Interview: Musician Jonathon Prichard

Hello all, in the Interview series, here is a long overdue post from my interview with Jonathan Prichard who is an Adelaide musician, and has just finished his last year studying a Bachelor of Music (Jazz) on bass guitar. I have known Jono for years, he never fails to make me laugh, feel slightly confused and happy. I recently got to see his graduating recital, with photos below. Enjoy. xx

What do you do?
And why do you do it?

At the moment I do music and that’s because it’s the only thing that really drives me to do anything. The creativity, meshed with the self-expression, is the unique medium where I find I can really be satisfied with what I’m doing. I’m also teaching, and getting into that more as a career path. Currently trying to figure out which specialities I want to be able to teach besides music.

What is your favorite thing to wear?

I have a pretty expensive trench coat I bought on exchange in 2001 at KaDeWe, a fairly famous store in Berlin, that’s a cashmere blend. Mostly I don’t think too much about what I wear much.

What is your favorite thing to drink/eat?

Pfeffernüsse come to mind, which are German gingerbread type biscuit things. I’ve also gotten slightly addicted to chai latte with vanilla recently.

If you were an animal, which would it be?

I reckon I’d be a serval. If I ever get a tattoo, it’ll be of one of them, or maybe a lynx. Cats are awesome.



What are you working on right now?

I have a recital coming up, and other things with uni. I’m going to be playing one of my own pieces, called Ineluctable Modality of the Visual, named after a difficult to read chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, because the piece itself is hard to get your head around, so that’s the main thing I’m trying to get right for my recital. Other than that, I’m trying to learn French.

In the next year, what are your rough plans or goals?

Try to do a Graduate Diploma of Education, maybe a C4 in Teaching English as a Second Language, with the aim to be qualified to teach High School and Adult Education; and to teach English and Music overseas. As well as decent French, I speak German and some Indonesian.

The best place you have traveled to...

There was a cabin, I think in Austria, where I had the time of my life with a whole bunch of other German exchangers. We played this hardcore, speed-based card game all day long. I was awesome at it. There’s something about cold, hard logic achieved at great speeds that I excel at more than anything else.

What do you collect?

I don’t really collect anything, though I used to when I was young. This question makes me think about all the memorabilia in my unit though, little in-jokes like the damaged door in the lounge that has “this is art” on it, as well as a price tag someone put on to continue the joke, or the “respect your mom” poster that’s been on the spare room door while four different people (one of whom doesn’t speak with his mother) have lived in the house with me and the picture of two people I don’t know that’s been up on my freezer since a friend and I found it in some second-hand board game in an op shop. My unit collects memories: really oddly-humoured, ironic memories.




What is your best Musical memory?

Several would come equally: my first gig, just the excitement of it, a gig I did for the scouts, because it was for a fair few people, and being told after performing in a pit band for a musical that it’d made my father cry.

Can you write a short story of one paragraph from the top of your head for us?
There once was a man named Mummingford the butler. He has a petty, miserly man and he saved up all his money just so he could tell other people he was richer than they were. He was right, so no one could dispute his beliefs. Unfortunately for him, he needed a kidney, so he had to go to the hospital to get one. On the way, he learnt a whole bunch of life lessons from a wide assortment of one-dimensional extras and then he wasn’t a miser any more. Instead, he was a beautiful swan. The end.

This story may have just been an amalgamation of other media: Jeeves and Wooster, a few choice lines of King’s Bounty, A Christmas Carol, Scrubs and The Ugly Duckling.

Is there anything else we should know about you?

I had an operation on my eyes when I was about ten and now I have artificial lenses in my eyes that, when light hits them, occasionally shine like a cat’s.

On a perfect day off, what do you do?

As much as I possibly can: jog or walk, read, go to the shopping centre nearby for coffee and to look at the bookstore and gaming store, play computer games, work on French a bit, do some musical things, teach a student or two and catch up with friends, maybe a movie or poker or something.

If you found a treasure box, what would it look like? And what would it contain?

Probably I would hope it contained treasure, both from some fantastical imagery and financial gain. To that end, it’d be a big, archaic chest with an unnecessarily large lock.

What was the best show you ever saw, and why?

I loved seeing The Bens in concert. I don’t understand why more musical geniuses don’t collaborate more often. Is it the artistic temperament? I mean, plenty of artists do, but mostly the kind that have talented voices or are skilled instrumentalists; not the all-round musical artists like Ben Folds, Kweller and Lee were. Lee is a pop artist, but it’s clear that he knows that and doesn’t take some of his stuff too seriously; seeing him with the ASO and in The Bens it’s clear he knew what he was doing.