DJ Ron: Someone once told me if you can describe a record with just one word, it's probably not that good of a record.
JustJack: Well, then this must be a great record.
DJ Ron: Well, let me ask you, do you think all those different labels and subgenres are helpful or do you think they hurt the music scene?
JustJack: As long as musicians don't put themselves into those categories, I don't think it makes any difference. I think it's often the press and journalists who make those distinctions and I think musicians just make music.
DJ Ron: It's all the flack people, all the writers and stuff who do all the labeling?
JustJack: Yes, I mean I don't think anyone's sitting in a studio going I am alt-hop or whatever. That's my opinion anyway. I don't think that its necessarily detrimental or encouraging, I think they're just kind of there. They're often there just to kind of to let people know maybe what a certain type of music might sound like before they go out and buy it.
DJ Ron: Has anyone painted you as like oh, a white guy rapping, you must be another Eminem?
JustJack: A couple of people did say that but I'd obviously say that there will never be another Eminem and I'm nowhere near his style and I never will be, so it's a completely different thing. I'm not a battle MC, I'm not trying to be part of a particular style of hip-hop, I just love hip-hop music and I'm trying to do my own kind of thing, but you know, I wouldn't concern myself at all.
DJ Ron: Do you find yourself reaching a different musical crowd than you might have originally expected?
JustJack: I didn't expect to reach any particular kind of crowds. I literally started to make music and everything happened in a very kind of natural sort of quite surprising way. It was never like 'oh, I want to be a performer,' I wasn't in front of my mirror with the hairbrush trying to perform or whatever, it was never like that. It was a natural progression from dance-type music, getting quite good at it quite quickly and then everything else kind of happened from there. So, as for my audience, so far in England it's been extremely varied in terms of peoples' ages and in terms of where they come from and their own musical tastes.
DJ Ron: It's good to see you're not inspired by Fame Academy. So where does the title Outer Marker come from?
JustJack: It's actually from Die Hard II. I think when the airplanes are trying to land in Dulles Airport, they talk about going pass the "outer marker." But the story behind it is basically me and my friend used to sit there and throw film quotes at each other and try to guess what film they were from, and I threw this quote at him that was involving the outer marker. We realized afterwards that I didn't know what film it was from, so we sat there and scratched our heads and then we phoned a load of my friends and they were like what's this outer marker thing, what is it? It became this kind of mythical thing that really sounded like something, but we couldn't work out what it was. It was only afterwards, when I've actually named the album The Outer Marker that we found out it was from Die Hard II, via a very sharp-eared film buff. So, that's where it's from, but I quite like that part of it, the sort of sound of it, it sounded quite sort of like it was on the edge of things which is where I kind of think the music exists.
DJ Ron: Your songs have a real sense of emotion to them which seems to be missing in a lot of music today, which comes first for you the lyric or the melody?
JustJack: Normally the lyrics, but it changes from track to track and I don't have a fixed way of working on music. For some of the songs, it's the lyrics first and sometimes it's lyrics that I've worked at and worked at and worked at, edited and changed and worked through. Some of the things I literally just pick up the mic and I'll have a track going and just make up some stuff and it comes from there. The melodies are the kind of things that when I hear, whenever if I've got a sample running or whatever, come into my head. If you're sitting listening to a track and you're whistling and count a melody, that will become the melody of a song for me. I don't actually play a musical instrument so the melodies are things that I'll kind of be whistling in my head and then I try to lay them down and put it with a lyric and it appears.
