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As part of Music Is To Blame’s What’s to Blame? interview series, Sarah-Jayne talks us through her musical back story, her evolving creative process, the importance of collaboration and her hopes for the future.
Tell me about the band name Dutch Mustard. Who’s to blame for that?
My lovely friend Phil, who I used to work with at Wembley Guitar Center. When I started, I booked gigs without even having a band because I thought that would be a good push to get a band together. He suggested Dutch Mustard and I was like, “Oh, God, that’s awful but we’ll just use it for now”. We ended up using it for loads of shows and then I thought, we’ll just leave it. Other artists perform under a band name too, Kevin Parker is Tame Impala, St Vincent is actually Anne.
It’s become my identity now, so I don't feel weird without it. I actually have it tattooed on me now which is embarrassing so I have to keep the name forever now!
Who would you say is to blame for your music career? What got you started down that path?
The wonderful Jack Black in School of Rock. I saw it when I was eight years old, and I just loved it. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to be Zack Mooneyham on the guitar, he was my superhero. I asked my Mom for guitar lessons, which we couldn’t really afford at the time and she said if you can get a guitar, I’ll organise the lessons. I was eight years old, and I saved €40 - this was back when I still lived in The Netherlands - and I managed to buy a guitar with Christmas and birthday money.
I got classical guitar lessons, which is not what I wanted to do, but it was the way to start. Very quickly after that, I started playing acoustic guitar and then electric guitar and then finally started to play rock, which is what I wanted to do. So, yeah, School of Rock was the beginning of my music making.
What was it about that character in particular that made you think "I’ve got to be like that"?
It was just the whole thing of sticking it to the man and just being united together and putting on a show and thinking, we can do this. It just really made me feel part of something. I saw the way that Jack Black talks about rock and roll, the way he teaches the kids what it means, it just really grabbed me. I thought, “That is so cool, I need to be a part of that, that’s what I want to do” and it never changed, I still feel the same. We actually quote School of Rock sometimes before gigs.
Is that what you were recreating when you got a band together to do those early gigs?
I think so. I played solo shows for a very long time, from about 14, 15, because I used to be managed by Rick Buckler from The Jam. Bless him, rest in peace, he passed away recently, but he got me doing my first gigs. I did a lot of it on my own to start with, but I always wanted to be in a band and have that bigger, fuller sound. Once I was a little bit older and I was getting more confident with my skills as a musician and songwriter it just got to a point where I thought, “OK, I can do this”.
It’s definitely that feeling of community and rock and roll and doing it together. We did a little tour when I was about 19 in a little car, and we were all in there listening to rock music so it was a big influence, especially in the first stages of how I was making music.
Do you remember the very first gig? What was that like?
The very first proper Dutch Mustard gig was actually as Sarah Jayne and Band at Strongroom in London because my friend David worked at Strongroom Studios at the time.
It was the best day of my life at the time! We had five songs and we learned it in three rehearsals. At that time I wasn’t producing so I had the guys write in their drum parts, write in their bass parts. I might have had some ideas on demos, but we had to glue the songs together. It felt like, “Wow, I’m gigging in London, this is so cool”!
I’ve been doing it for years and I still feel that every gig we play we treat as Wembley. Every gig. We give it everything, even if it’s five people, a thousand people, you just never know when your next gig’s going to be and it’s such a special feeling, you can’t get it anywhere else. Also the chemistry with players, making music with someone and bringing people together with what we’re creating and then you have a room of people and we’re all in the same world. You just can’t get it anywhere else.
How would you describe your journey from getting that first gig to where you are right now?
A roller coaster! It’s been extremely intense. I actually went through a vocal injury during lockdown (2020/2021) and I realised the sound wasn’t cohesive, it wasn’t the sound that I wanted. I realised I was trying to recreate my favourite bands and trying to sing like them and trying to play like them. It wasn’t authentic. It taught me a lot about the difference between a band and session players, but you have to learn this stuff, you don’t just grow up knowing everything.
We had six shows booked and they were all cancelled. I’d lost my voice anyway, from the way I was singing, drinking too much because I thought you had to get really drunk and mess yourself up to be part of rock and roll. I really thought I had to do that to fit in. But now I know it’s not about that. You don’t have to feel like you have to copy people and what they do to be rock and roll.
After I lost my voice, I had speech therapy and singing lessons for about a year and I had to actually find out where sound comes from within my body. It was really after that that I found my authentic voice. I think in ‘Weeping Willow’, my first release, I was onto something there. Once I found my voice and started to become confident again, working through all these things that I’d learned over the years that I needed to unlearn, that’s when the first EP came together.
I’m still keeping the grit that I love that comes from Soundgarden and Queens of the Stone Age and Nirvana and those hard rock bands, but then I also love My Bloody Valentine which is more the dreamy side of me. I also like really good pop music or alternative electronic stuff.
I love Thom Yorke and so I felt like I wanted to introduce this influence as well. So then you had ‘Loser’ which I wrote with Bill Ryder Jones which was written in two days in the studio, it was just so easy, it just fell together quite naturally. That track is one of my favourites, it just boosted my confidence so much to continue with releasing.
With ‘Thank You’ I wanted to show off a little bit more of my pop side. Still keeping the rocky guitar and the dreamy elements in there.
I’ve just released ‘Dreaming’, this week, and for that song, I leant more into my alternative side. I was a little bit worried if people were going to like it but I was listening to Thom York a lot, and Grimes had a song with an electronic feel that also influenced me while writing. I’m just following my gut, letting the music become its own thing and the more I let go of it the better it actually gets.
With lyric writing, I don’t sit there and think about what I need to write about. It’s more of a therapeutic process where I’ll make the sonic loops, the beats or the bass or the guitar, whatever the initial spark is, and then I’ll create a loop from it, then I’ll just get a mic and start singing. All of a sudden, I have this song and I’m thinking, “Woah, that’s so deep. But is that too deep? Are people going to think I’m a drama queen?”. I tell myself to just tell the truth, just tell them what you’re feeling because they’re going to feel similar things. I think I’m really starting to find my feet at this point.
I’m really happy and excited for what’s to come, I'm writing my debut album this year, I feel that if I’ve come this far already as an independent then I’m never going to stop making music. It makes me who I am and I make people happy. Every time I see people smiling at gigs and I get that feeling, it’s just worth everything, really.
What is the current milestone on that journey that you feel most excited about?
I feel most excited about the new music that I’ll be putting together. We’ve got a tour coming up this summer and it’s our first proper headline tour. I honestly cannot wait!
If you were trying to communicate one message through your music, what would that be?
Believe in yourself. No one’s going to do it for you.
You can make everything happen. You can make all your dreams happen. You belong somewhere. You are part of something bigger than yourself. I think that’s really important.
When people listen to my music, I want them to feel like they belong there. It’s all good, I got you, you’re all welcome here.
You moved from The Netherlands to London, and I’m wondering if there’s a connection there about belonging. How did that move influence you?
Oh, true. I’ve never actually thought about that. I moved to The UK when I was 10 years old, so I had to leave a lot of my school friends behind who I'm still friends with. We moved a lot as kids, in the UK as well, to different homes. I really think that makes so much sense. This is therapy! I think you’re right, because I’ve moved so much. I’ve been in London for 10 years, in the UK for 20 years, but I really feel like I belong there, but I also have my home in The Netherlands with my family there and my friends there, I’m always split between.
I suppose there’s that saying home is where the heart is. So I guess it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, if your heart’s in the right place, you’ll always be home. Maybe that’s something that I try to put into the music, that feeling of belonging. We’re all here. When we all put our headphones in there’s another person in another place listening to the same song.
The videos for your songs are beautifully produced. What’s it like to have a song that you created as a purely auditory experience put through that process of visual interpretation? Does it change the way that you think about the song?
Absolutely. It’s a very confronting process because we all have our insecurities as people anyway. As an artist, I like to think we are a little bit more vulnerable, because we’re putting our faces out there and we’re putting our music out there and my music is all very, very truthful.
I’m actually putting a lot of personal emotions out there or things I’ve been through. When it comes to videos, for me it’s been a real process to find my confidence in the way I make music, the sound I have, the way I look, the way I portray myself to people. I think it’s all connected whether you’re a musician or not. It’s taken me a really long time and a lot of hard work within myself to even find a visual identity with the way I present myself that makes me feel comfortable with who I am. With music videos, you’re in a position where you can play around with storylines, costumes. You can portray a song so that someone will hear a song one way, someone else will hear it a different way. So you’ve got an opening to be playful with it. In a creative light, you can think, “What’s going to bring more attention? What is going to excite people?”.
That’s been really scary for me because I’m just not used to that, I’m not used to making films. I’ve now met a lovely director called Jos Newbolt, and he’s directed ‘Dirty Queen’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Loser’, ‘Thank You’, and now ‘Dreaming’. He has had to go through so many conversations with me and my anxieties because, as I said, it is scary, especially if you’re in the video as well. You want to make sure that you identify with the image you’re putting out there and the story. I don’t want something to be violent, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be passionate.
It’s very difficult finding the fine line between emotions. ‘Beauty’, for example, was a dance video completely. I’m not a dancer, but it was a dream I had my whole life. I met someone who could help so I just asked him and we learned the choreography. It took two months for me to learn the whole routine. I remember going through that process of speaking with Jos, saying that I don’t want it to be too dark. I always worry when things are too dark, because I think a time in my life when I was listening to hard rock, I felt like I had to be dark and negative. I can feel that way and listen to heavy music and love it, and we all have moods but I’m actually quite a bright person and quite bubbly, so I always worried about being pulled back into that dark place. We had to be very careful about how we were doing the choreography and communicate with the choreographer, Matthew Perry and director Jos Newbolt. They really had to communicate together as well and through everyone’s hard work, it just came out perfectly.
With ‘Loser’, we were supposed to have a sunny day with the beach but we got rain so the whole video ended up being black and white which I didn’t want to do so I had to trust him and it was perfect. You have to trust people because the black and white made it super dramatic and then I listened to the song and I thought, “oh my God, it hits so hard now, that’s how it changes the song.” When someone else creative listens to it, they’ve got a vision of how it makes them feel. We drove to Hastings with two of my friends, Lena and Laszlo, and it was just us in the rain, camera wrapped in bags, but it was right, and it was dark, it was just the pure emotions of what the song was.
I love how it feels like cinema. It’s amazing how those two worlds, music and cinema can come together. If you’re working with the right people, they will try to pull you out of comfort zones for the greater good and you collect more fans that way, other audiences so that you’re not just stuck in your little cocoon doing the same thing.
Do you find that sharing your work with a bigger audience means that you see yourself and your work in a different way?
I actually try to not think about social media. It drives me crazy but at the same time, it’s lovely because it’s how I met Bill Ryder Jones, for example, or Dave Sitek. When it comes to making music, I try to remove myself from it. With ‘Beauty’ I actually sing about algorithms and how we’re all prettier in pictures, so I do take influence from social media and what it’s doing to the world.
When fans message me, I reply to everyone if I can as they do boost my confidence knowing that other people connect with my music. It makes me quite emotional when people say that my music helped them through a difficult time in their life. They’ve said they feel really hopeful and empowered. I take that all on board massively.
The lesson I learned from connecting online is that I must be doing something right because they are here, and they are following or they are subscribing. But I also have to be careful to not let that influence my confidence and my skill level. It’s so important not to think about competition, because how is an independent artist supposed to compete with labels paying for all this? I find social media quite a difficult topic but I do take influence from what fans tell me in the sense that they make me feel like I’m on the right path which then influences my next moves because I just feel like I can be open with who I am as a songwriter.
From getting your first guitar when you were eight and playing that first gig at the Strongroom through to ‘Dreaming’ and your debut album, where is this journey taking you next?
I don’t know. Wembley?! It’s completely open ended. I want to play lots of festivals, I want to play lots of gigs. I hope it’s going to lead me to bigger audiences so I can connect with more people. I just want to keep making music. It’s just about timing and making the time, making it happen. We’re on to some really exciting new music and this is not a short road. I think we’re actually at the beginning of what’s to come, which is crazy because I’ve been working my whole life to get to where I am right now, and it feels like I’ve already done a whole journey.
I actually think it’s only the beginning, so I can’t wait for what’s to come.
Peter Freeth
Image: Jason Davis
