There are moments when you follow a bands career that you suddenly think, yep this is where I always thought they could and should be. The Bar Stool Preachers hit that bullseye on the main Empress stage at Rebellion 2019. The bands 5 ‘O’ Clock Thursday slot was so well attended that the (brilliant) security were turning people away as the venue had reached it’s three thousand plus capacity. Two weeks before and during another heatwave the band supported The Mighty Mighty Bosstones in London and in forty-degree heat they still had the crowd skanking, singing and swaying but Rebellion was the next level. The band also squeezed in a headline slot on the intimate Acoustic stage later that night. Originalrock.net sat down with lead singer Tom McFaull and guitarist Tom Gibbs in the salubrious backstage Rebellion bar to discuss the night before and the ongoing rise of Britain’s hardest working band, The Bar Stool Preachers.
OriginalRock.net. How are you guys this morning?
Tom McFaull. (In a very hoarse voice) “Hollow! but very, very, very happy!”
OR. So the main stage and it was absolutely rammed…
Tom. “They stopped people coming in at one point.”
Gibbs. “Maximum capacity, it was just incredible.”
Tom. “Some of that show will stay with us forever. We started with a sing-a-long ‘One Fall Down’ so within thirty-five seconds we could have fallen flat on our face, but to have three thousand people all singing “never look down on anyone else” front to back…it almost made me cry, like being punched in the gut, in a good way.”
Gibbs. “One moment I remember looking up and I was like…I was lost for words, I mean we’ve been coming here (Rebellion) for the last five years and for us to progress to the Empress Ballroom and for it to be busy was just humbling.”
OR. And how was the acoustic show?
Tom. “Just as mental but in a very different way!
Gibbs. “No bass drums aloud!”
Tom. “People were stood right back to where the merch stands started, I think we had about four hundred people in that little room, so yeah crazy. The first four rows were kids, dancing women all having the time of their lives.”
OR. So it’s been a year since we last spoke, update us on what’s happened and happening.
Tom. “We have thirty-five new songs written, we have three more tours of America coming up. On Wednesday we fly to New York to play with The Bouncing Souls, The Bronx, Off With Their Heads and The Swingin’ Utters everything’s new and we’ve never been busier, never been more successful, never been so broke and never had so much fun in all our lives. It’s all going in the right direction.”
OR. This time last year, apart from Tom, the band all had full-time jobs. Are you getting to the point where you’re all going to have to take that jump over the cliff’s edge?
Tom. “That’s happening right now (pauses) it’s a hard but very interesting situation to get your head around that life dynamic. When you’re an artist, musician or whatever life is a balancing act between work, happiness and creation so you need to be in a good, or bad, emotional headspace to do it. You need to make sure you’ve got a place to sleep at the end of the day. We’ve all been on massive Aldi bags of pasta for the last six months, 89p to survive a day but you kind of bottom out and you realise you don’t need anything else other than my basics and I get that met on the road or the scratch (cash) we’re making now. We don’t have any time to do anything but the band in the next six or seven months because we’re so busy.”
OR. Has the decision almost been forced on you?
Tom. “Exactly, because of our success, it’s a nice way to go.”
Gibbs. “For me, it’s gone to where being a musician was before, now I’m a full-time musician and a part-time removal man instead of the other way round. To finally get to a place, you know you train to play the guitar and learn for years, it’s just nice to get something back from it. To be able to do this full-time and make a career out of it, it’s brilliant.”
Tom. “We just did three and a half weeks in Europe, where arguably we get looked after the best and arguably bands get paid the most and all this sort of stuff and after three and a half weeks we were all made up because we went home with a hundred and fifty/two hundred pounds in our pockets. It was like pukka that’s half the rent done for the month, we drank the rest!”
OR. Does some of that money come from the merchandise?
Tom. Merch, no. If we all got paid from the merch we could all afford to live much nicer lives. None of us has ever taken a single penny from the merch, every penny has been reinvested. Into more merch at the start and now it’s things like American visas, booking a van for September (UK tour) and paying for pre-production on the new album, no-one ever tells you that it’s (the pre-production) just as expensive as recording the album.”
Gibbs. “Everything we do falls under the blanket of us, we’re self-made and self-sufficient.”
Tom. “And that’s because we don’t take any money out. Our appearance fee, after expenses, we split that bang down the middle all six members get a sixth, no animal farm here.”
The Bar Stool Preachers have an incredible work ethic and at Rebellion their merchandise stall was one of the busiest and that’s in part down to the T-shirts being just £5-10 each and also because there was one or two of the band manning it at all times. Out attention turns to that work ethic and how bands now have to do a great deal more than just turn up and play. Straight after their Thursday show, they were back on the stand covered in sweat and fuelled by post-gig adrenalin swapping precious tenners for shirts ‘n’ stickers.
Gibbs. “It’s lucky in some way that we’re a six-piece because it means that two people can go off and do that (merchandise) because we don’t use stagehands or techs, so the others can get all the gear off stage. So by half nine last night, everything’s packed up and we’re ready to party.”
Tom. “The work ethic is something that defines The Bar Stool Preachers now, it wasn’t always that way. We worked, as you know, doing a hundred and fifty/two hundred shows a year to earn our stripes and now no-one can take that away from us. So this year we decided to do one UK tour instead of three and it means that we’re selling out all the club shows in September but it also means we can play the Midwest of America and Southern Europe…So it allows us to unlock these different doors rather (pauses) , that we didn’t have time to do before because we were playing in Stoke-On-Trent or something. When we did our first real tour with The Slackers they turned round to us and said: “If you’re not a Slacker you’re not a Slacker and it’s fucking obvious.” And that stuck with us a band, it was everyone work hard for each other and to be completely transparent and that’s really come back to help us in a big way. Especially at festivals like Rebellion where there’s a lot of work to be done.
It would be really easy for people not to like us, I mean we play Ska, Ska-Punk and there is a lot of snobbery in the punk scene, there’s no way around it, but our work ethic seems to hold us in good stead.”
OR. People can say what they like about Ska-Punk but it’s one of the only genres that’s never gone (in or) out of fashion.
Tom. “Totally agree. When all this (Punk) was conceived you would never have called The Clash a Ska-Punk band, they play Punk Rock but they had elements of Ska, Roots Reggae, you know what I mean. People spend way to much fucking time pinning their flags to non-existant masts, it’s stupid.”
OR. When you played in London with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones you had a brass section, is it coming back?
Tom. “No, of course, it’s not coming back, there’s already six of us!”
Gibbs. “From the music side of it, the orchestration and how parts come together you need a trumpet to fill the sonic void for the recording. Live we have a keyboard that’s now a full-time member, especially for the punk, it pads out the sound.”
Tom. “Especially for the big stage sound, there’s nothing more beautiful and raw than a single chugging guitar and a power chord and to have a really subtle key-line just under that making it feel like it goes to every corner of the room, it’s just something we’ve learnt.”
Gibbs. “It’s nice to have the brass in certain songs but it can get overused.”
Tom. “We’ve just written some really really good simple Reggae songs one’s called ‘Eye For An Eye’ and we played live for the first time last night, people went mental for it but we’ve already been told by the label that we can’t release it as a single because we’ll be classed as a Reggae band. So we have to say we’ll just stay as a brash five/six-piece. But there will be times when we go full-on James Brown/Elvis, three backing singers, three-piece brass band!”
OR. You mentioned new material have you got a date for recording?
Tom. “September, straight off the back of the UK tour, 13th to the 23rd is the UK tour and then we go straight into the studio on the 25th until the 2nd October. So we’ve got eight days and we’ve got thirty-five ideas/songs at the minute, then as a democratic process, we’ll pick twenty and then we’ll go in and live take all twenty of those. Send them off to our favourite people (record company) get them to pick eleven or twelve then go and record those songs with a top-notch producer. That’s the plan.”
OR. And now you’re financially self-sufficient does that streamline the process is your time now even more precious?
Tom. “No, it’s the other way round.”
Gibbs. “Because of where we are musicianship wise we can turn those thirty-five ideas over in twelve-hour days and get that done, there’s no faffing around.”
Tom. “This album is so much truer to the sound of the band, it’s much more like the first album, it’s stripped back, two choruses per song.”
OR. So this album number three, the difficult third album.
Tom. “Is it f…(laughing) I think it is if you’re a band that’s first album flies. If you’re a darling of the scene and you release an album that everybody buys it that by the third album the expectation has built up so much that if you haven’t done the rest of it your foundations will be hollow. So what we’ve done is be shit at first and we get better and better and better so by the time album number three come out we’re really quite good.”
Gibbs “With the PR we’ve got for album three it’s going to reach a lot more different audiences to what we’re already involved in, that’ll be great for them (newer audiences) it’ll be our first album to them.”
Tom. “They can then see our discography and we’ve got a back catalogue to dive into.”
OR. Straight after Rebellion you’re heading out to the States for a tour with The Bouncing Souls, how many dates have you got because they’ve split the tour into three sections?
Tom. “Us and The Bronx are the only bands that are on more than one leg (of the tour). We’ve got the Midwest dates from Wednesday and that we go back out December, New York in December! 21st, 22nd, 23rd all in New York.”
OR. If we’re sat here next year at Rebellion next year (we will) what will have changed or been done, what will we be talking about?
Tom. “I think album number three would have just been released, we may well do a Rebellion release.”
When the interview finishes Tom and Gibbs discuss some incredibly exciting tour possibilities for 2020 before we chat some more about the band’s main stage debut. It was a moment and standing in amongst the sold-out late afternoon crowd five years hard graft suddenly all fell into place. The Bar Stool Preachers have earned these moments and may there may yet be many, many more.
(After a quick pint I returned to the main arena to find the band manning their merch stall once more, converting the Rebellion punters one t-shirt at a time.)