RAILROAD BILL | INTERVIEW
Noel Gardner talks to Dan Nichols of the band Railroad Bill, who have been Cardiff scene favourites since the mid-80s and have a brand new album, launched in their home city this Friday.
You describe yourself as Britain’s longest running skiffle group. How easy is this fact to verify, with regard to the size of the skiffle scene in Britain?
Well, we know we are the longest running touring band. There’s a band in Yorkshire, Please Y’self, that definitely precedes us, but doesn’t play festivals or circuit gigs. The skiffle bands of the 50s are mainly dead and the other two or three in the 80s/90s revival – Terry N Jerry, Railtown Bottlers, Skiffskats, Gutter Brothers – did not go on.
There are now many hundreds of groups who say they are skiffle, or skiffle-influenced, due to a combination of the vintage and Americana booms. We play the rock’n’roll end of British skiffle, influenced by punk rock, though – so we think we’re not like those. Our favourite modern group are our friends the Severed Limb, who are very contemporary – mixing skiffle with punk and world music.
What has kept you together for 29 years?
We stay together because people offer us gigs and money and we like the music and don’t personally hate one another. You’re a long time dead. If we had had lots of success or absolutely none I guess we would have split or given up by now!
Is your status as a Cardiff band, and/or a Welsh one, especially important to your identity? I’m asking this partly in reference to the fact you play a lot elsewhere in the UK, and in Europe.
At foreign festivals, we feel we represent Wales! We make them change signs and copy if they say ‘Inglaterra’. Sometimes, though, it seems we are more popular in England and abroad than in Wales – when, for example, local venues ask us to support bands who support us elsewhere. Or when We’ve played 10 Glastonburys, Bestival, Cambridge Folk and in Switzerland, but never Green Man or Festival Number 6 or anything like that in Wales.
The thing is about this, though, is that it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t mean we don’t feel Welsh. We just go where we are paid and don’t look back or worry. If someone in Wales phones us and offers us a good gig we are happy because we don’t have to drive for hours, but I can’t say it particularly bothers us if they don’t.
How long has the new Railroad Bill album been in the making? How does it differ from the band’s past recordings?
From writing the first songs we’ve been working on Pigs Might Fly for three years. Chris [the tea chest player] and I had virtually stopped writing songs and our show had turned more into an act rather than a creative band. When we formed Punks Not Dad, a suitably short-lived and notorious side-project, that changed and when that ended we wanted to continue the hot creative streak we were on!
Is it influenced by things you’ve discovered/been listening to in recent years, or is there a fairly fixed set of inspirations which the band always draws from?
The influences for the new album are wider than usual, but still fairly venerable. Music hall, calypso, rockabilly and jazz resonate through the album as well as skiffle. The song Joined At The Hip And Evil To The Bone is influenced by early black American rock’n’roll and R&B, for example, whereas Obstinate Child is a straight blues-rock number played on skiffle instruments. Slow Train is straightforward jazz and although people have said that Pain sounds a bit like Tom Waits, I originally wanted it to sound like Wandrin Star by Lee Marvin.
I think another way it differs from previous work is that we have lots of guest musicians on it, so it sometimes sounds more like a 50s compilation album than a straight record. Artists like rockabilly guitarist John Lewis and teenage folkjazz loop chanteuse Kizzy Crawford mean that certain songs are very unlike the Railroad Bill template. Finally, there aren’t any songs about picking cotton or Wild West outlaws on this record…
Is it fair to say that the band expresses itself more ‘naturally’ through live performances than recordings? To put it another way, how come you’ve hardly released any albums in your time together?
No, it’s just easier to keep a band on the road if you don’t keep stopping to make records! We have made seven albums before but we’ve only gone down the promotion and review route for two. We flogged thousands of our old CD “Still Rolling” for six years and it was still doing well at gigs, but we didn’t promote it more widely or follow it up because it was mainly blues, skiffle and folk covers and I suppose you think, why waste the time and energy? It’s not the future of music.
We are a DIY band, not just in our instruments but our attitude – self-managed, promoted etc. We pay for ourselves through our own earnings. It’s a long time since we thought we were going to be famous, so we didn’t need to court the press or music industry, just to play enough for people to see us and keep booking us.
I suppose the follow-up question is: why this has changed now? Well, apart from the creativity thing, part of the reason for doing this record was that we found that when all the new Americana acts started coming through they were stealing some of our gigs despite being worse than us, so we wanted to make a statement – “Oi, kids, get off our lawn!!!” With all the promoters and tour agents you have to do more now.
Like punk or Merseybeat, skiffle is clearly a live-honed music. You can hear that on this record, but I also think you don’t always get to hear the songcraft, lyrics or more subtle arrangements when we play live and we do do these things too! The way to do it, we learned when recording our previous LP at ToeRag studios, is to rehearse hard and play songs as live as possible in recording.
How do you find people react to the idea of a band playing skiffle nowadays, compared to how they reacted in the 1980s?
Very similar but the retro boom means really young people like us too now! I think most of them think we are an original 50s skiffle group mind, cos we do sometimes feel really old amongst the 19 year olds! In the 1980s there was more pressure to take yourself seriously – part of our problem was that we didn’t. We fit in more now in some ways. And the idea of skiffle as being a bit naff has been challenged in recent years by people like Billy Bragg and Mark Kermode, so it’s been reinstated as the original three-chord punk music that it actually was, rather than a few novelty records.
Railroad Bill Album Launch with Kizzy Crawford and John Lewis, Four Bars at Dempseys, Cardiff, Fri 12 June, Tickets: £5 (sold out). Info: 029 2023 9253 / facebook event