Johnny Jewel: ‘The first David Lynch film I saw was Elephant Man. I cried for over a week’

Johnny Jewel has a kind word for everyone. Dialling in from Los Angeles, the producer, David Lynch collaborator and former leader of the subterranean synth sorcerers Chromatics talks enthusiastically about the pioneering genius of Madonna’s first two albums, his role in the revival of Kate Bush (small but significant) and that time he and Saoirse Ronan recorded a song in a kitchen. But ahead of his concert in Ireland this week he is particularly passionate about the great TV hatewatch of 2023: the Weeknd’s music-industry cringefest, The Idol.

Jewel is a friend of the Weeknd – real name Abel Tesfaye – who sought him out to remix his megahit Blinding Lights. He was briefly attached to work on The Idol, a collaboration between Tesfaye and Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, which Rolling Stone described as “nasty, brutish ... and way, way worse than you’d have anticipated”. Jewel has never been one to go with the flow: for the record, he thinks The Idol was a five-star knockout.

[ The Idol: Nobody makes something this dreadful by accident ]

“I loved it. I was attached to it when there was a previous director, before Sam,” he says, referring to Amy Seimetz, who reportedly left amid creative differences with the Weeknd. “And then the project morphed a few times. I enjoyed watching it. Honestly, anyone who’s slagging it, imagine you don’t know it’s the Weeknd. And it’s someone’s first project. They did amazing.”

As a cineaste, he couldn’t get enough of the directorial references that Tesfaye and Levinson smuggled into the show. “There’s [Stanley] Kubrick, [Dario] Argento. There’s [Nicolas Winding] Refn. It hangs in the air a lot, like [Refn’s minimalist horror] Neon Demon. There’s also [Brian] De Palma. There’s a lot of things. I enjoyed watching it, enjoyed the music that Mike Dean did for it. And for everybody saying Abel can’t act, the Tedros character couldn’t be further from how Abel is in real life. So he can act. That’s not him at all.”

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In The Idol, a Britney Spears-style pop star played by Lily-Rose Depp tries to cope as life comes at her at full speed. Much the same can be said of Jewel, best known as the driving force behind Glass Candy and Chromatics – groups that extracted maximum effect from the twin aesthetic of chilly electro soundscapes and retro female vocals (courtesy of Ida No and Ruth Radelet, respectively).

Chromatics split in 2021 amid an apparent collapse in the relationship between Jewel and the rest of the band. But the drama in Jewel’s life precedes that break-up. When he was 17 he was kidnapped at gunpoint near his family home in Houston, Texas, and held hostage for 36 hours. Then, in 2015, he almost drowned while swimming in Hawaii. These traumas have remained with him – but he is determined to use them as a positive.

“How you view it doesn’t change what happens in your life,” he says. “I’m an inspired person who wants to do things. I’m motivated. I chose to focus on the upside because it’s useful. The downside doesn’t help me with what I want to do. Also, there’s a million people that have a much harder experience. I feel grateful that, in terms of trauma and hardship, my life is fairly uneventful compared to other people. I’m thankful for that. It would be disrespectful to how fortunate I’ve been to focus on those singular moments that were maybe a little bit of a challenge.”

Jewel, whose real name is John David Padgett, comes to Dublin as part of his new tour, on which he will be performing music written for films such as Drive, Bronson and Lost River (which starred Ronan and for which she and Jewel recorded a track).

Expect plenty of references to Twin Peaks, too. In 2017 Lynch sought Jewel out to contribute to the score of Twin Peaks: The Return, his long-awaited sequel to his early-1990s procedural horror. Chromatics went one better and appeared on screen performing in the purgatorial depths of the show’s Roadhouse Bar.

“The first David Lynch film I saw was Elephant Man. It was on HBO in the early 1980s. That completely destroyed me. I was maybe seven or eight. I cried for over a week because I thought the movie was so sad. There was this feeling, a looming heaviness I could relate to. I’m not sure why that is or any logical connection. His work always inspired me and resonated with me on a deep level.

[ David Lynch: As a father and husband ‘you gotta be selfish’ ]

“It was great to be able to give back. It felt there was a seed that was planted, especially when I saw Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me,” Jewel says, referring to Lynch’s unsettling Twin Peaks prequel. “That grew 25 years later into a few pieces of music. That was a unique, once-in-a-lifetime situation – there’s a director that has a sonic signature that is so deeply implemented into your own DNA. Then, to work together later, it’s very unique.”

Cinema is his first love, says Jewel. He thinks of himself not as a musician but as a director who works in the medium of sound: rather than get caught up in the minutiae of a tune, he looks down from above, like De Palma or Scorsese planning a big set piece in the 1970s.

“When I was a teenager my primary focus was painting,” he says. “I was coming through everything through the visual medium first. Then, through being obsessed with Andy Warhol, I discovered the Velvet Underground. Which led me to John Cale and Nico and that kind of experimental music. I started making noise music – field recordings, musique concrète experiments.”

He was drawn down the rabbit hole and found that he didn’t want to come out. “I became so into it, I put painting aside. I’ve always approached music from a visual aspect – a massive appreciation for negative space. That’s where the film world collides with it. I focus on texture and minimalism. That’s perfect for film: it leaves room for the dialogue, the narrative. The music I make is so linear, it moves well with pictures. I would say the atmosphere of films and also books inspire me sonically – when I watch things and read things.”

That isn’t to say he doesn’t care deeply about music. For him, pop is one of the purest forms of artistic expression. That’s why he curated a tribute LP to Madonna’s early music, released two years ago on his label Italians Do It Better (featuring artists as diverse as the Los Angeles electro singer Glüme and the Belarusian postpunk trio Dlina Volny). And why he was ahead of the curve covering Bush’s Running Up That Hill, on Chromatics’s 2007 LP Night Drive – more than a decade before Stranger Things introduced Bush to Generation TikTok.

“She deserves that recognition – it’s incredible,” he says of Bush. “It’s great to see her get that recognition and discovery. Hopefully, it leads into her albums as well. It’s a cool needle drop of a pop song on a TV show. I’m friends with Michael and Kyle,” he says, referring to the Stranger Things soundtrack composers Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon. “It’s awesome to see all the worlds inter-collide in that way.”

Chromatics were a huge cult band: they packed Vicar Street in Dublin in October 2019, the concert a memory to treasure when the world closed down a few months later. But the gaps between albums were growing ever longer. In the end it was Jewel’s perfectionist streak that reportedly convinced his bandmates to pull the plug while working on what would have been their seventh LP, Dear Tommy.

In the aftermath of the break-up, Dear Tommy has spawned a complex mythology. One theory is that Jewel wiped the record after his near-drowning in Hawaii. Whatever the truth, fans are desperate to hear it and hopeful it may eventually see daylight. Jewel appreciates that people love to mythologise their favourite music. The truth, he says, is that most of the material from that LP has already been released. There’s no mystery or conspiracy, much as the Chromatics audience might like to imagine otherwise.

“Again, like with directors, every director has 10 movies that they tried to make. My main takeaway from [the Dear Tommy conversation] is it’s a massive compliment to how much people care about my work that there’s such a myth around it, for people wanting to hear it. But 90 per cent of the music was released. It just didn’t come out in its intended form, the intended version. That’s part of the beauty of life. There’s always things we want to do that we can’t do for some reason or another. It makes you appreciate the things you can do. There’s a fatalistic romanticism about it that is interesting. I appreciate it.”

Johnny Jewel performs his scores for Drive, Twins Peaks and other productions at the Sugar Club, in Dublin, on Wednesday, November 15th