I first encountered what was, at that point, merely the kernel of the Blood Tub Orchestra, one night at a gig at the Dublin Castle in Camden. I can’t remember what the gig was, but I bumped into my old friend Ashley outside the venue and he introduced me to Tim Whelan, who explained that they were going to form a new band together. This wasn’t exactly surprising, as Ashley has been in so many bands over the years it’s unlikely that you haven’t seen or heard him playing at least a few notes. He’s at least partly responsible for the likes of Voiceless, Headbutt and London Dirthole Company, while Tim is a member of Transglobal Underground and was previously involved in the Transmitters and Furniture. Anyway, Tim started to explain the concept behind this new project. Music Hall songs, he said, not in a nostalgic manner but taking the more peculiar lyrics of the original era and re-interpreting them to make them relevant to the current times. I must admit, it sounded intriguing, but by this point in the evening there had been alcohol involved for all three of us and I wasn’t entirely sure if I should take this idea seriously…
Fast forward a year or so, and I’m attending a Sleaford Mods gig at the excellent Colchester Arts Centre. We arrived early to check-out the support band, but as the place is packed and I haven’t got my glasses, I couldn’t see who they actually were when they arrived onstage. But the vocals and noisy bass guitar sound familiar and, once they start introducing songs from the Victorian era, I suddenly realised it’s that self-same band in the flesh !
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the set and I’ve seen them several times since then, during which time they’ve just got more and more enjoyable. The recent release of their first album ‘The Seven Curses of the Music Hall’ prompted me to start thinking about an interview, because this is a band that really deserve to be heard
by a lot more people. Granted, it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste, but if you have an inquisitive sense
of humour and an openness to different forms of music (everything from garage punk through industrial
to rockabilly) then I’m sure this is something that may well appeal to you. John Peel, I’m sure, would have loved it !
Fast forward a year or so, and I’m attending a Sleaford Mods gig at the excellent Colchester Arts Centre. We arrived early to check-out the support band, but as the place is packed and I haven’t got my glasses, I couldn’t see who they actually were when they arrived onstage. But the vocals and noisy bass guitar sound familiar and, once they start introducing songs from the Victorian era, I suddenly realised it’s that self-same band in the flesh !
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the set and I’ve seen them several times since then, during which time they’ve just got more and more enjoyable. The recent release of their first album ‘The Seven Curses of the Music Hall’ prompted me to start thinking about an interview, because this is a band that really deserve to be heard
by a lot more people. Granted, it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste, but if you have an inquisitive sense
of humour and an openness to different forms of music (everything from garage punk through industrial
to rockabilly) then I’m sure this is something that may well appeal to you. John Peel, I’m sure, would have loved it !
After a recent gig in Camden, I arranged with Ashley to meet up with him and Tim at the highly appropriate Pride of Spitalfields pub down in the Old East End. Pints were prepared and the conversation ensued. So, first of all, how did you two get to know each other and how did the interest in Music Hall songs come about ?
Ashley ; I think I got to know Tim through Nick Dubulah of Transglobal Underground, who had also been in one of the last versions of Voiceless with me. Tim had been sharing a flat or a squat with him back in the 80’s, I think. Since then, he’s invariably turned up on at least one track on each Dirthole album to date. On the latest one, he sings a song called ‘Debbie’s Dirty Secrets’, which is about our guitarist secretly being a serial killer down at the docks…
Tim ; I would say there were three different things that got me interested in that era. Firstly, I did some music for The Imagined Village, which was a sort of experimental folk project. When I finished with that, I realised that I still had some other ideas left-over, which were more to do with looking at songs from the British Music Hall era but not in that usual kind of snobby, touristic way… you know, everyone gets in a charabanc and thinks that everything was very jolly. I suddenly had the idea of performing ‘Never Let Your Braces Dangle’, by Harry Champion, in the way that we do it now. I spoke about it with Ashley and he suggested using the members of the London Dirthole Company, Kirsten Reynolds, Rob Lewis and Debbie Smith, as they were already assembled and would be into it. I began researching online and looking in libraries while everything came together. The basic idea was to look at that whole thing in a different way from how most people would… not in that ‘Good Old Days’ fashion… Funnily enough, I also remembered that my grandmother hated that programme because she just thought it was false nostalgia…
Ashley : When I was a kid, we used to go around to my grandparents house on Boxing day. My granddad would be sneakily drinking whisky all day until, in the evening, he would be pissed and get his banjo to start singing all these old songs that he’d learned when he was in the army ! So, after I spoke to Tim, I started to like the idea of there being an English style of music that could be treated like World Music on a level of intellectual observation. Music Hall songs aren’t taken seriously because of things like ‘The Good Old Days’, whereas folk music does get taken seriously. But when we started researching, we realised that there was a massive amount of songs, many of which were not recorded and only exist as sheet-music.
Tim ; Another thing is, a lot of these songs were never meant to be taken seriously. Some of them were probably never meant to be played more than a few months after they were written and they were often just little jokes that worked at that moment.
Ashley ; I think I got to know Tim through Nick Dubulah of Transglobal Underground, who had also been in one of the last versions of Voiceless with me. Tim had been sharing a flat or a squat with him back in the 80’s, I think. Since then, he’s invariably turned up on at least one track on each Dirthole album to date. On the latest one, he sings a song called ‘Debbie’s Dirty Secrets’, which is about our guitarist secretly being a serial killer down at the docks…
Tim ; I would say there were three different things that got me interested in that era. Firstly, I did some music for The Imagined Village, which was a sort of experimental folk project. When I finished with that, I realised that I still had some other ideas left-over, which were more to do with looking at songs from the British Music Hall era but not in that usual kind of snobby, touristic way… you know, everyone gets in a charabanc and thinks that everything was very jolly. I suddenly had the idea of performing ‘Never Let Your Braces Dangle’, by Harry Champion, in the way that we do it now. I spoke about it with Ashley and he suggested using the members of the London Dirthole Company, Kirsten Reynolds, Rob Lewis and Debbie Smith, as they were already assembled and would be into it. I began researching online and looking in libraries while everything came together. The basic idea was to look at that whole thing in a different way from how most people would… not in that ‘Good Old Days’ fashion… Funnily enough, I also remembered that my grandmother hated that programme because she just thought it was false nostalgia…
Ashley : When I was a kid, we used to go around to my grandparents house on Boxing day. My granddad would be sneakily drinking whisky all day until, in the evening, he would be pissed and get his banjo to start singing all these old songs that he’d learned when he was in the army ! So, after I spoke to Tim, I started to like the idea of there being an English style of music that could be treated like World Music on a level of intellectual observation. Music Hall songs aren’t taken seriously because of things like ‘The Good Old Days’, whereas folk music does get taken seriously. But when we started researching, we realised that there was a massive amount of songs, many of which were not recorded and only exist as sheet-music.
Tim ; Another thing is, a lot of these songs were never meant to be taken seriously. Some of them were probably never meant to be played more than a few months after they were written and they were often just little jokes that worked at that moment.
Were you surprised with the kind of material that you found ?
Ashley ; We went into it wanting to try and find songs that would still sound appropriate now and we found that, at the time, they did use a lot of political puns and things like that. So when you hear a song like ‘The Fine Old English Tory Times’, it does still have a relevance.
Tim ; I think it’s one of those things where, once you’ve got your radar-working, you’ll find these things. I can’t remember where I first came across that particular song, but later-on, I discovered it was actually written by Charles Dickens as a satire on the Tory Party. On the other hand, you had writers and performers like Whit Cunliffe, who I can only describe now as a kind of cross between George Clooney and Benny Hill, perhaps with a bit of Jacob Rees-Mogg thrown-in ! Although one of his biggest hits was called ‘What Does It Matter To Me ?’, which suggests that he really didn’t believe in any of it.
Ashley ; It’s hard to decide whether his songs were genuinely offensive or meant to be ironic. I tend to think that they probably were ironic, but at the same time, he was trying to wind people up…
There certainly seems to be a lot more to it than it’s generally given credit for…
Tim ; One of the interesting things I found was that there’s a lot of scholarly stuff that repeats the cliché that the Music Hall was the more conservative, commercial side of the people’s music, as opposed to the more well-meaning, teetotal, folkie side of things. But neither of them were exactly what they’re portrayed to be. It doesn’t work that way as they crossed over an awful lot, anyway. But it does seem that it gets portrayed as this well-meaning, puritanical approach on one side and this much more hedonistic approach on the other. The thing is, if you have one you have to have the other. If you listen to a song like ‘The Bolshevik’, you get the impression that they started out to write a song about a Bolshevik, but then they got bored after the first verse and while the protagonist is supposed to be on the dole, he also has servants, so it really doesn’t make any sort of logical sense. It’s a pretty surreal song when you really look at it ! Even things like the phrase
‘jingoism’ came from a Music Hall song. ‘We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too !’ On the other hand, another song was saying, ‘I don’t want to fight, I’m a coward through and through…’ You’d get one side of the story and then the other side from someone else… It seems a lot of Music Hall performers were even satirizing other Music Hall performers. ‘I Dreamt That I Dwelt On The Top of St Pauls’, for example, was an old sentimental song that they just took the piss out of.
Ashley ; We went into it wanting to try and find songs that would still sound appropriate now and we found that, at the time, they did use a lot of political puns and things like that. So when you hear a song like ‘The Fine Old English Tory Times’, it does still have a relevance.
Tim ; I think it’s one of those things where, once you’ve got your radar-working, you’ll find these things. I can’t remember where I first came across that particular song, but later-on, I discovered it was actually written by Charles Dickens as a satire on the Tory Party. On the other hand, you had writers and performers like Whit Cunliffe, who I can only describe now as a kind of cross between George Clooney and Benny Hill, perhaps with a bit of Jacob Rees-Mogg thrown-in ! Although one of his biggest hits was called ‘What Does It Matter To Me ?’, which suggests that he really didn’t believe in any of it.
Ashley ; It’s hard to decide whether his songs were genuinely offensive or meant to be ironic. I tend to think that they probably were ironic, but at the same time, he was trying to wind people up…
There certainly seems to be a lot more to it than it’s generally given credit for…
Tim ; One of the interesting things I found was that there’s a lot of scholarly stuff that repeats the cliché that the Music Hall was the more conservative, commercial side of the people’s music, as opposed to the more well-meaning, teetotal, folkie side of things. But neither of them were exactly what they’re portrayed to be. It doesn’t work that way as they crossed over an awful lot, anyway. But it does seem that it gets portrayed as this well-meaning, puritanical approach on one side and this much more hedonistic approach on the other. The thing is, if you have one you have to have the other. If you listen to a song like ‘The Bolshevik’, you get the impression that they started out to write a song about a Bolshevik, but then they got bored after the first verse and while the protagonist is supposed to be on the dole, he also has servants, so it really doesn’t make any sort of logical sense. It’s a pretty surreal song when you really look at it ! Even things like the phrase
‘jingoism’ came from a Music Hall song. ‘We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too !’ On the other hand, another song was saying, ‘I don’t want to fight, I’m a coward through and through…’ You’d get one side of the story and then the other side from someone else… It seems a lot of Music Hall performers were even satirizing other Music Hall performers. ‘I Dreamt That I Dwelt On The Top of St Pauls’, for example, was an old sentimental song that they just took the piss out of.
It’s strange that this was such a cultural phenomenon at the time but so much of it has been largely forgotten…
Ashley ; Well, one of the things that struck me was that the majority of these songs pretty much disappeared during the First World War, because so did the most of the original audiences. They went to War and were killed, so the only songs that survived were the more popular ones which the officers enjoyed. After the War, it was only really the softer parts of it that continued, as Music Halls became more of a Middle-class thing and eventually became what we now know as modern theatres.
Even though the original Victorian Music halls were actually pretty rowdy places…
Tim ; Yes, but they’d get a mix of working class people and also the Oscar Wilde-types , who would have their own private seats. A lot of the stuff ended up being reviewed in the national press and some of the performers became household names. I think a lot of the writers at the time would much prefer going to Music Halls rather than the regular Victorian theatre because it was much more fun and they made that clear in their reviews. I found one written by an American critic who described a night out at the Royal Victoria in Waterloo, which is now the Old Vic. He arrived late as he hadn’t realised that he’d have to fight for a seat, and he was then quite shocked when a woman told him, ‘you can come and sit on my lap, darling !’ So he wrote about the low morals of these Londoners, as opposed the upstanding American people, but he gradually became more bemused by all of it and didn’t really put them down, apart from the fact that some of them did smell a bit. One of the really interesting things he writes about is that, as he left at 11.00, the markets were just starting up in the streets outside. There was a whole night life in London at the time which disappeared during the First World War, when they had the blackouts. After the end of the War, the government saw no reason to let things return to as they were, because they thought it would help to keep people behaving themselves.
Ashley ; Well, one of the things that struck me was that the majority of these songs pretty much disappeared during the First World War, because so did the most of the original audiences. They went to War and were killed, so the only songs that survived were the more popular ones which the officers enjoyed. After the War, it was only really the softer parts of it that continued, as Music Halls became more of a Middle-class thing and eventually became what we now know as modern theatres.
Even though the original Victorian Music halls were actually pretty rowdy places…
Tim ; Yes, but they’d get a mix of working class people and also the Oscar Wilde-types , who would have their own private seats. A lot of the stuff ended up being reviewed in the national press and some of the performers became household names. I think a lot of the writers at the time would much prefer going to Music Halls rather than the regular Victorian theatre because it was much more fun and they made that clear in their reviews. I found one written by an American critic who described a night out at the Royal Victoria in Waterloo, which is now the Old Vic. He arrived late as he hadn’t realised that he’d have to fight for a seat, and he was then quite shocked when a woman told him, ‘you can come and sit on my lap, darling !’ So he wrote about the low morals of these Londoners, as opposed the upstanding American people, but he gradually became more bemused by all of it and didn’t really put them down, apart from the fact that some of them did smell a bit. One of the really interesting things he writes about is that, as he left at 11.00, the markets were just starting up in the streets outside. There was a whole night life in London at the time which disappeared during the First World War, when they had the blackouts. After the end of the War, the government saw no reason to let things return to as they were, because they thought it would help to keep people behaving themselves.
But even before then, the Music Halls were a target of the more puritanical side of Victorian society…
Tim : There were constant efforts to try and close them down, or at least control them more strictly. At the time, the Leicester Square Empire was a rather notorious variety theatre because of all the prostitutes that were known to hang around in the balconies ! There was a big campaign by social reformers to clean things up, which was bizarrely opposed by many in the establishment. They didn’t have the phrase ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ at the time, but had it been around, they would have been using it. Britain has always had this sort of slightly-hypocritical morality, which at the time was something along the lines of, ‘There’s nothing wrong with child prostitutes being sent up to clean the chimney because that’s what the people want !’ So you had groups trying to close down these places being portrayed as spoil-sports, but at the same time, some of these places were little more than brothels and definitely needed to be closed down.
Ashley ; That being said, there were also some very successful female performers and it definitely wasn’t as male-orientated as you might think. Vesta Victoria was very successful at the time and also became popular in America, where she would tour the major cities and, apparently, even became an influence on early Blues singers like Mamie Smith, both in the way she performed and the way she dressed. I think that, during the first twenty or thirty years of the 20th Century, songs from the Music Hall era were very influential in the music that would eventually develop into Blues, Country & Western and maybe even Rockabilly…
How easy was it to uncover the songs that you’ve since adopted ?
Tim : I spent quite a long time researching original songs at the British Library, but for every one song I found that was even vaguely interesting, there’d be another hundred that would be rubbish. And I also found that there were many that had almost the same tune and lyrics as other songs, because the writers would just hear something popular and churn-out their own version. The two main writers in London were Weston & Lee, who were writing such a huge amount of songs… the story goes that they’d start work on a new song in the morning and they wouldn’t have lunch until they’d finished it ! Then, after they’d eaten and if they still had enough time and energy, they’d start work on a second one. They could produce two songs a day and they did that for forty years. For them, it was just like going to work in an office…
Ashley : They were mostly making money from selling sheet-music, so the more they had out there, the more potential income they had…
Tim : They’d write everything… sentimental songs, bawdy songs, patriotic songs, unpatriotic songs… they really didn’t care what they wrote. They be asked to write a song for a particular singer and they’d write it in whatever style he wanted. But at the same time, they also wrote a lot of the better songs because they got on such a roll after a while. You’d have one of the really successful performers, like Harry Champion, and all of his songs were written by different people, but they all sounded like him because they’d know the type of performer they were writing for and they produced something that was in his style. Harry Champion had such a large personality that the songs had to be written in a certain way… which was sort of surreal, maybe with a bit about the mother-in-law in there and maybe a bit bawdy. A lot of it was completely bonkers. There’d also be songs where there were additional verses, so that he could add them or leave them out depending on the audience and what he thought he could get away with. He was actually arrested once in Birmingham, because the Police had came to one of his shows and heard him sing something that was too suggestive… he probably mentioned ankles or something !
Tim : There were constant efforts to try and close them down, or at least control them more strictly. At the time, the Leicester Square Empire was a rather notorious variety theatre because of all the prostitutes that were known to hang around in the balconies ! There was a big campaign by social reformers to clean things up, which was bizarrely opposed by many in the establishment. They didn’t have the phrase ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ at the time, but had it been around, they would have been using it. Britain has always had this sort of slightly-hypocritical morality, which at the time was something along the lines of, ‘There’s nothing wrong with child prostitutes being sent up to clean the chimney because that’s what the people want !’ So you had groups trying to close down these places being portrayed as spoil-sports, but at the same time, some of these places were little more than brothels and definitely needed to be closed down.
Ashley ; That being said, there were also some very successful female performers and it definitely wasn’t as male-orientated as you might think. Vesta Victoria was very successful at the time and also became popular in America, where she would tour the major cities and, apparently, even became an influence on early Blues singers like Mamie Smith, both in the way she performed and the way she dressed. I think that, during the first twenty or thirty years of the 20th Century, songs from the Music Hall era were very influential in the music that would eventually develop into Blues, Country & Western and maybe even Rockabilly…
How easy was it to uncover the songs that you’ve since adopted ?
Tim : I spent quite a long time researching original songs at the British Library, but for every one song I found that was even vaguely interesting, there’d be another hundred that would be rubbish. And I also found that there were many that had almost the same tune and lyrics as other songs, because the writers would just hear something popular and churn-out their own version. The two main writers in London were Weston & Lee, who were writing such a huge amount of songs… the story goes that they’d start work on a new song in the morning and they wouldn’t have lunch until they’d finished it ! Then, after they’d eaten and if they still had enough time and energy, they’d start work on a second one. They could produce two songs a day and they did that for forty years. For them, it was just like going to work in an office…
Ashley : They were mostly making money from selling sheet-music, so the more they had out there, the more potential income they had…
Tim : They’d write everything… sentimental songs, bawdy songs, patriotic songs, unpatriotic songs… they really didn’t care what they wrote. They be asked to write a song for a particular singer and they’d write it in whatever style he wanted. But at the same time, they also wrote a lot of the better songs because they got on such a roll after a while. You’d have one of the really successful performers, like Harry Champion, and all of his songs were written by different people, but they all sounded like him because they’d know the type of performer they were writing for and they produced something that was in his style. Harry Champion had such a large personality that the songs had to be written in a certain way… which was sort of surreal, maybe with a bit about the mother-in-law in there and maybe a bit bawdy. A lot of it was completely bonkers. There’d also be songs where there were additional verses, so that he could add them or leave them out depending on the audience and what he thought he could get away with. He was actually arrested once in Birmingham, because the Police had came to one of his shows and heard him sing something that was too suggestive… he probably mentioned ankles or something !
Were you surprised how that these songs could be adapted so well to the different musical styles that you play them in ?
Ashley : The idea was to play the songs but not in a straightforward nostalgic way. We wanted to re-imagine them in a style that we thought was appropriate.
Tim ; We had to be really careful in choosing the right songs for the different styles. ‘The Fine Old English Tory Times’ worked really well in a kind of rockabilly style, but I don’t think any of the others would have. We had to find the ones that worked in the way we wanted to play them. We literally had to go through hundreds of songs to find the ones that worked for us. I remember when I came across ‘As You Were Before’, as I was in the British Library going through these huge compendiums of sheet music. I spotted it because I liked the picture on the front of the sheet music, which was a drawing of a bloke with a big red nose. When I started reading the lyrics, I saw it was great, but I’d been through two or three compendiums just to find that one. You really have to keep going through all of them before the gems turn up !
You’ve played gigs with quite a range of different bands, but you do always seem to go down well with their audiences…
Tim : Well, we did play one gig supporting Sleaford Mods, which you mentioned, and we enjoyed it but I think some of their audience was horrified ! But the thing is, although many of the bands we’ve played with are pretty different to what we’re doing, they do have certain references to a sort of British-ness or English-ness that we also have. I think The Cravats definitely have that, Sleaford Mods definitely have that… We played with The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, who you could maybe say were a bit more like
us image-wise, but there were also other bands playing that gig who had nothing in common with us or them so it was still a real mixture. I just think all these bands, in some ways, have a connection with what we do.
Ashley ; Although I have to add, we're definitely not a Steam Punk band, even though we adopt a Victorian style. We may have those Victorian influences and we may be a punk band, but… we enjoy electricity, not just steam ! I don’t mind playing to those audiences, but to me a lot of what gets called ‘Steam Punk’ is just Goth-lite…
Ashley : The idea was to play the songs but not in a straightforward nostalgic way. We wanted to re-imagine them in a style that we thought was appropriate.
Tim ; We had to be really careful in choosing the right songs for the different styles. ‘The Fine Old English Tory Times’ worked really well in a kind of rockabilly style, but I don’t think any of the others would have. We had to find the ones that worked in the way we wanted to play them. We literally had to go through hundreds of songs to find the ones that worked for us. I remember when I came across ‘As You Were Before’, as I was in the British Library going through these huge compendiums of sheet music. I spotted it because I liked the picture on the front of the sheet music, which was a drawing of a bloke with a big red nose. When I started reading the lyrics, I saw it was great, but I’d been through two or three compendiums just to find that one. You really have to keep going through all of them before the gems turn up !
You’ve played gigs with quite a range of different bands, but you do always seem to go down well with their audiences…
Tim : Well, we did play one gig supporting Sleaford Mods, which you mentioned, and we enjoyed it but I think some of their audience was horrified ! But the thing is, although many of the bands we’ve played with are pretty different to what we’re doing, they do have certain references to a sort of British-ness or English-ness that we also have. I think The Cravats definitely have that, Sleaford Mods definitely have that… We played with The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, who you could maybe say were a bit more like
us image-wise, but there were also other bands playing that gig who had nothing in common with us or them so it was still a real mixture. I just think all these bands, in some ways, have a connection with what we do.
Ashley ; Although I have to add, we're definitely not a Steam Punk band, even though we adopt a Victorian style. We may have those Victorian influences and we may be a punk band, but… we enjoy electricity, not just steam ! I don’t mind playing to those audiences, but to me a lot of what gets called ‘Steam Punk’ is just Goth-lite…
Everyone in the Blood Tub Orchestra has been involved in (often many) other bands before now. Do you think this helped what you’re doing in this project ?
Tim : Well, we all have our own individual musical styles and I definitely think that’s an important factor in what we’re able to do. Although we’ve got specific ideas for this, everyone is still going to sound like themselves within the group. Someone said to me, after one of the gigs, that we sounded like chaos being organized by somebody very clever. That’s possibly quite right, although I’m not sure it’s any one person in particular. It’s the thinking that puts it all together, which is pretty complex, but we then have to abandon most of it when we go onstage. I don’t think we’d want to sit there just trying to be intellectual about it. I think the thing we’ve all got in common is the ability to carefully think-out how we should be doing this, but then chuck that all out of the window at the right moment.
Ashley ; I think the way we play the songs allows them to have a life of their own. You might record them in a certain way, but when you play them live there’s enough space for them to go in different directions. If you start playing something and it just becomes the same every night, it becomes really uninteresting to play and you either have to drop it or leave it alone for a while.
Tim : It goes back to what I was saying about us all having individual styles. Some songs will be played in a certain way and others might go off in an entirely different direction, but I do think they have to have some relation to the people playing them. Someone else could come along, take another set of songs and try to do the same things we have, but it would always be completely different to us.
I would say your music is definitely something that needs to be seen and heard live. If you were to hear just one track on the radio, for example, you probably wouldn’t be able to get a good idea of what the band were doing. But when you see the band onstage, it all seems to fall into place…
Ashley ; Yeah, it can be pretty difficult to explain what we’re doing to people who haven’t seen us. I usually say something along the lines of, we play post-punk versions of Music Hall songs, because at least that gives an idea of what we’re doing…
Tim : I think that’s the closest we could get without it all starting to sound too bizarre. It’s a lot better for people to see us live and make up their own minds as we probably sound a lot more straight-forward than any description would suggest.
Tim : Well, we all have our own individual musical styles and I definitely think that’s an important factor in what we’re able to do. Although we’ve got specific ideas for this, everyone is still going to sound like themselves within the group. Someone said to me, after one of the gigs, that we sounded like chaos being organized by somebody very clever. That’s possibly quite right, although I’m not sure it’s any one person in particular. It’s the thinking that puts it all together, which is pretty complex, but we then have to abandon most of it when we go onstage. I don’t think we’d want to sit there just trying to be intellectual about it. I think the thing we’ve all got in common is the ability to carefully think-out how we should be doing this, but then chuck that all out of the window at the right moment.
Ashley ; I think the way we play the songs allows them to have a life of their own. You might record them in a certain way, but when you play them live there’s enough space for them to go in different directions. If you start playing something and it just becomes the same every night, it becomes really uninteresting to play and you either have to drop it or leave it alone for a while.
Tim : It goes back to what I was saying about us all having individual styles. Some songs will be played in a certain way and others might go off in an entirely different direction, but I do think they have to have some relation to the people playing them. Someone else could come along, take another set of songs and try to do the same things we have, but it would always be completely different to us.
I would say your music is definitely something that needs to be seen and heard live. If you were to hear just one track on the radio, for example, you probably wouldn’t be able to get a good idea of what the band were doing. But when you see the band onstage, it all seems to fall into place…
Ashley ; Yeah, it can be pretty difficult to explain what we’re doing to people who haven’t seen us. I usually say something along the lines of, we play post-punk versions of Music Hall songs, because at least that gives an idea of what we’re doing…
Tim : I think that’s the closest we could get without it all starting to sound too bizarre. It’s a lot better for people to see us live and make up their own minds as we probably sound a lot more straight-forward than any description would suggest.
As you were saying, there’s a definite sense of British-ness to your music. I was just wondering if you’ve thought about playing abroad and what kind of reaction you might get in different countries ?
Tim : Audiences would probably like it in France, because they have the same musical traditions. I think the French imported a lot of their music in from other places, like Johnny Halliday, who died recently. He was one of the biggest stars there ever was in France, but basically what he did was Americana performed in a French style with a lot of showbiz stuff on top of it. That’s why he became so popular in France. I think that most countries in Europe would be able to relate to the Music Hall era because they probably had similar roots or were at least influenced by it in some way. And I think people in America would probably get what we’re doing, as they had their own Music Halls as well. We recorded ‘Father Do Come Home’ on the first EP, and there’s even an old Bluegrass version of the song, which was basically an American anti-drink, teetotal song…
Tim lives in Paris and Ashley is just about to move to Los Angeles for a year or so… How do you intend for things to continue ?
Tim : Well, the album will get a digital release at the end of April, so we’re hoping to do a certain amount of stuff around that. We’ve already agreed that we can replace individual members at times, as and when necessary, so we’re not short on ideas. We’re also starting to work on a few other things, some connected with songs that we haven’t had a chance to work-on yet and there’s also an idea based around the divide between the drinking and non-drinking fraternities of the Nineteenth Century. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff out there. We’ve opened up a big of cans of worms and we certainly intend to follow it up.
Ashley ; We’ve also got the advantage now that if we record digitally, we don’t necessarily need to be in the same country to do it.
Tim : We’ve actually done pan-European projects within Transglobal Underground where no two artists were allowed to actually meet each other during the recordings and the whole point of it was to not actually know who you’d be working with. In the case of this band, we obviously have far more connection between us already, so everything that comes along is a new opportunity to see how it will work. I think that’s the nature of the world these days, everyone’s becoming more and more separated in terms of distance, but you’re not that far apart when you want to work together.
Ashley ; I’m also intending to be back in London around August-September time, so no doubt we’ll get together to do something then… I think for playing live, we all still need to be in the same room, at least at the moment.
Tim : One way or another, we’re definitely planning to continue. I think we’ve all got a bit too stuck in to it now, so it’s not something we could just drop. I think we’ll probably end up getting more people involved as we can only carry on like this so far without just going around in circles. The recent gigs we’ve played have shown that it’s becoming a more solid thing and people are now starting to come and see us of their own accord. I’m really proud of it and I think we’ve created something rather special, so the next thing to do will be to push it further forward. We’ve shown what we can do live so we don’t need to keep on doing that and. in a way, it’s better if we don’t have to play every gig we get offered because it isn’t exactly easy putting these things together. We can’t just use whatever’s lying around, it has to be done properly. That’s the big contradiction about what we do, in many ways. It may look like a bunch of idiots climbing onstage and tearing a bunch of old songs to pieces, but there’s actually a lot of thought that goes into it, to allow what comes out on the other side. We’re very happy with the way the music sounds and how the album came out, but now we’ve just got to see how much interest that creates while we start work on the ideas for the next one.
Ashley : The interesting thing is working on how we approach songs that have already been written in a certain way, to add something new to them. There’s no formula to any of it because, one thing might work for one song but it wouldn’t be appropriate for anything else. That’s one of the fun-parts, kicking the songs around a bit to see what will work for them…
Tim : Audiences would probably like it in France, because they have the same musical traditions. I think the French imported a lot of their music in from other places, like Johnny Halliday, who died recently. He was one of the biggest stars there ever was in France, but basically what he did was Americana performed in a French style with a lot of showbiz stuff on top of it. That’s why he became so popular in France. I think that most countries in Europe would be able to relate to the Music Hall era because they probably had similar roots or were at least influenced by it in some way. And I think people in America would probably get what we’re doing, as they had their own Music Halls as well. We recorded ‘Father Do Come Home’ on the first EP, and there’s even an old Bluegrass version of the song, which was basically an American anti-drink, teetotal song…
Tim lives in Paris and Ashley is just about to move to Los Angeles for a year or so… How do you intend for things to continue ?
Tim : Well, the album will get a digital release at the end of April, so we’re hoping to do a certain amount of stuff around that. We’ve already agreed that we can replace individual members at times, as and when necessary, so we’re not short on ideas. We’re also starting to work on a few other things, some connected with songs that we haven’t had a chance to work-on yet and there’s also an idea based around the divide between the drinking and non-drinking fraternities of the Nineteenth Century. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff out there. We’ve opened up a big of cans of worms and we certainly intend to follow it up.
Ashley ; We’ve also got the advantage now that if we record digitally, we don’t necessarily need to be in the same country to do it.
Tim : We’ve actually done pan-European projects within Transglobal Underground where no two artists were allowed to actually meet each other during the recordings and the whole point of it was to not actually know who you’d be working with. In the case of this band, we obviously have far more connection between us already, so everything that comes along is a new opportunity to see how it will work. I think that’s the nature of the world these days, everyone’s becoming more and more separated in terms of distance, but you’re not that far apart when you want to work together.
Ashley ; I’m also intending to be back in London around August-September time, so no doubt we’ll get together to do something then… I think for playing live, we all still need to be in the same room, at least at the moment.
Tim : One way or another, we’re definitely planning to continue. I think we’ve all got a bit too stuck in to it now, so it’s not something we could just drop. I think we’ll probably end up getting more people involved as we can only carry on like this so far without just going around in circles. The recent gigs we’ve played have shown that it’s becoming a more solid thing and people are now starting to come and see us of their own accord. I’m really proud of it and I think we’ve created something rather special, so the next thing to do will be to push it further forward. We’ve shown what we can do live so we don’t need to keep on doing that and. in a way, it’s better if we don’t have to play every gig we get offered because it isn’t exactly easy putting these things together. We can’t just use whatever’s lying around, it has to be done properly. That’s the big contradiction about what we do, in many ways. It may look like a bunch of idiots climbing onstage and tearing a bunch of old songs to pieces, but there’s actually a lot of thought that goes into it, to allow what comes out on the other side. We’re very happy with the way the music sounds and how the album came out, but now we’ve just got to see how much interest that creates while we start work on the ideas for the next one.
Ashley : The interesting thing is working on how we approach songs that have already been written in a certain way, to add something new to them. There’s no formula to any of it because, one thing might work for one song but it wouldn’t be appropriate for anything else. That’s one of the fun-parts, kicking the songs around a bit to see what will work for them…
Well, to end with, seeing as we’re in a part of London that was originally famous for its’ Music Halls and infamous for the Whitechapel murders, I was wondering if there were ever any Music Hall songs written about Jack the Ripper ?
Tim : That’s a good question ! At a guess, I would say that there were none, but I know he was a subject for quite a few melodramas…
Ashley : Although I expect he went to the gigs…
Tim : I don’t think the Music Hall songwriters wrote songs about that sort of stuff. I mean, Edith Piaf was involved in a scandal where her mentor was murdered in the nightclub where she was singing and later on, she sang a song that was basically, ‘He died, there was blood everywhere…’ She really milked it, but the British would never have done anything like that, not in the Music Halls. I imagine there may have been a few things that were performed in the Blood Tubs, but it wasn’t really a very bloodthirsty period in British entertainment ! The ‘Blood Tubs’ were not really Music Halls, but were melodramatic theatres in which you went to see plays about poor maidens being murdered or gallant youths being taken to the cleaners by wicked bookies… stuff like that.
Ashley ; There was so much stuff like that because, at the time, there were so many murders happening in London. Not just the Jack the Ripper ones, but there were also other infamous cases that were being sensationalized by the daily newspapers. A lot of these plays were being based on actual events. It was really the English version of the French theatres of the same time, the ‘Fantasmagoria’. They’d get around the licensing rules by advertising the evening as a musical event, but they’d just have a five minute excerpt from an opera and a comedian, or a poodle riding a bicycle. It was really all about these ‘plays’.
Tim : One of the reasons for the name of the group is that it’s not a generic Music Hall reference and it refers more to a particular kind of attitude in entertainment during that period. What I find interesting is not so much the musical side of it, but the way in which the songs show how little has changed in Britain. If you take away the clothes, the politics, the food and the financial system, the ways that people react to life emotionally and the ways that they hate each other are still very much the same. We are still a country-divided and the only response to it seems to be, let’s get completely shit-faced drunk and beat the crap out of each other. Then we’ll wake up blaming ourselves, shuffling our feet and feeling very diffident about all of it. Funnily enough, even at the height of the British Empire, while the country was supposedly basking in its’ imperialism, there were also people writing things asking, what the Hell are we going to do when this all ends ? They weren’t all daft-enough to think that it was going to last for ever and some people had the sense to realise, what the fuck are we all playing at ? Of course, the main fear back then was German immigrants and you can still read their articles about the whole country becoming infested by evil German immigrants. So, like I said, some attitudes really haven’t changed, even if the nationalities of the evil immigrants have… And, of course, the Aristocracy weren’t thinking of things in the same way at all. They’ve always looked after themselves and looked at things in terms of, how are we going to benefit from this ? Or how are our children and grandchildren going to benefit ? They’re not thinking in the same way most people do, they’re thinking over several generations. They’ll sell-off everything, just the same way they did in the 80’s. Then they bought it all back in around 2006, before selling it all off again over the past few years. Now they’re just hanging around waiting for the next chance to buy it all back again, always at a profit. It’s the whole Boris Johnson thing and the Aristocracy have been doing it ever since they took over in 1066 ! So little has changed… I mean, on some levels everything has changed, but really, it’s not very different, we just think it is. If you take away the façade that the Victorians were a bunch of moralistic, reactionary fuckwits, we really still have the same problems and the same debates right now.
Tim : That’s a good question ! At a guess, I would say that there were none, but I know he was a subject for quite a few melodramas…
Ashley : Although I expect he went to the gigs…
Tim : I don’t think the Music Hall songwriters wrote songs about that sort of stuff. I mean, Edith Piaf was involved in a scandal where her mentor was murdered in the nightclub where she was singing and later on, she sang a song that was basically, ‘He died, there was blood everywhere…’ She really milked it, but the British would never have done anything like that, not in the Music Halls. I imagine there may have been a few things that were performed in the Blood Tubs, but it wasn’t really a very bloodthirsty period in British entertainment ! The ‘Blood Tubs’ were not really Music Halls, but were melodramatic theatres in which you went to see plays about poor maidens being murdered or gallant youths being taken to the cleaners by wicked bookies… stuff like that.
Ashley ; There was so much stuff like that because, at the time, there were so many murders happening in London. Not just the Jack the Ripper ones, but there were also other infamous cases that were being sensationalized by the daily newspapers. A lot of these plays were being based on actual events. It was really the English version of the French theatres of the same time, the ‘Fantasmagoria’. They’d get around the licensing rules by advertising the evening as a musical event, but they’d just have a five minute excerpt from an opera and a comedian, or a poodle riding a bicycle. It was really all about these ‘plays’.
Tim : One of the reasons for the name of the group is that it’s not a generic Music Hall reference and it refers more to a particular kind of attitude in entertainment during that period. What I find interesting is not so much the musical side of it, but the way in which the songs show how little has changed in Britain. If you take away the clothes, the politics, the food and the financial system, the ways that people react to life emotionally and the ways that they hate each other are still very much the same. We are still a country-divided and the only response to it seems to be, let’s get completely shit-faced drunk and beat the crap out of each other. Then we’ll wake up blaming ourselves, shuffling our feet and feeling very diffident about all of it. Funnily enough, even at the height of the British Empire, while the country was supposedly basking in its’ imperialism, there were also people writing things asking, what the Hell are we going to do when this all ends ? They weren’t all daft-enough to think that it was going to last for ever and some people had the sense to realise, what the fuck are we all playing at ? Of course, the main fear back then was German immigrants and you can still read their articles about the whole country becoming infested by evil German immigrants. So, like I said, some attitudes really haven’t changed, even if the nationalities of the evil immigrants have… And, of course, the Aristocracy weren’t thinking of things in the same way at all. They’ve always looked after themselves and looked at things in terms of, how are we going to benefit from this ? Or how are our children and grandchildren going to benefit ? They’re not thinking in the same way most people do, they’re thinking over several generations. They’ll sell-off everything, just the same way they did in the 80’s. Then they bought it all back in around 2006, before selling it all off again over the past few years. Now they’re just hanging around waiting for the next chance to buy it all back again, always at a profit. It’s the whole Boris Johnson thing and the Aristocracy have been doing it ever since they took over in 1066 ! So little has changed… I mean, on some levels everything has changed, but really, it’s not very different, we just think it is. If you take away the façade that the Victorians were a bunch of moralistic, reactionary fuckwits, we really still have the same problems and the same debates right now.
I bet you never thought the subject of Victorian Music Halls could prompt such a lot to talk about in this day and age, but as someone said about forgetting history only to repeat it, so much can be learned from looking back further than your last birthday. The Blood Tub Orchestra are one of those fine ensembles who will most definitely entertain you but also leave you with something more to think about. Their current album, ‘The Seven Curses of the Music Hall’ is available through Phono Erotic records, and the band themselves can be investigated further via the decidedly non-Victorian internet ;
