Originally part of the modrevival explosion of the late 70s, a resurgent Long Tall Shorty have put some serious energy back in the English R'n'B Scene, with their new release Women & Trouble . JonnyMagus was lucky enough to spake to Tony Perfect of LTS for what has turned out to be the mother all interviews. Check out Long Tall Shorty's new album, on Biff Bang Pow Records, Women & Trouble, it is a real winner.
Long Tall Shorty have had many line ups over the years, but how did the current line up get together? How long has the current line-up been together?
Well, Jeff the Harmonica player bought a place out in Barcelona at Xmas and is kind of living there so the current line up has been together since then. However, Len the drummer has been with us for around 2 years, Clovis the bass player since March last year and Mark Norton who plays Sax and Harp is a full time member of the Gene Drayton Unit but has been playing with us for about a year. Fortunately we have never had any gigs clash with them although they are playing at our club, (Piccadilly Blues Club in Soho ), on the same bill as us on 20th April so I don't know what will happen there. We do also have access to a Hammond Player but he doesn't want to be in the band full time as he likes to be paid once in a while and by playing with pub groups he can get paid. Good luck to him but it's not what I'd like to do!
'Women & Trouble' is a full on R'n'B album. The crazy wailing harmonica and the loud blues riffs are superb, but how did your new sound evolve and was it an easy or difficult process ?
Errr!! We had been reformed about 3 years, had done the LP on Acid Jazz, (Bird in the Hand), and had been gigging for a while, mainly around London . A mate of ours, Brian who had previously been with Back to Zero back in 79, used to jump up and sing once in a while and I thought it'd be fun to ask him to join the band as lead singer as I hate doing it. The idea was to play R and B as we were getting a bit older and wanted to return to the 1980 sound of the band. Anyway, things didn't work out with him and he left but I wanted to keep going in that direction. I was introduced to Jeff at a gig at the 100 club and while a band were playing, he suddenly pulled out a harp and started playing along in the middle of the club. I then invited him to jump up which he started doing and once again, after a while, I thought he might like to join up, which he did. We then looked at the whole band and how we could really move forward so started dressing in suits again and writing new stuff. It wasn't difficult, just a bit of a roundabout process but as I mentioned earlier, it wasn't totally alien to me as the 1980 line up had been a full on R and B band.
What are your main Rhythm and Blues influences?
I've always loved Hendrix and the Yardbirds and way back in the 70's when I was really into them, I started to delve back and find out what made them sound the way they were. I discovered all the famous blues singers and quite a few obscure ones too. My favourites are Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. They have a very primitive sound but also very contemporary and futuristic, (for the time), as well. I'm not keen on people like BB King as I prefer the real guttural kind of blues. Freddie King is my favourite guitar player of all time along with Jimi who I am still mad about! English Blues artists I like are John Mayall who has always provided me with a million influences and I was lucky enough to meet him when I went to his gig with his son Gaz. I also met Mick Taylor at the same time and think he is one of the best, and most underrated guitarists this country has ever produced.
I love the furious edge to 'Woman & Trouble', full on howling blues with real bite, loud and proud. Do you see this raw approach as getting back to the rudiments of R'n'B?
Well, I hope so! I didn't want the LP to be too "clean" but obviously none of us are Muddy Waters so it's really just our take on the Blues. The one thing I am really proud of about the LP is that it still sounds like Long Tall Shorty but 1970's Boy it aint!! I have always tried to give my music a bit of an edge and when you are recording, it is very easy to polish it up and smooth off the sound. When we did Bird in the Hand, we didn't have to worry about that because the sound was very Garage/Rock influenced but this LP could have been a bit of a let down if we hadn't had sympathetic hands and ears on the production side. I guess LTS are always gonna sound rough and edgy, god only knows how that will work out with our next lot of recordings?
How did you approach the song and lyric writing on the new album, because there is real anger mixed with dry humour to your blues? Was there any differences on how you approached the writing in comparison to previous Long Tall Shorty line-ups?
When we first approached the R and B style for the band, we were doing a lot of Blues covers to get a kind of reference point for where we wanted the band to go. Once we had found the songs we all liked, it was fairly easy then to write along those guidelines. I have been writing songs since I was 16, (a LONG time), and over the years, you realise it is a craft and there are certain structures that it is wise to follow. I definitely find that I put a lot more into the song writing since the band reformed in 2000? Old songs like "If I Was You" or "Thats What I Want" both from 1980 took me minutes to write, maybe 10-15 minutes each whereas nowadays, a song like "Walking Down the Line" from the new LP evolves and is really crafted by myself and the rest of the band. For example, this was originally written as a sloooooow blues and I took it to rehearsals where the others told me it sounded like this, that or the other. I then went home and worked on it because I liked the words and thought it had a good melody. Next time I presented it to them, they liked it and we worked out all the bits and pieces to shape them into a song. The worst one in terms of time to write was "Bitch", which by the way is a very tongue in cheek title, because Jeff wrote it as a long meandering John Lee Hooker type of song. It had no structure whatsoever and I think the first time we played it, it went on for about half an hour!! Anyway, we put it all into verses and bridges etc and made a song out it. The one thing we do always try to work to is a 3 minute song length, anything over that starts to get a bit repetitive, (in my opinion), and you end up repeating what you have already said. There are a couple of songs on the LP that drift over that and which personally I would have cut down but hey! I'm only the guitar player!!!!
How did you approach the new album in terms of recording/production?
Firstly, we asked Biff Bang Pow to pay for it which they kindly did. Once the budget was agreed, we went to the studio and negotiated with the owner to make sure what we wanted fitted in. Our main priority was not to have to skimp on the quality of it. It's so easy to run out of time or money and not put on the vital handclaps or tambourines or whatever and we REALLY didn't want to have to do that. Then we started rehearsing more for recording than for gigs and did things like playing along to a click track to make it really tight. I have never done this before, normally I just go in with the drummer and set up a mike to shout instructions while we are playing, but this time we wanted to have songs that had a certain danceability and if they are speeding up and slowing down all the time, you lose that. I'm really pleased that you think it still sounds angry, you try being angry playing to a click track, it's not easy!! As for mixing, we left Jeff and Jeremy, the engineer, to it, got them to run off a cd and then put our oars in. It did sound a bit wimpy at first so we sent it back with a few notes and it came out as you hear it on the CD. I don't get too involved in mixing, not because I'm lazy, but as a musician it's too tempting to keep asking them to turn your instrument up as that is what you're listening too. Drummers seem to do this as a matter of course, "oooohh, you can't hear my second bass drum beat on the 3rd bar of the second verse"!!! You have to try and listen to it as if you are hearing it for the first time and to be objective, not self indulgent. Unfortunately, my attention span doesn't allow me to do that!
Obviously R'n'B was the music of choice with the original mod scene back in the early 60s, but nowadays it seems that chin stroking real ale bearded monsters are associated with the English blues scene (from my experience any way). Personally I think your new album is a real breath of blues fresh air, and as you're all sharp dressed, short cropped mods. Do you think this sharp but raw approach might get younger music lovers to take a look at the original Rhythm and Blues?
What I am really hoping is that if we ever get to play in front of the real ale mob, we might influence them to discard their lumberjack shirts and flak jackets and to take a bit of pride in the way they look. I totally agree with you, modern blues is almost a by-word for liberalism and I don't think anyone could ever accuse me of that. I'd love it if people heard this and then came back a few months later and said they'd got into some of the original stuff. I look at music as an inheritance and you are there to pass it on and let people know about the heritage or where it all came from. I don't want people comparing us to some load of old hippies who play every Friday night in their local pub, I want them to look back and think, "Aha, they nicked that off of Muddy Waters, Christ the original of that is amazing".
I'm not sure if we could get onto the blues circuit proper, it's all a bit snooty and I really don't think a lot of the bookers or the audience really understand what it is really all about. "oh, he hasn't got a 1947 guitar, how dare he sing a Robert Johnson song". I don't think they'd be able to handle anyone with a bit of attitude but I might be wrong? I'd love to find out.
Are there any other modern English Rhythm and Blues bands you can recommend?
Not really. I know what we're doing isn't exactly original but it is different from any of the other crap I've seen out there. You think of a modern day blues band and I bet 99.9% of people would say, Old bloke, pony tail, going bald, bashed up old guitar, denims and a pint of wrinkly wallflower or whatever that stuff is that they drink". I mean, I was talking to some old hippy once about the blues and he put a Gary Moore record on telling me with some delight that I'd love it. It was absolute crap, he's a heavy metal guitar hero. The blues should have a bit of finesse, not volume and petunia oil! I'd love to think there might be some other bands out there doing it a bit differently but I sure as hell don't know of any.
Mod label Biff Bang Pow has put out your new album. How did you hook up ?
We paid to do our single and I sent it to Detour and BBP to get there opinions as we were going to do it ourselves. As luck would have it, they both offered to release it but BBP offered to do an LP which was kind of what we were fishing for.
How has the reaction been to the new album ?
Very good so far but I always await the negative comments and welcome them as much as the good ones. You will only ever improve by taking the bad reviews along with the good ones. I'd even go as far as to say that I prefer bad reviews to no reviews. The hardest thing in the world to fight is apathy!
Where can you purchase your new album?
Only from BBP as far as I know although it was in a shop called Sister Ray in Soho strangely enough. BBP do have distribution but I'm not sure if we are the sort of band who would have a release in the local Woolworths or HMV.. The whole music biz nowadays, even at our level, is so commercially minded and we are such small fish in a massive pond, I doubt we'd get a look in. Those kids who run NME and such like probably think they are messiahs or something, imagine you're 22 years old, writing for a music mag, you've got the latest Artic Oasis Blur band's label offering you trips to Russia to review their gig. It's sure to go to your head. So, to answer your question, ha ha, I don't know really. I only bought one and I sent that to my dad!
I hear that you've a Hammond organ player for your live gigs now. How have the recent gigs been received?
Oh god, we've been storming places recently although as I said earlier, the Hammond player is not really full time as he wanted paying all the time and that just isn't a factor to me so I can't kow-tow to people like that. We've got really focused, someone even said we were slick in Oxford on Saturday!! Because we have the Piccadilly Blues Club every month, we are playing regularly and have got so tight. Also, we actually look like we are enjoying ourselves and I think people really appreciate that and it becomes endemic. Nothing worse to my mind than watching some miserable sod singing about a load of nonsense, unless it's Morrissey of course, but then he always had a certain humour, didn't he?
Have you any plans to release more material with the new dynamic RnB line up?
Yes!! Our next lot of stuff is going to be really FUNKY!! For the first time in my musical "career", people have been dancing, (not jumping around), to my music and it has really pleased me. I mean, who dances to live bands these days?? I really want to encourage that and we have to provide the soundtrack for that to happen.
Lastly, describe Long Tall Shorty is three words
Not All There!!