Guitar | Mojo

I am Jean-Charles (or JC) and I'm the guitarist of Soozand the Blue Cats.

I've been playing guitar since I was 12. I learned my first few chords at the Institut Terrefort and a year later when I moved to the "Foyer des Templiers" in Bordeaux, I met some very good musicians there, much older than I was and who taught me a lot. A very informal way to learn... Jimy Hendrix and Jimmy page were our gods as much as Carlos Santana & Pete Townshend, but also Django Reinhardt and Andrés Segovia...

Les Quidams at the festival of La Rochelle, 1977
(Merci Jean-François pour la photo)

I played with various bands since then. The first one being "Les Quidams" in the south of France in 1976/77. Amongst other things, we played at the Mont de Marsan Festival in 1977.

We opened the second day of the festival. After us, bands like the Damned, Clash, Doctor Feelgood, Eddy and the Hot Rods and even The Police played. In fact, as far as I know, it was the last time The Police played in public as a 4 piece band. Henry Padovani left them after that (or was he asked to leave?) and Andy Summers was the undisputed victor... Years later in London, I was working as a chef in a restaurant called "Le Cellier Du Midi" in Hampstead where Sting used to live. He was a regular of the restaurant and use to have dinner there regularly. It was something I always resented, after all in 1977 we played on the same stage at the same festival and now I was cooking for the man... Unfair or what?

This is a poster of the Festival
(Merci Rock en Stock!)

Then, years later I moved to Toulouse where I met some other unfortunate musicians from a band called "L'Aiguade". They were real Baba cool as we used to call them, not really my cup of tea! The band had already released an album, but continuous bickering got the better of them. I was glad to leave the sinking ship.

Chansons pour que fleurisse le geranium?
I rest my case...

Some of them were members of a weird cult, they used to call themselves Elohim!!! They were waiting for some UFO to come back to earth or something. It makes me shiver just thinking that I was part of it for a short time!

An then I had to play "la Baloche". Terrible circuit of cover bands playing in small towns for hours on end every Saturday night, all the crap that the radio stations thought was worthy of the masses! It was the end of my stint as a musician in France. Now it was time to go and call it day... Hello England!

When I moved to England, I thought that maybe in the country where every man and his dog was a muso, (or so I thought), I could meet other musicians easily and play good music. It wasn't to be!

Maybe it was my accent, but at every audition I went to, I got the "Don't call us, we'll call you" treatment.

1982 London. Just practising in my little bedsit in Stockwell.

I'm not paranoid but after a while I started to think that I wasn't good enough and I'd better do something else. So I went into photography...

Mind you, it's because I was playing guitar that I met my first wife Kathy in London, but that's another story... worthy of a few sad songs!

So, eventually we moved to Australia, land of Men at Work. It had to be good! And it was... The first thing I did though, was to move to bass guitar. There is only a ratio of one bass player for every 20 guitarists, so I thought that it would help me find work, and it did! And as a bass player, I played in few bands in Sydney, most notably "Lighthouse" and "The Untouchables".

Great fun, but little money. I suppose that if money is important, then music isn't an option (unless you're called Mick Jagger or Paul Mac something, but that's just jealousy on my part).

Lighthouse

The Untouchables

And eventually I thought that the best way to be in the best possible band, was for me to be each member. Meaning that if I wanted to keep control of what was happening, I had to play bass, drums, guitar and keyboard. That's when, I met the almighty Macintosh... Future generation will no doubt rename the new age of the world as BC and AD (Before Computers and After Digital).

I finally found musicians who never said anything bad to each other, who always knew their stuff, were never drunk and always on time. I discovered Cubase...

And so in 1998, I released my first and only album called Colour.

Created, produced and burned by me, me and only me!

But in the end I went back to playing with a band. When we finally moved to Tasmania, I was one of the founding members of Azimus. (Azimus has its own website: azimus.com.au).
And then with Susan, we started to play in cover bands and also as a duo called Café Noir.

With Susan and the Blues Club Band at the Forth Valley Festival

The Blues Club Band at the Forth Valley Festival