More Than Meets The Ear
Eight years after their last studio album, Jadis have returned with More Questions Than Answers. Prog catches up with bandleader Gary Chandler to find out about what might just be their career-best recording and why he has no plans to give up.
Words: Nick Shilton Images: Keith Curtis
Jadis are still ticking along quite nicely, thank you.
As time passes, progressive rock bands come and go. A small handful scale the dizzy heights of significant album sales and extensive international tours, performing sell-out shows in decent-sized, reasonably salubrious venues and making a comfortable living. But that’s not the experience of the majority of prog acts, many of whom are active for a few years before beating a retreat and calling it quits, hopefully with their creative ambitions satisfied to varying degrees, albeit usually to the detriment of their bank balances. Somewhere between those two extremes, there are the stalwarts who plug away decade after decade, never giving up, always doggedly persevering. Only eight years short of racking up half a century as a going concern, Jadis epitomise this last category.
Gary Chandler, the band’s lead vocalist/ guitarist and sole ever-present, is candid about Jadis’s lengthy journey.
“I suppose the folly and naïvety of my younger self believed that if you put enough effort and time into something, you will at some point reap the rewards. I was very, very wrong!”
“If Martin [Orford] is in an environment where the people all get on and it’s an easier situation, he’s happy to be involved. He’s put so much into this album and done some really good stuff.”