Carl Barat & The Jackals

Info

Carl Barat & The Jackals is Carl Barat's band, formed in 2014 following auditions with musicians who were recruted via the internet.

Regarding the band's name, Carl mentions: "I think it's rather a noble-ish, funky animal. You get hyenas, which have funk, but I tell you, jackals have something. I think we considered everything in the language. Every word in the language on paper. And we spent hours cutting it down from hundreds of names. [laughs] Just a great name, really".

Commenting on recruiting a band via email, Carl mentions: "If I put the word out that I'm looking to put a band together, what I'm really going to get are friend's boyfriends or people I half know that want to be in a band. I wanted to try something new and start absolutely anew—it'll all be about the band and not about previous relationships. I wanted to start fresh. It made sense, really. It's so odd what you get sometimes—you just type something into your phone and it gets seen by tens of thousands of people. But the response has been quite overwhelming. And quite a lot of work. I got over a thousand applicants and then I picked out 50 feasible ones. And then from that down to 30 after auditions. It was quite hard as well, it was like The X Factor. [laughs] I found the correct people through earnest, hard work, and the fact they are very passionate, which was the main criteria."