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Setting the record straight
When we first attempt to contact The Tansads' John Kettle to organise this interview, he is surprisingly hesitant.
"I don't know," sighs the 42-year-old. "I'm not sure it's something I want to do, I'll have to think about it."
Dig a little deeper and you realise why his reluctance is not entirely inexplicable.
Since retiring The Tansads – one of the best remembered and most loved bands to hail from Wigan, with legions of fans in the town – John is no longer a commercial commodity, no morsel to be digested by the public's gluttonous, gossiping belly, no longer a songwriter and guitarist per se.
His Jaraff House studio business, well known and hugely respected among Wigan's musicians, trades solely via word of mouth and it is flourishing.
Now married with a young family, his life is private and his story personal. He doesn't need the particular can of worms that is the stop-start tale of The Tansads to be re-opened.
That he eventually acquiesces is, almost definitely, down to one thing: Time
This is the Pemberton lad's first interview for a decade.
He stayed silent despite the publication of one of the most vituperative, vitriolic memoirs of life in any band, This Is Pop; Life and Times of a Failed Rock Star, written by bassist and ex-journalist from our sister paper the Wigan Reporter, Ed Jones.
Some saw Ed's book as venting his frustration on the band's perplexing lack of national recognition by lashing out at everyone from fellow members, to high ranking record industry officials and the state of British music in general.
Now, John says, these are old wounds. Time has healed. Time to set the record straight.
But first, the beginning.
For those either not in the know, or who have forgotten what all the fuss was about, in the early part of the 1990s, The Tansads were more famous than The Verve.
They were Wigan's crusty-folk-rocker-next-big-things. And they almost, almost "made it" (the very suggestion would now cause John to hoot with laughter). The Tansads began with John and brother Bob writing songs at home, eventually recording a demo with some mates at a homegrown studio, featuring younger brother Andrew on vocals.
The tape was sent to Island Records. An A&R told them: "It's great. When are you next playing?" The Kettles didn't even have a band.
"It was an unconventional start. I'll admit it," says John. "I can't really sing a note and so we were looking for a lead singer.
"I came home one day and I heard a really lovely male vocal coming from the lounge. It was Kathy's Song. I thought it was a recording from an LP I'd never heard before, but it turned out to be my younger brother, Andrew.
"He'd never shown an inch of interest in rock and roll before, he was six or seven years younger than Bob and myself and I think we were so obsessive with music, that we'd turned him right off.
"As soon as I'd heard him singing I told him, 'right, you're in our band, or me and Bob will never speak to you again,' so he had no choice."
"My brother and I had turned our parents' house into a record shop of speakers, instruments, PAs, vinyl," he smiles. "We broke their spirit, I think. They just wanted a nice house to live in, but what they got was us."
The Tansads were an amorphous bunch at first, members coming and going hither and thither, their number bulged to nine or more members at any one time.
"The first real solidifying factor in the group was Ed Jones. He helped bind the band together," recalls John. "I got on very well with Ed," he says midway through the interview apropos of nothing. "I liked him, I still like him."
To John, The Tansads was all about the visceral rush of the performance.
"We took eight or nine Wiganers, who would otherwise have been on the dole across Europe, on all sorts of adventures," he recalls.
"For some reason, we were hugely popular in France."
He laughs bashfully when he remembers how, through Ed's music column, they manipulated the local media, and built up a huge illegal flyposting campaign, which simply stated "The Tansads are coming," featuring a picture of the pram the band was named after.
Capturing the Wigan zeitgeist – before they had ever released a record, the Tansads could sell out every venue in the town twice over - the band soon came to national prominence.
And not least for their spat with rivals Verve.
Richard Ashcroft's proclamation in one interview that his band was going to "blow the Tansads off the stage" – for a charity gig at the Mill at the Pier – led to a penance of sorts for such petulance. Verve had to carry on The Tansads' flyposting campaign, and were subsequently busted for it.
For a long time, John saw their rivalry on an equal footing, until years later, the reality of the situation hit home.
"When The Verve played their concert at Haigh Hall in 1998, I was in New York trying to get a new record deal for The Tansads," he says. "I always believed that as one fell the other would rise.
"But when I got off the subway at Madison Square Gardens I saw two things. A huge life-size movie poster for Godzilla, and next to it an equal sized poster advertising The Verve's headlining gig at the Gardens the next week.
"I had to stop myself then and take my hat off to them. That was the meaning of being in a world-famous rock band.
"Rock and roll teaches you humility"
Back in 1991, The Tansads signed a deal with Pro Plus of Liverpool, who found them a producer (Phil Tennant, who also recorded The Saw Doctors and The Levellers) and helped them release their Shandyland album.
The band established themselves on what Kettle endearingly terms as "the toilet tour", the bog standard venues of the country, and their name was added to many of the summer music festivals of the time, such as Phoenix. Great things were expected, but the breakthrough never came.
"We were never cool enough," said John. "We were always seen as being too earnest.
"We were too busy having fun, leaping around on stage.
"I remember reading one review, which said watching us was like an episode of Little House on the Prairie!"
Their next album, Up The Shirkers was released on MusiDisc, but the relationship quickly soured. While the UK was peppered with Britpop (Pulp, Cast and Kula Shaker had all been support acts), The Tansads' folk-rock style missed the boat.
The single Iron Man taken from 1994's offering, Flock, summed their career up, stubbornly refusing to break into the charts, while the album rode high in the "indie" charts.
In 1995 the band, in its original format called it a day. They reformed in 1998, with a line-up featuring only John and Janet Anderton from the original bunch and released fifth album Reason To Be.
"The disintegration of relationships in the band and the financial side of things, like constantly having to fix the van meant we were spending more than we earned," says John on the collapse of the group. "I flung myself into studio work.
"The Tansads had been the biggest edifice in my life and that edifice had crumbled.
"I didn't really know who I was any more. That's probably the same for a lot of people in bands. I felt like disappearing in a way, I went into hiding, dropped off the radar."
Then Ed's book came out, bristling with the raw emotion of what he perceived as their failure.
John shakes his head gently at the suggestion: "I never felt the band had failed. People came to see us over and over again and I thought his book was most disrespectful to those people.
"We had received great feedback from our audiences, it was real ego inflating stuff.
"We got paid to do what we loved, drank loads of booze and travelled all over Europe. That could never be said to be a failure.
"The best experiences of my musical life were doing live performances with The Tansads."
John says his perspective now is far removed from those combustible days.
"I work with people who are still in that mindset," he says. "Being a singer-songwriter and band leader was something I lived and breathed. I hope my experience can tell them not to be too hard on one another, that they will look back on it in 10 years' time and tell them they are going to feel a bit daft about their arguments."
Producing other people's music has made him more detached, given him insights into new worlds and styles of music he never thought he would know of."I am very proud of what I have done here," he says. "I see my role as being someone to nurture bands.
"But I tailor my service to whatever the customer wants. If they want input, they get it, if they want hands off, they get it.
"What I most enjoy about it is when a band come into the studio to record their first demo, or put down some tracks for the first time and they go home thinking they sound far better than they had ever thought they could. I like to think I have made some really good friends."
The studio "hit" to date has been that of a Canadian rock band, The Marble Index, whose first single went into the top 10 across the Atlantic.
He has recorded arguably Wigan's finest current band Moco, and is about to record a band with the potential to seize that mantle, Filthy Romance.
But the material he works with veers from one extreme to another. He is known affectionately as the "grindfather" in some circles of hardcore heavy metal, while he has just produced a contender for the Latvian entry to the Eurovision song contest.
It would be wrong not to mention that Chester-based John is now recording once more with his two brothers, under the provisional name, The Dregs. He's not ruled out a one-off return for The Tansads or their music.
"I don't go to gigs any more and if I do, I get a little burning sensation," he flushes.
"I still write, but I feel almost embarrassed at playing my stuff in front of other people.
I do fancy it. I would do it in a small venue and I just want to know what it would feel like, just to dip my toe in.
"Regardless of how good it would be, I'm sure I'd be lost as soon as soon as we did one.
"The gig is a powerful drug.
"We have been writing for a couple of years now, but when we get into the studio, we seem to spend more time talking about it, than actually doing anything."
Despite the fondness with which The Tansads will be remembered, Kettle's legacy may currently be in the making.
John is one of a small circle of people directly responsible for ensuring that Wigan remains a hotbed of creative talent. His input into that circle is second to none.
The artistic renaissance in the town is such that live music can now be heard here every night of the week. Thanks to a small band of dedicated people behind the scenes, a professional standard CD can now be produced, mastered and released – all in Wigan. The future's in great hands.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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