This story is probably occurs in fragments within the vast number of articles on this site: the origins of the Soft Riot project and how the name came to be. Many years ago, back in 2006 and at the tail end of my ten years living in Vancouver, Canada, I started messing around with compositions on my own while I was playing in other bands. These activities were nothing anywhere close to “serious” at the time. Many of the ideas came about in my home studio in very random sessions — often late at night — messing about with the various synthesizers I had at the time (and most I sold before moving across the world). I’d work on these tracks for an intense number of days but then would not touch them for months as I was busy in these other bands, and moreover I wasn’t really sure if they were something I’d want to pursue in a live setting yet.
These original compositions were done under a project name called JJ Wax, which was a simple name based on my first and middle name initials and used “Wax” from The Wax Museum, the name I was using for my 7-8 years of freelance graphic design work when I was living for those ten years in Vancouver. At that time I was doing graphic design and early website development, more centred around the underground music scene at the time. Some of this early work for design work that time can be found here on my current jjdinfo.com portfolio website.
The name The Wax Museum itself came from a track by a somewhat obscure “chaotic” mid-90s hardcore band called Angelhair from their sole LP released in 1994 (maybe 1995?) called Insect Mortality. I still have the original pressing of this LP, and this year it was given the full, expanded re-issue treatment by the long-running San Diego underground punk/hardcore label Three One G.
The members of that band went on to form a more influential band (at least in my world) called The VSS.* The singer of the band, Sonny Kay, also ran what might now be called a “cult” underground record label called GSL (Gold Standard Laboratories) that had its heyday in the late 1990s until the mid-2000s.
* Their sole album Nervous Circuits is in my top influential records of all time which I went into great detail around four years ago which you can read here.
JJ Wax played one sole live show at a now defunct Vancouver venue called The Lamplighter back in 2006 I believe. I did not play the set alone as my musician friends Lyndsay Sung (whom I played with in Radio Berlin) and Steve Balogh joined me on stage after a few hurried rehearsals on synths and bass respectively. It was a decent show although I don’t remember it at all — except for abstract flashbacks of images — and I figured at that time I wasn’t ready to continue that project further, especially as I was acutely aware that I had a massive move across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Kingdom looming on the horizon.
So back into the closet that project went until around five years later. At the time JJ Wax had about 6-7 tracks that were played live, including a track called “Soft Riot”, which has never been released, and frankly the recording — at least to my current tastes — is too amateur and more so too alien to me at this point in my life and therefore doesn’t really warrant any re-introduction to the world at this point in time.
Around this time Vancouver was at the very beginning of its well-known path to becoming one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. The 2010 Winter Olympics were about to be hosted in Vancouver in the coming couple of years, and many old, 20th century neighbourhoods of Vancouver were starting to drastically increase in value. Old warehouses were starting to be knocked down for shiny new condominiums. Rents for a single bedroom apartment would soon easily start seeing quadruple-digit per-month amounts.
I had experienced this first-hand in 2006 when I had a small design studio room near the Mount Pleasant area of Vancouver that I was evicted from as the building that studio was located in was slated for a new condominium development. That’s part of a whole other story which will be perhaps saved for another time.
Many people in Vancouver were complaining and getting angry about this spiraling cost of living privately, often taking to the internet to express their dismay. Overall these changes that were beginning to happen in Vancouver started to replace easier, artistic living with the need to make money, and many people that had lived in Vancouver comfortably for many years without needing a high-paying job and with time to pursue their artistic endeavours were put in a position where they needed to focus on getting income to adjust to this new and expensive Vancouver. This whole story is better documented online by writers and journalists who have a far better authority on the subject than I.
This online conflict was not only a feature of this particular situation, but started to become the common discourse for many other discussions of a heated nature in the years to come starting in the 2010s. These concepts became the theme of the track “Soft Riot”, which was a little term I came up to describe this situation of “online dissent”. I believe this term might be more well known under the term “keyboard warrior”, or something to that effect.
This term “soft riot” I coined also seemed to provide two words of definite contrast as well. Eventually I just decided to port over that title to the name of the project: Soft Riot as I soon was tactically not wanting to use any part of my actual name, nor the design aspect of my creative work for this project. I’m not entirely sure at what point in time this happened.
As mentioned earlier, the project slept dormant for a number of years. The move to the UK happened and for almost two years left me incredibly disoriented, overwhelmed, living on little money and completely without my original community and connections to music that I had built up in my ten years in Vancouver— and indeed in North America. I was in a completely different place and my life took a drastic perpendicular turn. This wasn’t a bad thing overall, but it certainly required some effort and grunt work to figure it all out. It was finally in late spring of 2009 that I finally started to get traction on things again — making new friends, discovering new communities, clubs and music and of course, getting back into productively doing music.
In mid-2009 I co-founded Savage Furs with an old UK “pen-pal” Delaney which ran for a couple of years. And it was in mid-2010 I started re-visiting all of these fractured ideas that had been languishing in those years under the JJ Wax/Soft Riot name and properly developed and finished up those recordings. This became the original No Longer Stranger EP released on the Canadian digital label Panospria in early 2011, which eventually saw itself expanded into a proper LP with two extra tracks on the US label Volar Records two years later. These recordings sound drastically different in style and production than the Soft Riot material that followed it. It was meant to only be a casual, side project of subdued electronic atmospherics when I started it, but a few years later was pushed to the forefront as my main musical output and has ever since then.
Going back to those early days, the name Soft Riot sounded kind of new and fresh, but in the years following that name christening I started discovering an infinite number of bands using “soft” as a first word in their names. The first being Soft Kill from Portland, whom I had a vague connection with as I met singer/guitarist Toby back in the early 2000s when a teenage version of himself put up Radio Berlin on a house show bill when he was living in New Hampshire back in those days. Following that came Soft Metals, Soft Veins, Soft Plastics, Soft… the list is endless seemingly — I suppose artists such as Soft Cell and The Soft Machine had a very early “leg up” on this trend back in the 1980s and 1960s respectively but who knew it would become so wildly popular? Maybe it’s the intonation of the word? Or maybe its terminology alluding to abstract, washed out psychedelia? Or even the letters S, O, F and T looking aesthetically pleasing next to one another?
Perhaps there’s some psychic connection or similar trains of thought between myself and these artists who have overwhelmingly selected this one word to represent their artistic output.
Overall I’m not really attached to the name — if anything I’ve just been using it so long now that it doesn’t really matter. My name has been Jack Duckworth since birth, and I haven’t bothered changing that, despite its cute and anatine imagery, its relation to the famous pub owner from the long running British soap opera Coronation Street — or just its generally “English” kookiness (it’s a historical Lancashire-based surname which has nothing to do with measuring the value of ducks). Given my punk and hardcore roots, I often wonder why I never adopted a “punk” stage name (Jackie Daggers?) to obscure this unique name of mine for the sake of entertainment. But I just stuck with it because, I guess, I never had a yearning to come up with what could have been an idiotic stage name that could have possibly been an albatross around my neck for the numerous years to follow.
There’s been many times I’ve thought about changing project name from Soft Riot to something else, but the logistics of that — especially in an age where many artists have to weigh out administrative and financial considerations — just seemed too extensive to even bother: new website, new social media accounts, time spent on new graphics, updating music catalogues and — well — people possibly getting confused (is this the same thing?) and many other things.
If anything such a name change would be an exercise in flippancy. I’ve got far too many other pressing priorities in live to sit around orchestrating a change of name. It is what it is and for the time being I’m fine with that.
On a final note, it’s always given me a giggle that I’m Jack Duckworth #1 on Discogs, ahead of Jack Duckworth #2 (Bill Terney’s character from Coronation Street) who is far more well-known than I!
Image above is the cover artwork from the original No Longer Stranger EP from 2011, based on a collage I created called “The Psychic General” from a few years earlier.
