(First published in Issue 104 of Electronic Sound magazine, August 2023)

TAKING FLIGHT

Welcome aboard, passengers! Your crew today? Manchester enigma Jim Noir and honey-voiced Soundcarriers and International Teachers of Pop frontwoman Leonore Wheatley. Together they are Co-Pilot, and their new album Rotate is a one-way flight to psychedelic pop heaven  

Words: Bob Fischer

“I moved to Manchester after I finished university in 2008, and I started working in Chorlton, in a bar called Dulcimer”, says Leonore Wheatley.

“We did not meet in Dulcimer!” splutters Jim Noir. It’s an uncharacteristically tropical Manchester afternoon, and the midday sun is dancing mischievously on the sparkling waters of New Islington Marina.  

“No, listen!” says Leonore. “I’d been singing with The Soundcarriers for about a year, and…”

“I’ll tell you my side of the story after this,” whispers Jim.

“Yes, but this is my side!”

They roll their eyes at each other, then burst into affectionate laughter. Manchester is boiling over. Insanely hot and sweaty. So much so that our plans to meet in Jim’s DookStereo studio have been abandoned, and instead we’re sipping Mobberley Summit beer at the canalside. Well, I am, anyway. Jim’s got a lager and Leonore is on the shandy. They’re both charming and funny, with the easy-going “shut yer face” rapport of long-term friends entirely comfortable with each other’s foibles. It’s a warmth that exudes from Rotate, the new album they’ve created together over countless similarly blissful, boozy afternoons. They’ve worked on it for almost a decade. Their friendship, they are attempting to explain, goes back even further.  

“Dulcimer was a place where lots of people from the Manchester music scene came to drink,” continues Leonore. “Through that, he got wind of the fact that I was in The Soundcarriers and that I’d moved to Manchester.”

“I just think it took a lot longer than that,” protests Jim. “I was living in Chorlton at the time, and I remember really getting into The Soundcarriers. You know, who were they? Then [Jim Noir band member] Ian Smith said ‘One of them actually works in Chorlton’. So I used to go into Dulcimer all the time, but I didn’t have the nerve to actually speak to Leonore. There was no ‘Hey! Do you want to be in my band?’ It was more ‘Can I have a pint please?’ Every five minutes. Then I’d walk away.”

“But one night I got a phone call from him,” says Leonore. “And I joined the Jim Noir band in 2010. It was such a fun time, and we’re all still friends now. Being in Jim’s band was my ‘Welcome to Manchester’ and it helped my confidence a lot.”

Since then, their respective musical meanderings have continued to intertwine. By the time of their first meeting, Jim had already ridden the first waves of fame, commonly feted as the “British Brian Wilson”. In the cultural maelstrom of the mid-Noughties, it was impossible to watch TV without hearing the pizzicato plonks of ‘My Patch’ or the Monkees harmonies of ‘Eanie Meany’. Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty licensed his tunes, as did million-selling Playstation game LittleBigPlanet. BBC Radio 4’s comedy panel game The Unbelievable Truth has used ‘My Patch’ as its theme music for over 17 years and counting.

Leonore, meanwhile, was finding acclaim as powerhouse frontwoman with The Soundcarriers, still Nottingham’s favourite psychedelic tropicalia beat combo. Her stint in Jim’s band lasted until 2013, after which she became the focal point of Sheffield synthpop supergroup International Teachers Of Pop. And, through all these splendid comings and goings, they’ve been chipping away at Rotate. Song by song, line by line, they’ve created a summery, sun-soaked masterpiece of harmony-drenched pop with a melancholy streak a mile wide.

The publicity describes it as a “a hand-sewn multi-coloured primary school patchwork quilt”. Which begs the question – who the hell made patchwork quilts at primary school?

“I did!” exclaims Jim. “We had to do sewing and everything. It was a health and safety nightmare. There were turds in sandpits as well.”

“Was that you?” deadpans Leonore.

“No, it wasn’t. Although I remember going on holiday to Llandudno with my school, and in the middle of the night they woke us all up and said ‘Take your shoelaces off and tie them together – we’re going to abseil down the Great Orme’. And they walked us all the way there, then said ‘Nah, we were only joking”. It was just a trust exercise. But I was only nine or ten, and I was crying my eyes out. Everyone else was saying ‘This is amazing’, but I was more ‘Noooo – we’re all going to die’.”

Leonore, meanwhile, recalls a childhood immersed in classical singing.

“I was in The Cantamus Girls’ Choir, based in Nottingham and Mansfield,” she explains. “I joined when I was ten. My grandad was a self-trained opera singer, and he was really pushy in getting me and my cousins to sing. When I was six, he’d line us up in the spare room with his old Yamaha keyboard, and we’d do scales with him and sing ‘I Believe’. He passed away a few years ago, and I sang that at his funeral.”

Are these the grandparents referenced on the Co-Pilot song ‘She Walks In Beauty’, I wonder? It’s a touching song, with hints of a complex family backstory: “She walks in beauty, footsteps sold by duty / It trickles down the rooted line, her tears have hardened over time”. Leonore nods.

“My grandad was called Peter, but we called him Opa, which is German for ‘Grandad’,” she says. “Opa and Omi. And my Omi was a Hungarian refugee during the war, she was displaced from 1940s Germany and lived in a camp before coming to England and meeting my Opa. Who wasn’t German, he was from Bulwell in Nottingham! But he really embraced her culture. They passed away within six months of each other, and that song is really about their journey. And ‘She Walks In Beauty’ is a Lord Byron poem. Byron was a Nottingham man, and we’re related to him. My Opa traced back the family tree…” 

I tell them I can also hear the folk-tinged melancholy of 1970s children’s albums in the grooves of Rotate. All those weird Play Away albums with groovy drums and Toni Arthur singing winsomely about witchcraft. 

“I do like that contrast,” nods Leonore. “Singing innocently about topics that are quite serious. ‘Brick’, on the album, is actually about my brother, Joe. He wasn’t having a very good time when we were recording, and he passed away a couple of years ago. I just wanted to make something that was reassuring for him. From a sister to a brother: just make sure you’re alright.

“And when he passed away, it was ‘Oh, let’s just finish the album now’. Because you never know what’s going to happen. I lost my sister Amber in January this year as well. They were both 27, there was only 20 months between them. She was fine when we were recording, so those songs were definitely about Joe. But I wanted to mention her today, because otherwise I’d come away feeling guilty that I hadn’t.”

We’ve settled down now, and there’s a respectful hush around the table.

“It’s great that Leonore is here,” says Jim. “She’s written the lyrics and she knows what they mean. I think that’s beautiful.”

There’s an elephant at the canalside. I don’t know, I confess, what to call Jim. To the record-buying public he is resolutely Jim Noir, genius producer of no little enigma. The name, as we all know, is deliberate play on Vic Reeves’ real-life moniker, Jim Moir. In his civvies though, Jim is Al Roberts. Leonore calls him “Al” to his face, and “Jim Noir” is how they both refer to the actual band. The co-writing and production credit on the Co-Pilot album, meanwhile, is for “Alan Peter Roberts”. Not to put too fine a point on things, it’s an absolute fucking minefield.

“Jim is just Jim,” says Jim. “And Jim music is Jim Noir. Always has been, always will be. But I’ve just started to call myself Alan Roberts on the albums, because I want people to know – it’s not Jim Noir! It’s me!”

Are they two different people, then?

“Oh, yeah,” nods Leonore. “He’s got two personas. The Jim part and the Alan part.”

“Jim likes to be a very cheeky man,” says Jim. “If I’m on tour, and someone calls me Jim, I immediately know who I am. I’m Jim. But if someone calls me Al across the street, then I’m just Al. They’re two different things.”

So who is he right now? Alan or Jim?  

“I feel like Jim, actually. Because I’ve had a couple of pints. If I was sat here not drinking, I’d be Alan. I’d be very pleasant, but I wouldn’t have much to say.”

“You’re quite shy,” adds Leonore.

“I am shy,” says Jim. “I remember when I did my first radio interview in 2004, it was so embarrassing. I couldn’t say a word. And worse than anything, my dad taped that interview and sent it to the whole family! ‘My son’s famous!’ They put me between two comedians, and I was sat there going ‘Erm…’. I just had no idea how to talk. My brain was saying ‘I’m so much funnier than these two’, but I just couldn’t get it out”.

It’s easy to forget how young he was, though. Twenty-two when he first started getting noticed? I tell him I saw the Jim Noir band back in Summer 2006, when they played an all-day free festival in Middlesbrough. The stage, I recall, was festooned with garden gnomes. Literally dozens of them. All different sizes, and some of them were bloody enormous. He chortles into his pint as I tell the story. Did the gnomes have some special significance, then?

“We’d been paid to do a corporate gig,” he recalls. “In the countryside somewhere, this massive estate. But literally nobody watched us, they were all just networking with each other and not listening to our music. So we decided we’d steal these fucking gnomes. There were thousands of them, all lining the path into this mad place. On the way out, we just grabbed the lot and drove off. Then, at our last gig, we chucked them all into the crowd. And we got sued by someone who got in touch with my management and said ‘You’ve broken my finger with a gnome’.” 

“Why have you never told me this story before?” gasps Leonore.

“You’ve never asked.”

The conversation twists and buckles in the afternoon heat. We discuss the enduring importance of the music we loved at the age of 11, and how that love – even though we may live in denial – never really fades. For Jim? The Prodigy. For Leonore? The Spice Girls. I suddenly start to feel very, very old.

Rotate, meanwhile, features a sample of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 1978 track, ‘Thousand Knives’. Looped and lavished with Beatle-esque adornments, it becomes the gorgeous ‘Motosaka’. Jim, it transpires, is a long-standing Yellow Magic Orchestra fan, and both he and Leonore were keen to clear the sample through official channels.

“Sakamoto personally cleared it himself,” says Jim. “And everyone wanted it to be the single, but then he died – and I just thought it would have looked naff. But I do have a six-foot framed poster of him in my flat.”

“Which I smashed one night,” confesses Leonore. “I was doing a weird monkey-grip spinny thing with one of my friends, and I accidentally let go. There was a ten-second silence, and my friend was sitting in the glass thinking ‘What’s going to happen?’ But he took it very well.”

“I’m a chilled-out guy,” shrugs Jim. “I was going through a phase spending as much money as possible. And now I haven’t got any.”  

And with that, it’s time to leave. As we walk back along the canal, they tell me enthusiastically about the album’s sleeve photos, taken in the cockpits of the planes at Macclesfield’s Avro Heritage Museum. And the name itself? Co-Pilot? Inspired by Jim’s fascination for playing Microsoft Flight Simulator on his new laptop. Fasten your seatbelts and secure all baggage… Co-Pilot are taxiing for take-off, and we’re all invited along for the ride.  

Rotate is avilable here:
https://copilotmusic.bandcamp.com/album/rotate

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