Jim Fry Interview

Kevin Quinn interviews Jim Fry, visual artist and star-snapper, author, musician, disc jockey and overall, a prose and conceptualist.

New book and LP Jodrell Atomic proffer what all art forms should ideally set out to achieve. Embodying the call to arms of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), a UK socialist organisation whose members included Eleanor Marx and William Morris, “Educate, agitate, organise” (first used in an 1883 pamphlet), both these essential products are analogue multimedia forms: a book that speaks, an album that informs.

Celebrating ideas of the future, Fry has created a two-pronged attack on popular culture’s current stasis. The LP, created with Fry’s dormant beat-combo, The Pre New, offers remedies through melodies, tonics via sonics and panaceas for the ears.

The Pre New’s fourth album is born from the pages of Jodrell Atomic, a new publication of words and photography by the band’s in-house singer, Jim Fry.

The book (which came first) is buried deep in the tedious Cheshire suburbia, yet in the shadow of the vast and majestic Jodrell Bank telescope, where everything is happening in deep space while nothing much at all happens on ground level. A past, present, future collide-a-scope. a “sublime tourism through teenage imagination.”

This brand-new PRE NEW material (an assortment of jazz-inflected groovers, electro-glam, Dadaesque cut-ups) sits alongside offbeat cover versions of songs by Hot Chocolate, Rita & the Tiaras, Anne Peebles, and Joe Meek, with additional musical and production contributions from Luke Haines, Drealise, and Quatermass 3.

“We tend to talk about an idea for about five years and make the new album in a week,” says Jim “So, the process for Jodrell Atomic was pretty impulsive, quick-thinking, and feral. We recorded it in frantic slabs; I hope it has a dirty edge. It’s a perfect playlist for this cautious age of A.I.”

The record stands up as the bastard son of The Pre New’s earlier work: Music for People Who Hate Themselves (2012), Music for Homeowners (2013), and The Male Eunuch (2015).

A pair of complementary love letters to two exhibits of exploration and wonder: Mount Fuji in Japan and the Lovell Telescope (Jodrell Bank) in Cheshire, England. Two vantage points, lenses, natural and technical reminders of what might be up, out, beyond the horizon.

What’s Jodrell Atomic all about, Jim? Life, but not as we once knew it?

It’s a nod to growing up in suburbia, where everything feels flat and cautious on the surface, but underneath, there’s a lot going on. 
You know that opening sequence in [David Lynch’s] Blue Velvet, where the man watering his lawn collapses, and the camera drops below the grass, and suddenly there’s all this frantic insect life? That always felt like a perfect image for where I grew up. On the outside, it was safe, dull, nothing much happening. But just up the road, there’s this enormous piece of space hardware, the Lovell Telescope, quietly tracking interplanetary activity and Cold War nonsense while you were bored out of your head, watching paint dry and eating beans on toast or egg and chips.

That tension, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, is really what Jodrell Atomic is about. Both the book and the record came from that same feeling.

How did the book & LP come about? A case of prose and concept?

It started with the book, Photography is my natural home, and I would shoot Jodrell Bank every time I took the train, which raced past it to and from Manchester. I ended up with a whole bunch of photos. I started to walk around the area with the camera and then visited the site itself, and of course, the gift shop and car park (for over 100 cars).

I worked up an idea in response to a book called Funeral Train by Paul Fusco, who was on the train from New York to Washington, DC when it carried the body of the assassinated Bobby Kennedy in June 1968. The photographer took stills of local Americans who had come trackside to pay their respects to the politician as the train ran through their neighbourhood. The published book of photographs is an intriguing snapshot of Americana at that point in history.

I also remembered Wolfgang Tillmans’ pictures of Concorde from his back garden in London. Around 5pm every day, the plane would take off at Heathrow, he would document it regularly with his camera. If you were further Southwest (as my Mum and Dad were, near Plymouth), you would hear the sonic boom, and it went Mac 2/ Supersonic around 20 minutes later. This was the high-spec, futuristic, modern world right under our noses every day.

With Jodrell Atomic, I avoided the more serious facts, I made a point that it was not a textbook, and I took a more romantic view, I guess. I got carried away with the tourism of it all, the ‘tea-towelling’ and ‘mug’ production and parking (for over 100 cars) that orbits around the Lovell Telescope.

The Pre New were settled all over the world now, but there had been talk about doing something again. As the book took shape, an idea of a soundtrack seemed to manifest, and with a few tracks coming from different people and the words from the book to play with, the record started to take shape. It’s the first time a ‘brief’ was in place before we made the record, that’s why it's referred to as a ‘soundtrack’ in sync with the book.

In the book, you align Jodrell Bank/the Lovell Telescope in Cheshire, UK, with Japan’s Mount Fuji, connecting the man-made monument for looking up, out and beyond to the natural mound. What can they, and us, learn from each other’s symbolism?

I did that because I felt like it.

We can all get a bit ‘factcheck’ about all the truth surrounding science and what we think we know about the natural world, but the truth is, I just did it without explanation. Everything doesn’t need to be actual, does it? Sorry if that’s a bit of a two-dimensional answer, but I am very much a 2D sort of creature; I don’t have a problem admitting that.

Both the Lovell Telescope and Mount Fuji are sublime of course, and to see them with your bare eyes is awe inspiring, that goes without saying, but beyond that I did see a connection between the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s set of 36 + 10 prints of Fuji, … the ‘grown up’ fine art theory leading you down another rabbit hole… but then I read that he really created the prints of Fuji to promote tourism for the region, so to see them on mugs and tea towels is to see them in their natural habitat.

I figured I would edit down my Jodrell Bank pictures to 36 and another 10 as Hokusai did with this prints of Mt Fuji, and as this was happening I became aware of how many ‘Great Wave Fuji’ images were in my house alone, I mean it must be on the same scale as Elvis, the Beatles and Queen Elizabeth II out there, and obviously I would love my Jodrell Pictures to have the same overkill.

Any symbolism ‘learned’ or stumbled across would have to come from the viewer, reader, or listener, not from me. That’s the exciting part.

‘CANADIAN DATA’ is both a melancholic lament and poptimistic enough to offer some hope. Can you elaborate on this particular track’s potency?

The Pre New are Pop Heads, I make no apology for that, and I think this comes through with ‘CANADIAN DATA’, it’s almost a real song.

We’d been listening to a lot of Yellow Magic Orchestra (again, a Japanese reference), and Laurence Bray had come down to the studio as we were editing the whole thing together, but he insisted we write a new track, so we pulled it together with producer Tim Larcombe in about an hour. Big sections of the album were made remotely, so being in the studio with LB was refreshing.

The Canadian reference? Well, I really miss Stuart Wheldon not being around when we’re writing. New Stu (as we call him) was born not that far from Jodrell Bank before his family emigrated to Canada as a kid. I guess the song is referencing the old world we were all trapped in and the new shiny one we live in now, and about those who emigrated, who got away, but it wasn’t planned or written specifically about a single idea; we would never do that.

New Stu lives in Hamilton, Ontario, now, and when you drive there from the airport in Toronto on the freeway, you go past a huge pylon field in Burlington, and I imagined that maybe all those pylons could transmit our collective ideas back and forward via Jodrell Bank, to keep the band going.

The other Stu (Boreman) from The Pre New once said to me that if we hadn’t got LB and New Stu in the band with their optimism and cheery outlook, we would have just made miserable, dire, grim music on our own. I think he had a point.

Is the overall message wistful or wishful?

The message is in the medium – No, the message is in the music.

I hope the record has a clumsy quality to it, not unlike that great period in Sheffield pop history around 1979-80 and Lovell’s early transmissions with his home-made telescope in that field in Cheshire. The Sheffield electronic crowd were openly experimenting, fearless, and with no clear idea of the ultimate outcome. All this is beautifully captured in Jamie Taylor’s 2025 book: Studio Electrophonique: The Sheffield Space Age.

I think there is a parallel with what was going on in Sheffield then and what Bernard Lovell was up to 80 years ago; Building a new future from a few bits of metal, capacitors and really stretched and ambitious imagination. Mistakes, errors, breakdowns and interference were all part of the process and all of it evolving in the public eye. Jodrell Bank may appear to be a slightly rusty cranky piece of 1950s space kit, but it still functions and imagines the future in the same way the Wasp Synthesizer or the Korg MS20 does.

I know that in 2025/6 we could never make a record like the first Human League album or like Vice Versa, ClockDVA or Cabaret Voltaire because technology is so sophisticated now, the choices are far too vast, but I hope our record has a rough, rustic, innocent quality to it as both the Lovelle telescope and the records of Sheffield in 1980 do.

The message is in the process. In the true sense of punk exploration, we aimed to make do with who and what was in front of us, and I was keen that everything that was possible was ‘one take’; in most cases, this was true.

We fixed 2 days for editing and recording vocals however I came down with some weird condition called labyrinthitis (the notes from the hospital even mentioned David Bowie) This condition involved a ‘waltzer’ like dizziness, like being on a ship in a storm, you could lose balance at any time and I lost about 70% of my hearing but we recorded all my vocals (one take) anyway, I kind of like that, this whole circus was in front of us so we let it become part of the story. We really overdid it with the Autotune as well, about 70%

The lyrics were written on the spot so the whole album should have a real bedroom demo edge to it … and a deaf singer, we haven’t had one of those for a while.

Next time I want to take even less time and record and mix an album in a day, like a jazz band.

Is nostalgia for a future that suggested so much, but never materialised, leaving a permanent echo of distant noises instead, simply a case of sour gripes?

The Pre New have talked about this stuff before, Concorde, mice with human ears grown on their backs, Dolly the sheep, and that people of my generation have grown up in where the futuristic world we anticipated never fully materialised.

Look at the plastic age, you know that blinkered aspiring futurism before we all started to look over our shoulder to bother to see what the effects had been. A kind of Tesco’s version of Oppenheimer. More recently, the notion of AI, Apps and Smartphone technology was going to make us more relaxed, happier and work less. Every generation must have a set of inventions and fears to define it, yes? And my generation had that stuff, skip loads, carpet cleaners or devices to cut up potatoes into cubes, or Moors Murderers and Rippers and of course ‘quicksand’.

But did you know that nostalgia was originally defined as a medical condition? Soldiers away from home would suffer from it as a genuine illness diagnosed by professionals.

It’s been said before, ‘Nostalgia is Denial of the Future’, but there are no sour grapes from me. To have navigated the world for the past 60 years has been a real pleasure, an adventure even, and I don’t want that to end.

The everyday world I occupy is a safer and better place now than it was then, yes there are a few people who are bit too uptight, but with endless opinions and points of view being banded around, a kind of social editing is needed to keep the noise out now, it may sound like ‘a cop out’ but sometimes it’s better to ‘live’ in your own head that take on what everybody has to say.

People need to relax a bit, you know, take a day out to Jodrell Bank (with parking for over 100 cars), buy a tea towel and a mug in the gift shop and then they can go home for once with a sense of achievement.

Who are your present-day sonic architects?

If we're referring to the architects on the record, much of the album was made remotely this time round. When I suggested we create a soundtrack for the book, I put the word out, and straight away Luke Haines sent some tracks over, he’s good like that, impulsive and responsive to ideas that we would talk up in a pub.

My son Edwin, who’s made a few interesting records as Derealise and, before that, AaxxonN, came back with some minimal electronic experiments and loops he'd been hiding away, so quickly we had something to go with. Vinny and I had recorded a few ideas at my place one morning and he would send stuff he’d come up with in Glasgow and for a more structured track, I asked Andy and Ben from Quatermas III (who I met though Gordon King) if they had anything and they sent over a very complete idea that quickly became ‘A NEW INVENTION AT THE IDEAL HOME EXHIBITION.’

I guess because the book came first and this soundtrack inevitably had boundaries drawn up, the brief was always to keep it primitive and simple and strangely no guitar ended up on there, (but there’s some very neat sax from Poppy Gibson). I guess when you’ve listened to as much music as we have over the past half-century, a few guidelines in place help get the thing finished.

It was rapidly becoming a Pre New event, but Stuart Boreman, with whom I formed the band years back, had been fighting a serious illness for some time. We talked and texted in his last months, and he was keen to send some words over, but tragically, that never happened, and we lost him in August 2025.

It turns out that the two Stus had previously produced a version of Ann Peebles’ ‘I CAN’T STAND THE RAIN’ a few years ago, and Boreman had taken care of the voice, so we edited that onto the record, and it sits perfectly, Boreman’s dry Yorkshire tone, growling its way through that disco classic, made the record complete.

Despite the soundtrack being recorded in disparate circumstances, to have Stuart Boreman on there made it feel like we were all together again, even just for a moment.

What about the music you are listening to?

Lots of Yellow Magic Orchestra right now and I’m discovering Oneohtrix Point Never (late to the party I know) I love that over processed hissy sample rate that has a real gloss to it, it’s a sound that will date very quickly, it’s got its own nostalgia embedded, you know like in built obsolescence in a vacuum cleaner of washing machine.

I really got into ‘Loose Talk’ by Amelia Barrett and Bryan Ferry earlier in 2025 when it came out, that aspirational theme that ran through that record really made sense when we were building this record and Dora King’s vocal on ‘YOGA RETREAT HANGOVER’ was a perfect foil for the middle-aged male voices across the other tracks.

I saw Cabaret Voltaire live recently in Manchester, and it was easy to see their influence on what would follow them, especially in terms of electronic dance music. Their set was a journey across their high points including a reworking of ‘Nag Nag Nag’, but midway through their set they featured some field recordings from Chris Watson they called ‘Tinsley’, the title comes from an area in Sheffield known for its steel industry and long-gone wire factory. It sounded mind-blowing and incredible.

Who are/were your go-to sci-fic seers, visionary doomsayers and promissory gloom-mongers?

Not sure he’s a gloom-monger, but I’ve always been inspired by Robert Smithson (no, not that podgy singer with bad make-up), Smithson, I guess you’d call him a land artist.

His ideas that half-finished building sites are modern-day temples, kind of history in reverse, echoes of the future and all that. His spiral jetty that went nowhere, his dumper trucks of wet concrete rolling down the hillsides like lava from a volcano, and he looked good as well, Cuban heels and a decent pair of shades, good haircut, he could have easily been a Standell, a Flamin’ Groovie or in the early Doors.

Which – if any – buildings or blocks that are springing up and puncturing the skylines of the plant tickle your aesthetic and artistic boxes? 

Are Wind Farms and pylons architecture? Or are they just ‘field furniture’? Is that a thing? Those wind turbines look so powerful close up, I’d love to go up to the top of one.

When I was young you would head North and would see pit wheels turning across the horizon from the motorway, now that skyline has been replaced by wind farms which I know is a different story but generating energy is still significant where I live now, there’s a power station right out there on the coast, lit up at night, it’s a shrunken version of Port Talbot, much of it made with light rather than the building itself.

Seeing the Lovell Telescope up close is a sublime experience, as I’ve said, it’s so modern yet strangely old-fashioned, an idea of the future that has passed, but it’s still working, tracking space activity from that sleepy village in Cheshire. If you are there on site when it starts to shift and rotate, turning on its axis when it’s following something up there in space, it's like being in a movie. It’s a remarkable sound.

Will The Pre-New return to the live scene to reclaim the dreams of the future?

Should old people like me get up on stage? 30 years ago, I would have said a definite “NO,” but I guess if you’ve got something to say, you should get up and say it regardless of age. We do have new music, so that’s a valid start and being on stage is quite addictive and a real thrill, even at the level of bands I’ve been involved in. At least we could never be a ‘heritage act’ because we had no real success, which helps.

I think the thing itself, the Jodrell Atomic thing should be on stage, the photography, the words and now we have a soundtrack, so a live version could be interesting but I do really like the idea of playing in total darkness like Sunn O))) or Autechre, I dunno, something picture-led could work, a kind of live photo exhibition in the spirt of the previously motioned Sheffield 1979ers or maybe we should just do Jodrell Atomic on Ice … YES … The Pre New present Jodrell Atomic In The Dark On Ice … Now there’s an idea … Shove that one up your arse, Rick Wakeman. Ha Ha.

Conclusion

Jodrell Atomic sits somewhere between artwork, document and daydream. It’s about looking closely at what’s already here, the future we imagined, and the small rituals that keep us moving through it all. Whether the work ends up on a wall, on a record, on a stage, or printed on a mug in a gift shop, it carries the same impulse: follow the instinct, the process, and let the meaning emerge, take care of itself.

Order Jim Fry's book and limited-edition album.

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