Best known as one of the founders of Notts electronic music titans Crazy P, Jim Baron (aka Ron Basejam) is a man with his fingers in several musical pies. This month sees the release of World Elephant Day, the first album from White Elephant – a collaborative project with Ben Smith (of Smith & Mudd fame) and fellow Crazy P member Chris Todd. In a wide-ranging catchup, Jim takes us from the halcyon days of nineties Notts to his solo work, and how The Sopranos played a role in the story of Crazy P…
This month you are releasing World Elephant Day, the debut album from White Elephant. Judging by your Spotify presence, you released your last EP in 2016. Why the long gap?
Well, it’s actually taken a lot longer than that. Chris and I first started making music with Ben back in 1996 when we were all studying at university together, in Nottingham. Unlike us, Ben moved back to London after he graduated. But we’ve always stayed in touch and occasionally made music together. That 2016 EP was actually the second record we put out, there was a one-track ten inch before it, called Sir John.
Since then we’ve just had loads of material which was just sort of sitting in the vaults. Then during lockdown Ben contacted me and said, “We’ve definitely got an album's worth of stuff, why don’t we put something together from it all?” So we all went back and listened to it all with fresh ears and realised it was really good. We all grabbed time here and there during other projects to get it to the state it’s in now.
The dictionary says that a ‘white elephant’ is a possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that's expensive to maintain. What made you choose that name?
Haha, maybe this album is the gift that nobody wants! To be honest I'm not entirely sure how the name came about – Toddy seems to think it came from a friend of ours, Rick Platt. A sense of humour is important for us and obviously the name is firmly tongue in cheek. But I think we all liked how it sounded straight away and there wasn't much arguing, so we just got on with it.
Aside from streaming, what other plans do you have for White Elephant? Will there be vinyl? Any plans to tour with it?
Yes, there will be some kind of physical release, although I'm not entirely sure what the plans for that are right now. We’d definitely all like to tour it, but I think we just need to see how it’s received before we plan for that. We're all quite long in the tooth, so the idea of sort of humping gear around, playing small venues hundreds of miles away to fifteen people isn't as appealing these days. I don’t want to sound conceited about that – it’s just that we all have other projects and families taking up most of our time. So we have to be fairly sure that there’s a demand for us to tour it on a reasonable scale before we can all commit to it.
This isn’t your first side project from Crazy P. Between 2021 and 2024 you’ve put out quite a few releases on your own, under the simple moniker of JIM. Tell us about those…
Yeah, that was another lockdown project too. The whole thing was an experiment in trying to write something like Crosby, Stills & Nash or Neil Young, with me getting back to playing about with instruments and doing it all myself. I really like that genre of music and it’s something I listen to often, but it was a project I didn't ever see leaving the studio, to be honest.
However, I'd been doing some work with Damian Harris, the founder of Skint Records. I sent it to him as I thought he might be able to give me advice on who to approach with it. He got back to me and said he wanted to sign it to a new label he was starting called Vicious Charm. So we put it out through there. I've always sort of skulked around at the back of the stage with Crazy P with a wall of synthesizers, and Danielle very much being our front lady, so doing the live thing for Jim was a huge challenge, because I'd never really sung outside of the studio. The whole experience was brilliant for me, in terms of just trying to challenge myself, and trying to see if I can do it without getting booed off.
The idea of doing stage shows like Orbital – with just mixers and pressing buttons – didn't really appeal to us. There weren’t many bands playing live house or disco back then, and we thought we could do something different.
So let’s talk about Crazy P. Can you take us back to the beginning? Where and when did you and Toddy meet?
I came to Nottingham for university in 1995. Chris was studying contemporary art, and I was studying a joint honours degree with law and music. He lived in Goldswong Terrace in St Anns – near the old Square Centre – so it was a bit of a hotbed for dope-smoking creatives back then. An old friend of mine called Cheryl introduced us. and we quickly hit it off and started playing around with music together.
What was Nottingham like back then? Where did you hang out?
Well, we were students and so we didn’t have a lot of money, so a lot of it was just house parties and student digs. But The Bomb, on Bridlesmith Gate, was the best nightclub around back then, and James Bailey, who ran it, was a huge supporter of local talent. He’d book some huge national act in the main room and then hand over the back room to crews like us, Bent, and Neon Heights. I saw some brilliant music at that place and James definitely helped us and others to create a foundation to make careers in music.
I believe it was around 2002 that you and Chris met Danielle, Mav, Tim and Matt, and Crazy P started to become a live act. Where did you come across them all?
I’d known Tim, the bass player, since my school days in North Wales. I'd made loads of music with him over the years, and he was the automatic choice. Matt Close, had been on Toddy's course and we knew he was a phenomenal drummer. We met Mav, going around the clubs playing percussion at places like Cream. Then we met Danielle in Manchester, and she was sort of the final piece of the jigsaw. We first saw she could dance, but then when we realised she could sing too we dragged her in. The idea of doing stage shows like Orbital – with just mixers and pressing buttons – didn't really appeal to us. There weren’t many bands playing live house or disco back then, and we thought we could do something different.
Fast forward a couple of years from here, then suddenly you’re on tour with Faithless, who were massive back then, and playing arena-sized venues…
Yeah, those are the days of your lives. Playing live to 15,000 people in the NEC in Birmingham, when you're just cutting your live teeth. You don't realize it at the time, but suddenly we were part of this huge production where you sort of see how things operate in the big leagues. There was a huge digital clock at the side of the stage and if you went on one second after that clock had hit your stage time, someone was in your face shouting at you. Before that we’d just turn up with our instruments, plug them in and play, but that whole tour taught us a lot about being more professional.
After this Crazy P became a regular festival band, with appearances at places like V Festival, Big Chill, Latitude, Bestival and of course Glastonbury.
Yeah, I think our first Glastonbury performance was 2007 and we haven’t missed many years since. I’m pretty sure I’ve played the last ten years of them in some form or other. It’s my favourite festival and obviously well known as one of (if not the) best music festivals in the world. That first appearance in 2007 was something I'll never forget. We came in on our tour bus and it got really rainy and muddy and there was basically a mud landslide which meant we couldn’t get out. The place looked like the ‘bring out your dead’ scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We had to sleep on that bus and wait until the next morning before we could get it out.
As the band grew, it fast became apparent that having a word like ‘penis’ in the band name was going to be limiting. So we just lobbed off the ‘enis’. It was surprisingly painless really.
As many mature Notts people will know, you were originally called Crazy Penis. Tell us about what prompted that name change…
Well, we were originally called Loco Pinga, which translated to Crazy Penis. But then we reverted to the English version and for our first record with Paper Records no-one seemed to mind. They also had an artist at that time called Dirty Jesus. Elliot Eastwick, who we worked with at the label, always joked that we should do a collab with him just for the name alone. When we chose that name we never really thought we’d end up doing much more than a couple of vinyl releases. But as the band grew, it fast became apparent that having a word like ‘penis’ in the band name was going to be limiting. So we just lobbed off the ‘enis’. It was surprisingly painless really.
Crazy P are fairly big internationally and tour often. Tell us about some of the countries you’ve played in...
We first got quite big in Australia around the time of The Wicked Is Music album in 2002 and started being able to sell out 1500-capacity venues over there. Nowadays we do loads of stuff in both the UK and Europe, we do a tour in America most years, and we make it all work.
It’s particularly surprising when you realise we’ve still never been playlisted on national radio in the UK. And we’ve never really had a big hit either. There are a few songs like Stop Space Return and Heartbreaker that we’d always try to include in our sets. However, for the last few gigs we did with Danny, we pretty much exclusively played music that nobody had heard. It was a brave old move, but it worked. I think people coming to see us trusted us, even if they didn't know the songs, to know that it was gonna be a good show.
Your last album Any Signs of Love was all recorded and finished before Danielle passed away in 2024. Tell us about how you reflect on that album now.
It's still a tough listen, and I can't really go back to it at the moment. Grief is a long old road, and to be honest I've only recently got to the point where I can even look at a photo of Danielle. I'm fine listening to a lot of the older material we did together, but Any Signs of Love is still quite visceral for me. It still doesn't seem like that long since we were in the room together recording it all with her. I know it’s a strong album and there's some amazing writing from her on it. Writing and recording and finishing it was a total joy. I'm hopeful there will be a point where I can stick it on and enjoy it again, but I'm just not quite there yet.
How do you survive in the music business today? You’re not touring at the moment and you don’t appear to do much in the way of merchandise. Crazy P are getting around 900k listeners on Spotify each month – is that enough for you and the rest of the band to keep a roof over your heads?
I'll be totally honest with you, the streaming thing is not even something that I look at in terms of income. The thing I've learned is that you’ve got to look and plan twelve months ahead and see what comes of that. It’s also only in the last few years we’ve seen royalty cheques for sales of our music anyhow. Yes, we can make money from touring. But it’s always a gamble. For us, publishing is a big part of keeping us going. We’ve had our songs played on some big films and TV shows like The Sopranos and Sex in The City, as well as lots of things you won’t have heard of like DFS adverts and Polish adverts for Colgate toothpaste. So about three or four times a year, we all receive payments for those, and it’s really that side of the music business which keeps us able to make music for a living.
Wow. That’s really interesting. I guess your music kind of lends itself to that?
Yes, I think it does. The Sopranos job was particularly interesting, as we had to do a special edit of the song for the director, so we were in touch a little bit and it felt like we were involved in the process more. It’s our track Lady T, and you can see it being played in Episode 17 of Season 6, in a scene set in the Bada Bing strip club. A lot of people think that’s the greatest TV show of all time, so it’s nice to have been involved in it a little bit.
World Elephant Day by White Elephant is released on Friday 20 February 2026. For more information about Jim’s music visit the links below.
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