Before The Geezers

Iain Sinclair has a bit of history putting music on stage – The Snowdroppers provided the live black and blues soundtrack for his production of Killer Joe at Belvoir in 2008. He also displays an obvious yet appropriately effortless appreciation of whatever 'cool' is. And if nothing else, that makes him the perfect director to take on Jez Butterworth's first play, Mojo, which he's bringing to the Sydney Theatre Company stage this month.

But there is something else – Sinclair's firsthand history with the play.

Sinclair was living in London when Mojo debuted – having completed his Master's he took advantage of the Old Vic's policy of hiring theatre students and was working behind the bar at the infamous venue alongside other hopefuls. “They used to bag me out for studying at RADA  [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] because it was a bit posh. The guy I lived with, this Jamaican dude Ricky, kept bagging me out, saying 'You've got to be careful not to be a boring tit when you graduate from that posh school,' and one day he slapped down the flyer for Mojo at Royal Court and said, 'Go and see that!'

“There's a point for every young professional where you go, 'Oh! This artform can speak in my language to my rhythms about the things I'm interested in!'” says Sinclair. “It was before Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, it was before Snatch, it was before Sexy Beast, all those 'geezer' London films… But the thing about Mojo is that it's that, plus extraordinarily classy plotting. The dialogue is more than just patois and wordplay, it's got another Shakespearean dimension inside it.”

For Sinclair, who grew up through the punk scene, it was a legitimising and inspiring collision of worlds: “As soon as I heard this language and the comedy in it, it was an instant lock-on and I felt like I could actually be in this industry without having to do Agatha Christie,” jokes Sinclair.

Which isn't to say that it won't, like a Christie, have a murder: Mojo, set in the cut-throat rock scene of 1950s London, begins with the discovery of a nightclub owner's body, sawn in half and dumped in two separate bins.

Mojo has also given Sinclair an opportunity to get The Snowdroppers' frontman Jeremy Davidson, back to the theatre – Davidson will make his stage debut proper as Silver Johnny in a production that Sinclair hopes will put the bite back into vintage rock.

“It's such a musically-written piece and the dialogue is so finely calibrated rhythmically that we're treating it a lot like a piece of music. The phrase I found myself using yesterday was 'you have to know the chords before you can sing the song'. It's like doing scales, like jazz! It's Cockney jazz!”