They might have made a song and dance about most things, but Lemon Jelly didn’t make a fuss about their departure…

First, the good news. Despite not having released an album since 2005, nor played live since 2007 (and even then not under their band name), Lemon Jelly, those loveable curators of soundscape collages that chimed with the early-00s playful sonic drift, have never officially split up. One could describe their extended absence as a hiatus, something Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen – for it is they – actually did announce back in 2008, but there has never been a tearful press conference citing irreconcilable musical differences nor a series of backstabbing interviews in the music press deriding each other.

And now the bad news. Anyone expecting Lemon Jelly to return in any form is best advised not to hold their breath. Yes, there are obvious reconciliations – Oasis, we’re looking at you; sometimes bands split up, get back together, split up, get back together, ad infinitum – Orbital; and then there are reunions that blindside everyone – Velvet Underground. But according to Deakin, always the more voluble member of the outfit, despite no full stop or final nail in the coffin being applied, those of a gambling bent are not advised to put money on any form of a Jelly get-together.

“I think we should have probably just gone that was the end of it,” he smiles from his north London home. “But no, we have never officially stopped. Our activities, however, have certainly ground to a halt.”

The truth is the pair (still very good friends by the way, “we speak to each other, not frequently, but we speak on a fairly regular basis”) did try to follow-up their final album, ‘64-95’, but it never worked out and neither wanted to release anything that wasn’t the equal of their previous work.

“I would hazard to say that the music we made came from a place of love and it was received with love,” he explains. “We all know when we hear music like that. It’s a real lightning in a bowl. It’s magic. It doesn’t happen on a regular basis. I don’t think we realised it was stopping, but I mean after a while you kinda get the feeling. I think people have probably got the message. I mean, you never know, maybe when we’re both pensioners, who knows?”

Deakin and Franglen were childhood friends – indeed, the latter dated the former’s sister for a while – who went away and did their own thing in their twenties and early-thirties (Deakin: DJing, teaching graphic design at Central St Martin’s and running the lauded design company Airside; Franglen: landscape gardening and session work for bands like Primal Scream, Pulp, Blur, Björk and even the Spice Girls) before reuniting in 1998. 

Arriving after the likes of Mr Scruff and Air – two acknowledged precursors to the beautifully sculpted sounds of Lemon Jelly – Deakin and Franglen’s aims were clear from the outset: to make something more imaginative than the relentless thud of generic house. “We loved dance music, dance music was the soundtrack of our generation,” he recalls. “But could we evolve it a bit? Could we make something slightly less banging, that’s got more ideas in.”

Their rich and vibrant sound struck a chord with the downtempo-cum-chill out sounds of the time and gave post-club ravers something more to listen to than just “old Durutti Column albums” at the afterparty when things started to get horizontal.

“We were the soundtrack to the stay back,” smiles Deakin. “That was kind of the intention. Yes, it’s in the background, possibly, but also it might kind of come in and fuck with your mind a little bit. Give you a little joyful treat if you were listening. You might move your body a little bit, but it’s not really banging.”

After signing to XL in 2000, following the release of three acclaimed EPs, Lemon Jelly released their debut album proper, ‘Lost Horizons’, in 2002. As well as appearing on the cover of Jockey Slut in August that year, the pair were nominated for the Mercury Prize, where they lost out to fellow XL artist Dizzee Rascal.

“We were on the same table as Dizzee,” he says. “And yes, the champagne flowed that night. That was almost the pinnacle for us. It’s nice to sell a lot of records, but it definitely meant a lot to us to have that kind of recognition.”

Since Lemon Jelly was left to fade lovingly into the distance, Franglen has continued to work in music. He co-produced Badly Drawn Boy’s ‘Born in the UK’ album and in 2010 performed a 24-hour symphony under London Bridge using a theremin and the ambient sounds of the capital.

Deakin meanwhile has recently drawn on one of his first creative passions – DJing – to form the backbone of his first theatrical work, Club Life. As the title suggests the show is an autobiographical ode to Deakin’s experiences in clubland. Rather than run another club night (“I’ve eaten a lot of that cake”), write a book or do a talk with video (“Does that really summon the spirit of a club night?”), Club Life is an immersive story of how Deakin went from being a “maths-obsessed board game nerd and complete spod who wasn’t making it with the women and wasn’t enjoying myself… then I went through this arc of finding my place and finding my tribe”.

One of the show’s many genius conceits over its two-and-a-half-hour’s running time (in among Deakin’s jocular and engaging monologues and his choice musical DJ selections), is the use of a cast to demonstrate the vagaries of British club life leading up to the millennium when Deakin ceased DJing to concentrate on Lemon Jelly. These actors don’t actively encourage the crowd to get up and dance, but their presence reassures the audience that to do so is the best way to enjoy proceedings.

With the show landing in London this November, after stellar reviews in Edinburgh, it is a timely reminder of why clubs and club life are so important.

“I still think there is something about the physical act of being in a space with a bunch of people,” concludes Deakin evangelically, “who by their very presence have indicated that they share the values and interests that you have. It’s a generational conversation that is most important when we are finding our own identities in our teens and twenties and it’s still important at this age. It’s where diversity really happens because you party with people from different backgrounds. And you realise that everybody is the same. And that is an engine of tolerance. Nowhere better than a club or a festival does that happen; where you really get the sense that we are all one, we are all the same, there is no difference, rich or poor, Black or white and we will honour each other’s differences and discover new mutations that come out of that. That’s what innovation is. It’s taking the existing elements and combining them in a new and interesting way. And you see that in club music, more than any other kind of music, I would argue.”

Lemon Jelly might be no more then, but Deakin is arguably embarking on his most crucial creative iteration yet.

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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