battle of] Orgreave and things like that. I remember predicting, when I was leaving uni in 1984, that, domestically, this would visit us again. But not even I would have anticipated that breakdown of conscience on the world stage.”
Prog is in the throes of an animated conversation about populism, Brexit, Trump, the Middle East – the whole geo-political quagmire we’ve all been in for, well, it seems like forever, doesn’t it? And Jump’s current album, Breaking Point, is just steeped in that zeitgeist. “Lots of Jump albums are concept albums,” says Jones, “not in that traditional prog sense, but on this one I wanted us to jump in the swimming pool of prog with both feet. Simply put, it’s about how refugees became pariahs.”
UK readers might remember UKIP’s highly controversial pro-Leave poster campaign during the 2016 EU referendum – the one featuring a long line of migrants with the words ‘Breaking Point’ emblazoned across it. Jones does, and he was – and remains – absolutely sickened by it: “They were showing pictures of lines of brown refugees on the side of a lorry, for a political argument about Europe. This was coming out of playbooks from before World War II. People say: ‘Nobody’s talking about this in music.’ Yes, they fucking are! Maybe coming from Sting or [Coldplay’s] Chris Martin it’d carry more weight, but I’ve been doing it for 40 years, 30 of them in Jump.”