Listen
to an exclusive live acoustic performance by the Twang in our exclusive
podcast
It might be 4pm, but there’s little daylight left to illuminate the rainy
streets of Wolverhampton. Around the corner from the Little Civic, the
Twang’s Phil Etheridge and Jon Watkin jump out of a car and run towards the
venue. A security guard asks for their ID, but Etheridge has forgotten his.
“Mate! I’m the singer!” pleads the 25-year-old.
“I don’t care if you’re Elton John,” replies the doorman. “You haven’t got a
pass so you’re not coming in.”
If you were to take Birmingham’s nascent practitioners of fractious geezer-pop
at face value, then this would surely have the makings of a flashpoint. But
Etheridge seems deflated by the doorman’s remark. “I wasn’t trying to be Mr
Johnny Big B*******,” he says. “I just meant that I’m the singer — and if
you don’t let the singer in, you ain’t gonna have much of a gig, are you?”
Messages are duly left with the tour manager, and Etheridge and Watkin decamp
to the pub. By the time the doorman has moderated his tone a queue of Twang
fans has begun to form. The band’s debut single, Wide Awake ,
may be a week from release, but most of them are already word-perfect. “Mad,
isn’t it?” says Etheridge, with the unfazed air of a man becoming accustomed
to such scenes. “You should have seen Glasgow.”
Like Charlotte at the end of Charlotte’s Web , Oasis may have
seen better days, but their progeny are just coming to maturity. For
Kasabian, the View, the Fratellis and now the Twang, Liam Gallagher’s vocal
on Rock’n’Roll Star was not so much a song as a pep talk
from the coolest careers officer in the land, proof that if you perfected
the pimp roll over enough journeys to school you were three quarters of the
way to your first Brit award.
Even so, when the Twang tell you their story you can’t help wondering if they
didn’t go a little too far in prioritising attitude over minutiae such as
songwriting and performing. For years, the Neon Twang, as they were then
called, were little more than Etheridge and Watkin’s fantasy band. While
Watkins played along on his bass guitar Etheridge would sketch out his
half-sung vignettes.
Then a guitarist, Stuart Hartland, moved into the shared house where Watkin
lived and mentioned that he was a fan of the Smiths. At the group’s next
rehearsal, Hartland proved it by adding his intricate Johnny Marr-isms to
the mix.
What the shy Hartland lacked in showmanship was then more than made up for by
the arrival of the group’s final recruit. Just as Happy Mondays have Bez,
the Twang have Martin Saunders. By affecting the smiliest, most saucer-eyed
approximation of a man at the outermost limits of human consciousness, the
Twang’s talismanic “second vocalist” is there to prompt similar behaviour in
the band’s fans.
Hartland and Saunders’s arrival signalled a dramatic improvement in the
Twang’s fortunes. Within weeks they had the same management team as their
fellow Birminghamites Editors. “For once,” Watkin jokes, “someone other than
our friends thought we were good. We were told to stop performing p***** in
front of our mates and step up the songwriting.”
By November 2006 the Twang had yet to play a show outside their home town or
set up a MySpace page — two prerequisites for any band looking to secure a
major deal. What they did have though, was a management team that understood
the psychology of the A&R chase. The less available a band seems, the
harder record companies pursue them.
Finally, four weeks before Christmas, the Twang played their maiden London
show at the Barfly in Camden. The sellout audience was divided evenly
between record companies and fans freighted in from Birmingham to provide
the necessary air of inter-Stella overdrive. The next fortnight whizzed by
in a haze of record company flattery and ever-escalating restaurant bills,
culminating in a deal with B-Unique, home to Kaiser Chiefs and the Ordinary
Boys. Watkin, who had yet to give up his job selling lawnmowers in a
home-improvements store, remembers testing the nerve of one record company
emissary by ordering a bottle of wine priced at £1,000, though he now says
they were “too drunk to appreciate it”.
The Barfly gig was a success, then? It must have been, although the singer
says his recollections of the show are sketchy. “I was in the toilet having
my lucky s*** and Saunders comes in and says: ‘Hurry up! We’re on!’ When I
got out, the rest were already on stage.”
Even so, Watkin says they are beginning to feel a little short-changed by
their reputation. “When you do three interviews in a row and they’re all
asking you about football hooligans, it gets a bit much. Do you know what I
mean?”
We probably have a rough idea what he means. He has found himself sucked into
a discourse that rears itself every time a bunch of casually attired
working-class boys find an audience that shares their interests. Etheridge
seems perplexed by a Q magazine feature in which he is quoted as
saying that people coming to their shows stand a good chance of being
“chinned”. He insists that he was quoted out of context.
Watkin adds that similarly extenuating circumstances need to be taken into
account when pondering his one and only arrest, the upshot of chasing some
people from his house with a samurai sword. “One of them chinned me,” he
explains. “So I ran into the house and grabbed the first thing I could find.
It was just a decorative one, though. No one mentions that.”
Etheridge elects that we go to a nearby Indian restaurant. Asking the waiter
if his meal can be ready before 9pm, he adds: “I don’t mean to sound rude.
It’s just that I really have got to be out by then.”
Age has clearly brought with it more considerate behaviour than that depicted
by many of the Twang’s songs. In The Neighbour , Etheridge
describes an incident when a neighbour complained about the noise coming
from his flat at 5am. “I used to work for my dad, living in derelict houses
while I did them up before he sold them on,” he says. “So every night was
party central. Then, when I moved to somewhere of my own, I carried on being
the same t***.”
If we seem to have journeyed into an atmosphere of mild contrition, it
probably has something to do with the phone call that Etheridge had from his
father about his son’s behaviour at the NME Awards some days
previously. Accepting the Radar Award for new bands at the televised
ceremony, the singer had exclaimed: “I was gonna say it’s a surprise, but
some c*** told us on the way down.”
Why, asked his father, did he have to go and swear on his national TV debut?
“I feel bad about that,” he says.
But if these feelings of self-doubt warm you to Etheridge, you also can’t help
wondering what use he could possibly find for them in the Twang’s music.
There’s surely no room for self-examination on the pages of Zoo
and Nuts — where the Twang are surely fated to spend much of 2007 —
or the guest slots on Chris Moyles’s show (Radio One Controller George
Ergatoudis declared his love for the band before 2006 was over).
Right now, the umbilical connection the Twang have with their fans is
remarkable to see in action. Half an hour after Etheridge bolts down his
curry a Monday night in the West Midlands has been transformed into a little
pocket of Britpop abandon. But not Britpop the media-savvy, middle-youth
larf played out in the London haunts where Blur briefly felt unassailable,
but the Britpop that took hold beyond the M25. A world where the bitter
overtones of John Lennon’s keynote address are surplus to requirements, and
a working-class hero really is something to be.
The Twang’s single Wide Awake (B-Unique) is released on Monday.
