Don’t Stop the Insanity

‘Excuse me, what was the question again?”

The first time Jason Kay, the leader of the British soul-pop band Jamiroquai, loses his place during an interview because a pretty woman is walking by, you dismiss it as a gag by a playful pop star.

As he leans forward in his chair on the patio of a West Hollywood hotel and watches the woman until she moves out of sight, he sure seems to be exaggerating.

But Kay, 27, gets distracted by passing women nearly half a dozen more times during the hour--and he’s too good a showman to repeat the same joke so many times.

Clearly, Kay--who may be best known in this country as the guy who wears the funny hat in Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” video--enjoys the life of a pop star. He recently bought a 42-acre country estate in England and he tools around back home in a dozen pricey sports cars, the spoils of having sold more than $125 million worth of albums over the last five years.

Part of Jamiroquai’s appeal is that Kay radiates good times on stage. Though the group’s music leans a bit too much on identifiable ‘70s soul and funk strains, Kay himself brings a winning sense of individuality to his concerts, where he combines moves as fluid as Prince’s with a disarming sense of humor.

“You know what I love about this country?” he asked during the band’s recent Universal Amphitheatre show, looking out at the crowd with the seriousness of a man about to share a profound discovery.

“Gatorade!” he shouted, picking up a bottle and taking big gulps from it. “I love the stuff.”

It’s clear during the hotel interview that Gatorade isn’t the only thing that Kay likes to drink. It’s midday and Kay winces at the bright sun as he takes off his dark glasses. He says he was “thrown out of the bar” the night before.

As soon as he sits down, he orders a bloody Mary.

When the waitress returns with the drink, he frowns. “Oh, I’m sorry, baby. I forgot to tell you: I don’t want any pepper in it. But just leave it here, I’m sure one of the others [in the band] will take it. Just bring me another one without pepper.”

He ends up drinking both.

“Don’t want anything to go to waste now, do we?” he offers.

Asked about his adjustment to the band’s escalating popularity, Kay says, “What’s not to like? I think too many music people are sullen, moody individuals who are either miserable in their music or in their personal life, sometimes both.

“When you do what you want to do, you should enjoy yourself. To me, music has always been about positiveness . . a reason to dance or have fun. It’s easy being miserable. Music should help lift you out of your woes.”

It’s easy when watching Kay’s love of the spotlight to think of him as the Liam Gallagher of British soul music.

As was the cocky Oasis lead singer, Kay was born in Manchester and seems wholly consumed with a legendary act that blossomed in the ‘60s. Instead of Gallagher and the Beatles, however, it’s Kay and Stevie Wonder.

But Kay isn’t too keen on the Gallagher comparison.

“Don’t like it,” says Kay, who speaks with the speed of his stage moves, often causing his words to run together. “Each to his own, I suppose, but my hang-up with Liam is that his attitude is wrong. You can’t treat people like [that]. Remember, the people you meet on the way up. . . . Well, you know the rest. He’s even called me a wanker once. I wasn’t brought up like that.”

He pauses briefly to watch yet another woman move along, but he doesn’t lose his place this time.

“That doesn’t mean you won’t have your moments. Like, you’ve caught me in a bad time. I feel like a guy who has been running and running and running for the last seven years and it’s time to sit back and reassess everything.

“Everybody’s going, ‘Isn’t it great what Jamiroquai has achieved?’ Well, to me, this is nothing. This is just a good foundation for a band I want to last for 15 or 20 years. I’m not interested in just being today’s pop star. I want a career, like Stevie Wonder or Sting or Queen.”

The more Kay talks, the more you sense a seriousness and ambition that aren’t readily apparent from the group’s music and concerts.

But it’s a trait that Jeff Ayeroff, who runs Sony’s Work label with Jordan Harris, noticed when they began working with Kay more than two years ago.

“Jay is very serious about his music and his career,” Ayeroff says. “He knows where he wants to be, and that’s essential in an artist. Very few artists without his kind of drive succeed. The lackadaisical ones don’t succeed, and the ones who don’t have a sort of vision about who they are usually don’t succeed.”

Kay grew up around show biz, watching his mother, singer Karen Kay, perform in clubs around the world and hearing about her struggles with agents, managers and club owners.

“My mom was an incredibly talented woman who played on the same stage in Hamburg as the Beatles when she was 17,” says Kay, who was raised by his mother when his parents split soon after his birth.

“She was into quality music, and I grew up hearing . . . the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Dinah Washington. But she also suffered at the hands of [businessmen] who spent all her money.”

When Kay started his own band, he remembered his mother’s business encounters and vowed to concentrate as much on the business side of his career as on the musical.

Though he was enthralled by the dance-music world, Kay wasn’t caught up in the turntable deejay or synthesizer focus of hip-hop and techno. He preferred live musicians who played in the style of ‘70s soul.

So he assembled Jamiroquai, whose core lineup of four other musicians is extended to 10 these days for live shows. The group’s first album, 1993’s “Emergency on Planet Earth,” made Kay a star in England and much of Europe. The package, whose lyrics dealt largely with the environment and other social issues, sold nearly 2 million copies.

The second album, 1994’s “Return of the Space Cowboy,” sold a bit over 2 million (as with the debut, predominantly outside the U.S.). By this time, however, the lyrics were more party-minded. Q magazine recently called “Return” one of the 25 best dance collections ever made. The group’s third album, “Traveling Without Moving,” has sold more than 6 million copies around the world and broken into the Top 30 in the U.S.

Many critics, however, have complained about the derivativeness of the Jamiroquai sound.

It’s a touchy point with Kay.

“What you basically had was these people saying here’s this white guy plagiarizing black music,” he says. “But I’m not like those people who build their songs around samples. We’re writing songs ourselves and playing them. To me, it’s like saying if we brought in a string quartet, we’d be plagiarizing Bach.

“Besides, we never tried to hide our influences. When we first started doing interviews, I went on and on about how much I loved ‘Innervisions’ and how Stevie Wonder was my hero. So what happens? Next thing I’m reading this magazine and it says this kid thinks he’s the new Stevie Wonder.”

One of the joys of his life was meeting Wonder recently at an MTV event.

“He was everything that I hoped he would be,” Kay enthuses. “I introduced myself and he said, ‘Oh, you the one who did “Virtual Insanity.” Nice tune.’ . . . I thought, ‘Wow, Stevie Wonder knows our tune.’ It was like getting a gold seal or something.”

Much of Jamiroquai’s audience in this country found the band through MTV, which declared “Virtual Insanity” the video of the year. Besides the music, the video showcased the charm of Kay, who danced about like a free spirit under his furry Mad Hatter-style hat. (“It’s actually fake fur,” he points out.)

Kay has been wearing colorful headgear ever since the days in England when he’d spend hours on the dance floor in clubs. The hats were like a signature that other kids remembered, and they also served a utilitarian purpose. They keep his longish hair out of his eyes, he says. He designs some of his own hats and has them made by a millinery in London.

But the band’s music has improved since the first two albums. The high-stepping “Cosmic Girls” has humor and spice, while “Alright” has such a snappy, Bee Gees-driven pulse that it would have been one of the highlights of the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.

Ayeroff, of the Work label, thinks the success of the “Traveling” album in this country is a major breakthrough for the band.

“We’re going to probably sell 1.5 million copies of this album [in the U.S.], but I think it really is just the beginning for him,” he says. “I think for a long time Jay didn’t believe that America was going to take to him, but seeing what’s happening now, he knows he has an opportunity on the next record to be huge, and he’s not going to let the opportunity slip away.”

On the hotel patio, Kay stares at the bottom of the second bloody Mary glass and smiles.

“It’s really been a hectic time,” he says of his escalating U.S. success. “There weren’t a lot of people who believed in us at first, but that’s OK. You should have to prove yourself. I’ve got to a stage now where I can sit and take a breather. I can afford to not put out the next album until 1999. I want to take a step back as a musician and as a person. We’ve got people’s attention now, so we have to take it to the next level.”

As if self-conscious about sounding too serious about his work, Kay suddenly leans forward, turns his head and asks, “Now, where is that waitress?”*

Hear Jamiroquai

* Excerpts from “Traveling Without Moving” and other recent album releases are available on The Times’ World Wide Web site. Point your browser to:

https://www.latimes.com/soundclips