The Jay-Jay Johanson and Diane Pernet interview published in 10 Men Magazine issue 64 is, on its surface, a conversation between two people who have long admired each other across different creative disciplines. Beneath that, it is something closer to an archaeology: a slow excavation of how a person becomes the artist they are, and what they carry forward, whether they intend to or not.
Johanson, the Swedish musician who has released 15 studio albums across three decades, cuts a specific figure. Pale blond hair, an all-black tailoring uniform, a preference for Comme des Garçons and Balenciaga by Demna (he walked the designer’s SS24 show for the house). The silhouette is consistent even as the sound shifts. Pernet, founder and director of the A Shaded View on Fashion Film (ASVOFF) festival, is no stranger to a catwalk herself, and has long been a listener. The issue’s theme is heritage, and both parties understand the word in its fullest, least sentimental sense.
The Small-Town Boy Who Left at Fifteen
Johanson grew up between Trollhättan on the west coast of Sweden and Skara, and left home at 15 for Stockholm, younger than any of his siblings. ‘The family was so big, I needed to break out of that,’ he tells Pernet. ‘I couldn’t focus. It was not good for art.’ What he took with him, he says, was ‘some sort of small-town attitude’ that became more acute the further he travelled, sharpening first in Stockholm, then in London, then in Paris. He has lived in the same flat for 27 years, having quickly retreated from central Stockholm to the suburbs, to what he calls ‘a small-town situation in the big city.’
His father’s involvement with a jazz club called Mäster Olof, in Skara, becomes one of the interview’s more quietly extraordinary passages. The club operated on a simple and brilliant logic: American jazz musicians travelling between Gothenburg and Stockholm by car could be persuaded to stop for a hotel and drinks. It worked. In 1984, Johanson’s father invited him down to see Chet Baker. He was waiting for a phone call from a girl called Camilla. She never called. He went. ‘That changed my life,’ he says, with the directness of someone who has had three decades to verify the claim.
London, i-D and the Jay-Jay Johanson Diane Pernet Conversation on Visual Language
The London years are handled with the same specificity. Johanson and his friends, tall and blond and 15, arrived in the city on the back of NME, Melody Maker, i-D and The Face, all read a week late in Sweden. They were too young for the Blitz but found Taboo, the Limelight, the Wag Club. New Year’s Eve 1985, he spent the night at Limelight with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The acid house years followed, and early Massive Attack and Neneh Cherry. ‘Clubbing in London, in the 1980s, was unbeatable,’ he says. It is not nostalgia, exactly. It sounds more like a statement of fact he has tested against everything that came after.
By 1993, Johanson was working at i-D as an art director’s assistant, in the last year of the magazine’s analogue production: fax machines, scalpels, glue, scissors. Nick Knight, Edward Enninful and Pat McGrath were all part of that team. When he was offered a record deal, he insisted on designing his own covers. ‘I just couldn’t let anybody else do it; today it’s the same, because it’s so linked,’ he says. The visual and the sonic are not separate processes for him.
The King’s Cross period, which lent its name to his 2019 album, comes through in similar relief. He was squatting, walking to Covent Garden and i-D each morning from King’s Cross, eating one potato a day. Pernet asks whether he honoured the person he was then. ‘That person was definitely the same kid who was stealing the books at the library,’ he replies. A melancholic child in a small Swedish town, borrowing Sylvia Plath and reading about Vladimir Mayakovsky through what he could find, and stealing the volumes he didn’t want on record.
Paris arrived with his debut album, Whiskey, released in 1996, which entered the French charts and eventually sent the single ‘Poison’ to number four in 2000. His first act on arriving in the city was to walk into the Comme des Garçons store with no money and no intention of buying anything, simply to absorb the atmosphere. He then knocked on Adrian Joffe’s door repeatedly until Joffe introduced him to Rei Kawakubo. It is a story about persistence, but also about a specific kind of knowing: understanding exactly where you need to position yourself before you can afford to be there.
10 Men Magazine issue 64, titled Future, Legacy, Heritage, is available on newsstands from 25 September. The shoot was photographed by Mark Pillai, with fashion by Toby Grimditch.
