"I
find these questions about the career hard to answer sometimes,"
starts Jason "because I'm never conscious of the fact that
I'm Jason from 'Ben and Jason', even though I have to introduce
myself like that to people. I'm never conscious of the fact
that there's some kind of yardstick attached to the success
and the sales and all that sought of thing. I like the idea
that I'm a musician and that I make a living from it. I like
the guys I work with. We have great fun and we write some tunes
that we generally like. So for me in terms of success I want
to be happy with what we do. Which I pretty much am but then
I'm an incredibly unhappy person most of the time so I always
find something to pick holes in (smirks). Probably a life time's
supply of Prozac would be a beautiful thing."
Returning to the point made earlier about people's expectations
of being in a band. Had life in a band been what they had expected
it to be?
"It's absolutely not what I expected it to be," begins
Ben. "We sit very firmly in this grey area which is - we
make records, we sell records, we're not in the charts, we're
not shifting millions of units, we're shifting a few thousand
yet with the relationship we have with our record company we're
allowed to sustain this and they allow us to grow slowly and
because we don't spend an absolute fortune on recordings it's
fine. I remember when I was twelve, listening to all the music
being obsessed with the frontman and reading the biographies
of singers and these mystical characters that made music. I
just thought you either made it or you didn't. If you did you
were on the television all the time and had your records played
constantly and sold loads of units. I never thought that there
was this grey area where you have to coast along and enjoy this
happening with everyday of your life, rather than enjoy what's
happening with "oh look we've sold a million, that's brilliant
we can do this with the next record." It's so odd, it really
is odd and I really struggle with it."
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