Trust Fund: Ellis Jones, Accidental Choruses And 'Seems Unfair'

What you will always get with Trust Fund is Ellis Jones. Arranged behind him on any given day, though, are musicians who in another time or context might be considered hired hands. They aren’t.

They are friends and family in a literal sense. As the band headlines Sŵn festival’s Barely Reeks stage at Cardiff’s Abacus, a few days on from the release of the wonderful ‘Seems Unfair’, Jones is flanked by his sister, Libby, and her husband, Bert, who play together in Cup Winners’ Cup, and regular drummer Dan Howard.

“We’ve never had to use classified ads,” Jones laughs beforehand. Managing the rotating door policy, a necessity due to work commitments and the creative endeavours of his friends, has become part of the process. “If everyone can do it, that’s sometimes hard as well,” he adds. “It’s always different, but this has been going really well.”

Jones is able to call on support from a sort of nationwide scene that, founded on DIY principles and without defined geographical or genre borders, is becoming increasingly influential as the list of great records to emerge from its loose coterie of talents grows.

Now for a brief exercise in joining dots. Roxy Brennan, who played bass on ‘Seems Unfair’ and sparred so well with Jones as co-vocalist, is currently on tour with Joanna Gruesome. That band’s former vocalist, Alanna McCardle, meanwhile, provided the low end on Trust Fund’s recent European run with Speedy Ortiz and sang on Dreams and Football, two of the best songs on the album.

A couple of days after Trust Fund’s Sŵn show, Martha roll into Cardiff for a set at the Moon Club. Their recent split with tourmates Radiator Hospital featured Jones’ vocals on the soaring Chekhov’s Hangnail and was recorded with MJ of Hookworms at his Leeds studio, Suburban Home.

So was ‘Seems Unfair’. And Joanna Gruesome’s ‘Peanut Butter’. And recent albums by the Spook School, Menace Beach and TRAAMS. The trail of breadcrumbs between the bands would lead you north to Durham, further north to Edinburgh, back to Leeds, then to Cardiff and Chichester. Or, to put it another way, it's a long drive with a killer soundtrack.

“I wouldn’t have known who else to ask, really,” Jones says. “Once we knew we could afford to do it with a producer and a proper studio it was always going to be MJ. I didn’t realise the extent to which he’s done [other records]. It’s when I looked back I realised.

“He does it based on the song first. I think of Hookworms as being a band where the songs are there but it’s also about texture. It’s interesting to know that when he’s recording he thinks about the songs first rather than sound, really. He’s really lovely to work with, a really nice guy.”

In the case of Trust Fund, the song is king and presentation almost a separate issue. ‘Seems Unfair’ is the first time Jones’ music has been recorded by a full band and is a step removed from the solo takes and rough-hewn pop that made up his early EPs and much of ‘No One’s Coming For Us’, the album he put out earlier this year.

It’s rocky in the mid-’90s sense of the word: fuzzy, warm and deeply melodic. It’s layered and deceptively complex. It’s also, perhaps, going to be a one off and a future anomaly in Jones’ back catalogue. Nothing is set in stone, of course, but given his prolific nature and desire to do what’s best for each set of songs, an easily-catalogued Trust Fund formula isn’t something we’ll have any time soon.

“We were playing live as a full band anyway, before we recorded,” Jones says. “We wanted to record what we actually sounded like, rather than me trying to replicate that in my room and not being able to do it. The next album will be more like the first one, maybe. Just based around the songs that we have and seeing what would suit it. We’ll see.

“I think the third one’s written. The thing about the first album was that I could record songs and if they didn’t fit they didn’t have to go on. With the second one we had a week and couldn’t really afford to have anything we didn’t want on the record. To have that back again, ‘Well, we could record anything now’, is actually a bit weird. I’ve been a bit sloppy with recording a bunch of shit that’s maybe not very good. But that’s fine.”

Treating ‘Seems Unfair’ as a single entity is easy, though. What comes next isn’t a pressing concern when an album is capable of commanding your attention as this one does. From the pure alt-pop thrills offered by Michal’s Plan to the mini epic Big Asda, it’s a fine body of writing.

In person, Jones is modest and self-deprecating. Like his music, he’s also funny and engaging. He speaks thoughtfully about the songs in a way many musicians can’t or, more often, won’t. At a time when some bands are dismissive of the writing process, or of recounting it at least, it’s fun to geek out over the album with him. He’ll openly talk about his influences - the pristine precision of the Lightning Seeds’ production, Kirsty MacColl’s wall-of-sound harmonies - or his complex relationship with lyrics. He quickly admits, though, that melody always comes first.

“It’s quite rocky and there are a lot of choruses on it [‘Seems Unfair’],” he says. “The first record didn’t have that many, really. It’s the sort of thing where I accidentally did it quite a lot. If you try and write a song with a big chorus it sounds terrible. There is that thing where if I try and write like that now it’ll sound bombastic, like U2 or something. I think it might be a natural thing to step back a bit and be like: ‘Well, I can’t try and do that so I’ll do whatever else happens.’

“I’ll always think of the melodies as being the good bit. The lyrics are just trying to find something that doesn’t sound too daft. Maybe a line will be in my head and it’s fitting a melody around that. From there, the melody takes over and the rest is, like, filler of lyrics which aren’t terrible, hopefully. I don’t think of it as storytelling or anything like that.”

But it is. In part, at least. Trust Fund songs often occupy a sort of hyperreal space, one where the specifics of Jones’ life - work gripes, landmarks, meetings with friends, snatches of TV dialogue, football - bleed into musings on omnipresent, insidious capitalism or, as Jones recently discussed with Drowned in Sound and Crack, the idea of safety in public or private spaces.

“I do choose it, so it’s not just a thesaurus or whatever,” Jones says. “I think of it like Belle and Sebastian lyrics. They’re quite full of detail, but then you try and listen to them as if something is happening to one person and it doesn’t really make sense that way.  Or like Morrissey, I guess. Not to compare myself to Morrissey.

“All his lines are like this very specific thing that’s happened, but over the course of a song or an album it’s not a journey through his life. It’s things he’s noted down and when you put them together it sounds more important than it is.”

That’s pop music in a nutshell, isn’t it?

'Seems Unfair' is out now on Turnstile.

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