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Sport 32: Summer 2004
The Cult of Personality
The Cult of Personality
It was a period of my life when I wasn't actually feeling music that much—I wasn't, wasn't actually—I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep doing it… [It felt] pretty cold, especially when that's all you—I mean, to me, that's kind of like losing—like turning the lights out and turning the heater off.
Jonathan was the guy who came and turned the lights and the heater back on.
It is impossible to overstate the centrality of Jonathan to the group. He organises all the gigs, he runs all the rehearsals, he composes the original music, he works the hardest, he sets the standard; the idea of the IAP was his, he got the funding, he set everything in motion. But it's more than that. He sets the mood, too. There's no challenge for leadership here. He can be hard to cope with, but he is also, often, warm, kind, and very, very funny. Charisma can't be learned, or earned; the bequeathing of it is as unfair as that of any other talent.
page 118Jonathan believes, apparently sincerely, that he is open to all comers, open to all lines of inquiry: it's something—one is given to understand, subtly, through a series of changing, downward-sent facial expressions, through a series of subtle, pointed shifts through the body and voice—that he struggled after, at some cost to himself, and found. This particular self-concept is easily challenged, though. Just take a line he doesn't wish followed and then pursue it against the early storm warnings, and watch what happens. He will, literally, tense and swell with barely-suppressed fury: his movements will speed up, and his diction slow down. Yes. Scratch the funny, charming, loose-limbed surface here and then get the fuck out of the way, before he shoves you there.
Now, Jonathan has a number of effective ways of doing this: he can stare at you arctically, which takes a little getting used to—this is the coldest bluegreen stare since the Third Reich—or he can cut you out of the group (and remember, they unconsciously follow his every lead, this particular hub of beautiful, talented, idealistic young people; in order to do your job effectively you need to be somewhere only just outside of the loop), or… he can turn vicious.
Vicious is certainly in the repertoire, don't imagine it isn't—personal and direct, with a series of well-chosen well-drawn unkind versions of the truth, delivered at cutting pitch. There are a lot of people who'll validate this particular impression, although none of them will consent to be identified doing so. Apparently he is intimidating, Jonathan Crayford: the number of people who have been offended by him seem reluctant to tell him so to his face. One cannot avoid wondering if this is, perhaps, a shame: if this inadvertent side-effect of the inadvertent force of his personality is unfortunate, for someone who—without question: truly, no question—genuinely struggles after fair, who genuinely believes he is doing a great right, who has been prepared to sacrifice a great deal (financial stability; recording contracts; an easyish, or at least earned and fought for, name; New York, in fact) to do what he believes he is here to do, to do what he believes he is, through an accident of birth, and God-given talent, and received or sought-after vision, uniquely qualified to do. Maybe what he deserves from the people around him is something better. The expectation that he is and will be accountable, for instance: that he can and will be called to page 119 account. A silent, or else clearly enunciated, demand that he learn to better manage the veering and tidal fluctuations of his mood.
I had this horrible dream when I was a kid. I've never forgotten it. I dreamt I was in the sea, and I was swimming to the surface, and I didn't have enough breath to reach it, and I swam and swam, and I wasn't going to make it… and just as I reached out to touch the surface, I realised it was the bottom. I'd been swimming in the wrong direction.
—But let us too struggle to be fair, let us go after balance here. Certainly he is a wonderful, astonishing interview subject: this is, you are forced to acknowledge—and Jonathan can be so rude and so ungracious that you do grudge acknowledging it, in spite of your own best intentions—a brilliant and a generous mind. He is articulate to a fault: after a fluid seven and a half minutes (most of which it would be absolutely possible to use), you take advantage of him drawing a breath to push him slightly toward clarifying one of the many intricacies he has already thrown at the camera and hovering boom: during the fifteen seconds it will take to pose the redirection, Jonathan will look down, scowl, study his fingernails, inaudibly sigh, and scowl again before looking up reluctantly, under his brows: this is not a man who enjoys being interrupted.