The Sound of the Studio: Inside the Restless World of James Johnston

James Johnston talks to David Corfield on life with PJ Harvey, the chaos of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds years, and the unlikely calm of his new career in painting.

© 2025 David Corfield

James Johnston stands by the tall studio window, the London light spilling across him like paint. Outside, a slate-coloured building looms – the same one immortalized in one of his recent canvases – and he stares at it with the soft concentration of someone who has spent a lifetime studying shapes, shadows, and the things that exist between them. The room is scattered with brushes, guitars, a half-tuned violin, the faint smell of turpentine, and the quiet crackle of classical music from a nearby speaker. It’s the kind of space that reveals its owner before he ever says a word: a place where disciplines collide, where a musician becomes a painter, and a painter becomes a musician.

He turns from the window, easy and warm, and says with a laugh, “I’ve just sold a painting in Penzance. Got the message an hour ago.” Another show is running concurrently in Berlin. A London exhibition is booked for next September. There’s even one scheduled in a small Norwegian town far north – so far north, he says, that summer never really turns dark. “It’ll be twenty-four-hour daylight,” he adds, raising an eyebrow. “Should be… interesting.”

For decades, Johnston has moved between the worlds of punk clubs, international tours, recording studios, art studios, and now the hushed rooms of independent galleries. He’s a shapeshifter, a lifer, a man who has always followed the work rather than the industry. Fans of PJ Harvey know him as the magnetic multi-instrumentalist who has appeared across her recent tours and recordings, bringing an instinctive, emotional intelligence to her sound. Followers of Nick Cave’s sprawling universe remember him as a member of the Bad Seeds during their volatile, soul-shaking early 2000s run. Others know him as the former frontman of Gallon Drunk, the London band whose swaggering, noir-drenched noise left a mark on an entire era of alternative rock.

But in this quiet studio, Johnston isn’t any of those labels. He’s simply an artist; one who builds things, breaks things, rebuilds them again, and pays attention to the details. “Doing it all yourself is what I like now,” he says, speaking about his painting career but inadvertently describing his entire life philosophy. “After years of music, where everything’s run by someone else – managers, labels, schedules, all that – it’s so good just being your own boss. You paint something, you put it online, and eventually the right person finds it. That directness, the trust… it suits me.”

© 2025 David Corfield

And people do find him. Collectors from Australia message about buying pieces so large and unwieldy they barely fit through standard doorways. Strangers descend on his exhibitions. Musicians and photographers ask to collaborate. “It’s a cottage industry,” he says with a half-grin. “But one I’m very happy living inside.”

Today he’s preparing for our photo session – a portrait series meant to capture the duality of his world. When he slips briefly into musician mode, handling a violin or sitting beside a guitar with an unthinking familiarity, the room shifts. There’s a sense of history in the air, of decades spent on tour buses, in rehearsal rooms, and on stages where the lights are too bright to see past the first two rows.

The PJ Harvey Years

There’s reverence in Johnston’s voice when he speaks about PJ Harvey – “Polly,” as he calls her, with the casual affection of real collaboration. “Working with her is incredibly inspiring,” he says. “There’s no cynicism. None. She takes it all seriously – the music, the staging, the tiny details – and because she does, everyone else rises to that level.”

He describes arriving at venues where the visual noise has been stripped away: no stray posters, no bar clutter, no nonsense. Everything is intentional. Everything is part of the mood. “Suddenly the space feels unique,” he says. “It becomes this intense environment just for the moment you’re in it. That’s all her – the whole presentation, the seriousness, the character in the expression.”

Johnston has been orbiting Harvey’s world for years, joining her live band for different cycles depending on the album and the tour. “She doesn’t really have a permanent band,” he explains. “It all depends on what the record needs.”

The preparation is meticulous. The timelines are long. “You know a year ahead if you’re going out on tour,” he says. “Because everything – crew, sound, logistics – is on such a massive scale. But it’s all done in such a personal way. Everyone feels genuinely valued.” It shows. Their recent performances, including the widely admired NPR Tiny Desk set, reveal a group that operates with telepathic ease. The music feels both raw and ceremonial, intimate yet vast.

© 2023 David Corfield

The Nick Cave Years

If Harvey’s world is sculpted precision, Johnston’s history with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds was the opposite: beautifully chaotic, emotionally turbulent, thrillingly alive. He didn’t arrive there through a typical audition or industry connection. The story begins instead with a boiler explosion in a Hackney apartment block.

“My brother opened his door at the same time as the guy next to him,” Johnston recalls. “Turned out that guy was Victor Van Vugt – front-of-house engineer for the Bad Seeds. They got talking, became friends, and eventually I met everyone.” From there, life took a sharp turn. “Blixa Bargeld couldn’t do a U.S. tour, so I stepped in. It was really intense but absolutely brilliant. Eventually Blixa left, and then I joined properly for about six years,” James remembers.

He was part of that blistering early-2000s period – the era of No More Shall We Part, Nocturama, and the swamp-gospel thunder of Abattoir Blues. “It was loud,” he says, laughing. “Really loud. And really good fun.” He still speaks about those years with admiration, especially when discussing Cave’s evolution. Recently he’d watched footage of Cave’s early band, The Birthday Party – a display of chaos, violence, and theatrical fury. “Seeing that and then seeing him now… the voice is deeper, richer, calmer,” Johnston says. “It’s fascinating. One of the best gigs I ever saw in the ’80s was Einstürzende Neubauten supporting them. Total mayhem. Brilliant.”

Lydia Lunch and the Art of Controlled Chaos

Another long-standing creative partner is Lydia Lunch, the no-wave icon whose influence spans punk, performance art, poetry, and confrontational theatre. Johnston speaks of her with affection and awe. “She’s incredibly driven,” he says. “Absolutely. And very amusing – in a wonderfully dark way.” Their current reconnection happened not through industry channels but through grief. A beloved friend connected to Corsica Studios – a small but legendary South London venue – passed away. The venue was holding a series of farewell shows before being forced to close due to redevelopment.

© 2025 David Corfield

“They asked us to play one of the closing gigs,” he says. “We said yes. Then we thought, well, might as well do a few more dates.” The resulting tour is equal parts music, cabaret, performance art, and comedy. “What the band plays – I write the music, she writes the words,” he explains. “We turn up, bang it out. Her personality drives the whole thing. It’s not a free-for-all, but it’s close in a good way. Huge noise, total energy.” He pauses, smiling. “It’s fucking funny, too. People don’t expect that.”

Falling in Love With Music – Again

For someone who has played guitar on some of the most intense stages in modern rock history, Johnston speaks with almost boyish excitement about getting loud again. “After not doing it for a while, I wondered if that was still me,” he admits. “But the first faceful of volume… yeah. It’s still there.”

His choice of guitars is pragmatic rather than precious. He uses a Fender Jaguar for the Lydia shows – not because of its classic surf-rock twang, but because it stays in tune no matter how violently he treats it. “You could wave it around like you’re threatening someone with it,” he says. “Still in tune. Unbelievable.” He pairs it with a Telecaster as a backup, matched for tonal consistency. The setup is deliberately simple: an octave pedal, a couple of noise pedals, a Marshall amp, a bass amp, and brute force. “It’s a big sound,” he says. “Giant, really. Drums and chaos and her voice cutting through it all.”

The Painter at the Window

If Johnston’s musical world is one of noise and movement, his painting is the opposite: slow, deliberate, solitary. And yet the two practices echo each other – the attention to detail, the instinct for atmosphere, the discipline of showing up even when inspiration isn’t there. He keeps painter’s hours: ten to six, every day. “To be honest,” he says, glancing at the canvases lining the room, “I just can’t wait to get in here in the morning.”

His works – often moody, architectural, dreamlike – feel like scenes from a film you vaguely remember or a street you swear you walked once. They carry a sense of stillness, but also tension, as though something has just happened or is about to. And collectors agree. His output is snapped up quickly despite his modest online presence. “I keep meaning to build a proper website,” he sighs. “But every time I start, I think, I could be painting right now instead.” He laughs. “Websites are laborious. Painting isn’t.”

 © 2025 Alan Walter

The Soundtrack of a Studio Life

Classical music fills the studio while he works – nothing to do with the worlds he’s known, nothing that calls to mind old tours, no lyrics to snag the mind. “It’s the least related to anything I do,” he says. “So it’s the least distracting.” Operas are the exception. “They go off immediately,” he jokes. But otherwise, the space stays quiet, the sounds familiar: brushes tapping, a guitar hum, the scratch of pencil on paper.

Johnston’s musical DNA is stitched from an eclectic past: Captain Beefheart, John Lee Hooker, The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Iggy & The Stooges, The Fall – the raw, restless spirits that rewired entire generations. “I’d go to the village library and borrow blues records,” he says. “I didn’t know what any of it was, but it opened this magical world.” Later came punk gigs, noise gigs, whatever he could find. “There was brilliant music in the ’80s,” he insists. “Hard to believe, but it’s true.” These influences don’t appear in his work directly, but they shape the way he listens, the way he interprets the moment.

The Last Image

Before the interview wraps, Johnston lifts an old student guitar – a battered thing with notes written on the fingerboard. It’s almost comic in his hands, but there’s something tender in the way he holds it. “I found it in a dustbin,” he says. “But I love it. I had one just like it when I was a kid.”

He rests his hand on a nearby painting, completing the image – the musician and the artist, the noise-maker and the observer, the man who has spent his life balancing volume with silence.

“Thank you,” he says as the camera clicks. “This was fun.” Outside, London is shifting toward evening. Johnston’s studio fills with the soft gold light painters love and musicians rarely see unless they’ve been up all night. It’s a fitting glow for someone who has lived so many artistic lives and somehow woven them all together – without fanfare, without spectacle, just with grit and curiosity and the absolute refusal to stand still.

James Johnston will likely never stop moving. There will always be another tour, another collaborator, another painting drying on the wall. That restlessness – that openness to the next idea – is what keeps his work alive. And for now, in this quiet studio filled with half-finished canvases and well-worn instruments, it feels like the beginning of something even bigger.

Words and pictures © 2025 David Corfield