PREMIERE – Jonny Collins talks about baking old master tapes, broken cello strings and the sessions behind a baroque pop masterpiece.
Transmission 393: Interview with Modesty Blaise
Modesty Blaise was formed in Bristol in 1993 by Jonny Collins, alongside David W Brown, Gregory Jones, Clem Courtney and Julien Clapperton. Their debut single, “Christina Terrace”, was recorded with Edwyn Collins, followed by a live appearance on ITV and inclusion across several end-of-year rankings.
Artist: Modesty Blaise
Release Date: 2026-04-24
Genres: Art Rock, Indie Rock, Pop
Label: From Lo-Fi to Disco!
Description: Jonny Collins on Modesty Blaise's "Melancholia" remaster, out April 24th via From Lo-Fi to Disco!, in this interview.
The band went on to support Robbie Williams at London’s O2 Arena, feature on a Rough Trade compilation, become the subject of an ITV company documentary on Jonny Collins, and record a BBC Radio session involving seventeen people. Their album “Melancholia”, originally released in 2000 on CD and vinyl, returns on April 24th, 2026, as a remastered 25th Anniversary edition via From Lo-Fi to Disco!, spread across three discs with restored audio, session outtakes and new artwork.
Featured image: © Gregory Jones
Thank you for joining me for this interview. What were your musical influences before you started performing or recording, and what motivated you to make music?
My mum was a singer and she sang a lot of songs from shows like Sound of Music and things like that, so I was always surrounded by that sort of thing. She gave it up, but she was very good, and there was a lot of that around when I started getting into music myself. It was the Beatles, XTC and the Kinks when I first started.
What made us start making music in the first place? What it was, was that we thought everything else was rubbish. When we first started, we thought everything was terrible, so we figured if everything’s terrible, we should probably make it ourselves, and then we’d have something we actually liked listening to. Obviously, that was nonsense, obviously there was good music, but that’s what we thought.
Is the name Modesty Blaise from the comic strip, the film, or something else entirely?
Both. The local paper here used to run the comic strip, and my parents had that, so I’d see it every night. Then I became aware of the film, because I studied film at college. It’s terrible, but I love it. It’s an awful film, such a mess, it really is, but there are things in it that are absolutely brilliant. I remember saying to Dave, who’s the bass player, and whose brother Tony lives in Valencia with Pilar, why aren’t we called Modesty Blaise? We couldn’t think of a reason why we weren’t, so we did. That was pre-internet, so long ago, before the internet existed. Now we know the good reason for not being called Modesty Blaise is that there’s a Norwegian metal band called Modesty Blaise. If we’d known that, we probably wouldn’t have. But that’s the reason.
I have never been fashionable, I never go out of style because I was never in style.”
—Jonny Collins
Melancholia was released in 2000 and is a magnum opus spanning many genres. When you were recording it, did you have any sense that it was going to be something different from what you had done before, or did it only become clear in retrospect?
No, we knew that we were doing the big one. There were a few things that had been written before that we weren’t ready for. Carol Mountain, which is very much the centerpiece of the whole album, could have been on the first album, but we didn’t really feel that we were ready to record it at the time, because we knew it was going to be big.
So there were a few things that were held over. Pretty Smart On My Part was written before, and then when we decided to go and do Melancholia, it was all written very much so that one track goes into the next. But those two tracks were already there, so they had to be worked out and weaved in that way. Yeah, we knew we were doing something big.
The title does a lot of work. Did the title come first, or did the music arrive already feeling like that?
It’s kind of both, at the same time. Carol Mountain was written in thirty minutes, one Sunday morning sitting on my sofa. But then some other things took a long time, and quite often I won’t finish a song until I need to. I’m not going to have it completed and not do something with it, so it quite often doesn’t get finished until I actually need it, at the last minute.
On the Sunday, I got a call to say that he had died of a heart attack. That stopped everything for about three months, because it really affected me deeply, and it was very, very important. I still think about it now, quite regularly.”
—Jonny Collins
What surprised you most when you went back into the archive, and was there anything you had completely forgotten existed?
There were some things that I didn’t know. Once we cleared up the sound, there were things that I could hear that were there. Dave was at the remastering with me, and there’s a bit, I think it’s on the strings for the Loving, where one of the cellists, there were four cellists, breaks a string. I left it in because I loved it: great, you broke a string, fantastic, that’s real, let’s break a string. I left it in, and Dave didn’t know it was there; he’d never heard it before, but I knew it was there. That came as a surprise to him.
I think what surprised me most was how good it was. We all listen to music on these things now, with little earbuds, and I do as well. Going back to a mastering studio with enormous speakers, like we used to listen to music on… I remember when I got my first big stereo, we had these huge speakers, and you could play some reggae music and scare birds away. It was a massive sound. We’ve all compromised now, listening to things like this, and putting it back through big speakers was a great thing. I would encourage everybody to get those speakers out of your garage that you thought you didn’t have a use for anymore, and wire them up again. One of the things I’ve become interested in recently, Matteo, is the idea of moving air. So much recording now is digital: it’s recorded digitally into a computer and that’s it, no air is moved. I’d hazard a guess that on most modern pop records, the only real thing you’re hearing is the voice into a microphone; that’s the air being moved into the microphone. So I’ve become interested in this idea of moving air: playing things through amplifiers, making the air move, and having it picked up by a microphone. I guess that’s talking about things being real again, analog rather than digital. I don’t have a problem with digital, but moving air… When we have big speakers at the other end of the room and I’m sitting here, the air is being moved towards me, and that’s what I got from listening to this album when we went to remaster it. Oh wow, I’d forgotten how good that sound was. We should all try and get that back. We’ve lost that; let’s stop listening on these things and try to get back that big sound we used to have.
One of the things I was always concerned with, and still am, when making records, is how big it sounds. Is it big, not anything else? That’s not necessarily loud. Being able to hear it on the studio speakers again made me remember that. Get your big speakers out, you’ve got some somewhere.
I did not have the heart to cut anything away, I just wanted to leave it there as his legacy.”
—Jonny Collins
The Little Things You Do was planned as a single twenty-five years ago, and then it just stopped. What happened?
Nobody knows. We started recording a video for it, actually quite close to here, in a studio, and we did one day’s filming. Then it was going to be a seven-inch single, and it was going to be in Canada for some reason, I don’t remember why or how. Nobody remembers what happened or what stopped it from happening. An album like Melancholia, which is big and also long, that was my mistake, I never intended for it to be that long, you’d expect more than two singles from an album that size. It was always going to be a single. I still don’t know, Matteo. I still don’t know.
Did the band ever disagree seriously about what the album should sound like?
That’s very interesting that you think it might be a democracy. No, and the reason is that nobody knew what it was going to sound like, other than me. Quite often people would come in, but at no point is the band actually playing together in the studio. Dave, who was the bass player at the time, was living in London, so rather like McCartney, he would come down afterwards and put his bass part on. I’d just tell him which bass to bring, and he’d come down on the train and put the bass on. So nobody really had an overview.
My idea of what it was going to sound like also changed, because there’s a track at the end, the Loving, that’s quite a lot longer than any track I’d normally want to do. It’s got lots of guitar in it, and it went on for ages. There was never any plan to do a seven-minute version; it was going to be two and a half minutes. My friend, Harry the Horse Thief, was playing guitar on that. He had come down from London, and I said, just play, play loads of guitar, and then I’ll edit it down to two and a half minutes. That was on a Thursday. He came down, did the guitar on I’m Going Out, which is fantastic, played harmonica, and did this guitar solo over the end of the Loving. Just play for the whole thing, I told him, I’ll edit out the bits I want and we’ll bring it down to two and a half minutes. That was on the Thursday, and I put him back on the train to London. On the Sunday, I got a call to say that he had died of a heart attack. That stopped everything for about three months, because it really affected me deeply, and it was very, very important. I still think about it now, quite regularly. Because I had all of that stuff he’d played on, his last recordings, I didn’t want to cut anything out. I thought, right, we’ve got to leave it all in there, I’ll have to write things around that. That’s why that last track is long: I did not have the heart to cut anything away, I just wanted to leave it there as his legacy. So the album is much, much longer than I thought it was going to be, which was all my fault.
Outside of music, what were you reading, watching or thinking about during the period you were making the album? What was feeding the record from outside the studio?
In terms of what we were listening to, there was a lot of soundtrack music. The idea of this album was that we were making a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist, that’s why the themes crop up again and again. The Carol Mountain theme, the harmonica part, is in a minor key, and at the end you get the strings playing the Carol Mountain theme. The loving theme turns up in a woman. That runs through the whole album; there’s all sorts of things like that.
There were a lot of soundtrack albums. I love Michel Legrand, I love Francis Lai, I love Lalo Schifrin, a lot of French soundtrack as well; there’s always a lot of French stuff there for me. And then albums we were listening to: a lot of Jimmy Webb stuff, Magic Garden by the Fifth Dimension, A Tramp Shining by Richard Harris, and things like that. The Millennium, obviously the Beach Boys; Carol Mountain is about Brian Wilson. John Barry soundtracks, yeah, that sort of thing. Van Dyke Parks, there’s nothing quite as weird as Van Dyke Parks in there. Elephant’s Memory. You can hear some stuff from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack, I think.
What was I reading? Carol Mountain comes from a biography of the Beach Boys called Heroes and Villains by Stephen Gaines; the specific stuff in there is directly from that, and there’s a lot of fun in it. Dave and I would quite often read music biographies and then say, hey, did you find that? Hey, did you hear that? We’d pick up little things, like Motown records where they had chains in the basement which they used to hit against the walls in time with the snare; that’s how you get that metallic sound. Hey, did you read that? Yeah, I read that. Should we have a go at that? Let’s do that. There is a much wider context to it.
I think, too, that with Harry dying as he did, it put a kind of gloss over everything. You asked at the start what I thought of when I first started listening to it again: I thought, God, there’s a lot of stuff in here about death, about stalkers, about suicide; there’s a lot of things like that in there. Which is interesting, because you’ve got nice little tunes playing over the top, with lyrics that are actually quite dark, I think, in places.
So much recording now is digital: it’s recorded digitally into a computer and that’s it, no air is moved.”
—Jonny Collins
The remaster was done by original engineer Martin Nichols at White House Studio. Why was it important to go back to the same person rather than to someone fresh?
Well, because of what’s happened in the intervening twenty-five years. Martin doesn’t do much recording now, he does remastering and restoration of albums; things like the last big Bob Marley album, he did The Police reissues, the Gary Numan reissues, and he’s done a lot of the Joe Meek stuff. He’s kind of gone away from general recording into specializing in exactly this sort of thing, so it only made good sense to go to him. Apart from that, he’s a really good friend of ours, so it made good sense to just go to Martin and say, we’re thinking of doing this, do you want to be involved? Absolutely, I do, bring it on. He specializes in the remastering of albums for very, very high-end clients, so he’s got a very good reputation for that now within the UK. That’s why, good luck.
Melancholia was released on CD and vinyl, including a Japanese CD edition with five additional tracks. What was the relationship with Japan?
Our record label at the time, April in Germany, liked to put extra tracks on Japanese releases; it’s something they did on all of their releases. I was a bit disappointed in our sales in Japan; I thought we’d do a lot more. Something happened with the company we licensed it to, or something like that. I think part of the reason for reissuing this is because I don’t think it’s had the recognition it deserves. So there’s something about that. The extra tracks on the Japanese CD, and I’ve got one copy of it, were also tracks on side four of the double vinyl; that’s something April liked to do, put extra tracks on the Japanese release. Fine, if that’s what you want.
It was also released in Spain, on Grabaciones en el Mar. So there was a Spanish version; we’ve always had Spanish versions, there was one for the first album too, which was released on Animal, which I thought was a strange label for us to be on, but I liked that, because we’re punk rock.
What does Bristol put into your music, if anything?
I don’t think it brings anything. I’ve thought about this, because I know a lot of people in the Bristol music industry, but I don’t know them through music, I know them through football. A lot of us play football together, and I think they’re always quite surprised to find out that I’ve released records as well. I’m not sure it brings much at all, because we’re never really integrated into anything, we’ve never really found a space where we feel we’re with our contemporaries, we feel that we’re like the others. Really, Matteo, I was never that sociable; I would never go and meet people down the pub. So yeah, I’m not sure it brings anything. I’d love to say that it did. I don’t think it does.
What’s one thing about Melancholia that reviews always missed?
I know the reviews this time round are very, very encouraging, because I think people, after twenty-five years, are understanding it more. Certainly in the UK; I think it’s less so in Spain, and less so in a lot of other European countries, because we always did well in Spain, Germany and Scandinavia, but less so in the UK. We always did well in America and Japan, but less so in the UK. I think an awful lot of the music industry in the UK is about fashion, it’s not about music, it’s about fashion.
In the UK, it’s just about what’s fashionable. Is it fashionable? I have never been fashionable, I never go out of style because I was never in style. I think that’s the big thing. This time around, people are saying, hey, this isn’t new, this is twenty-five years old, don’t look at it and say, well, this doesn’t sound like the rest of the music we have now. Of course it doesn’t, it sounds like what we were doing twenty-five years ago. So the context becomes less important, and because the context isn’t around it, people are able to listen to all of the music going on without saying, well, that’s not very fashionable. I think the first time around, people just missed what it was. I can understand that, because you can listen to it and go, what on earth is this, it’s no one style, it’s all over the place, I get something that sounds a bit dancey here, something that sounds a bit rocky here, a string quartet there, what on earth is this thing? There was no context to put it into. Now we’re putting it into a context of, this was twenty-five years ago, and it’s interesting. I think that’s why it’s being looked at slightly differently now.
You described the archive as being in messy condition. What surprised you most when you went back in?
A lot of the stuff we had was originally labelled up by Martin at the studio, and because of that, it was great. Martin’s got these big ovens, because he does these restorations, where he bakes the tapes; you put these massive two-inch master analogue tapes in, take them out, bake them in the oven, then play them back, digitise them and put them onto the computer. It’s a weird restoration process, but very interesting. We were only able to get through it because Martin had labelled everything properly in the first place. Dragging these tapes out of my loft, covered in dust, where they’d been sitting for more than twenty years, if he hadn’t done his job it would have taken a lot longer.
Are you working on new material?
Yes, I’ve just moved house, so once this is all up we’ll get some more stuff together. Yes, I am working on new material. It won’t be this year, it’ll be next year, and we’re quite excited about it. Some of the material is songs we never got around to recording; other stuff is completely brand new. It’s just doing stuff we’re interested in, spending a lot of time with Dave on bass again, Gregory on guitar and other things; Gregory’s released his own solo album, which is fabulous, and Roger on strings, Alistair on everything else. The stuff we’ve got so far sounds very good; there’s nothing complete, but it’s in various different stages. I’m very pleased with it so far.
Photos courtesy of © Modesty Blaise
Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others
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