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You could have been forgiven for thinking that Gallon Drunk had gone for good. The 'Traitor's Gate' EP was the first sign of life from the band since their much acclaimed second album 'From The Heart of Town' way back in 1993, and now they've followed it up with a fantastic comeback album 'In the Long Still Night', released towards the end of 1996. Easily their best work to date, it takes their old sound and gives it a hefty kick up the arse - the songs are great and the arrangements are tighter and more dynamic. When I met James Johnson and Mike Delanian from the band in Belfast (November 96) they had just put on one of the gigs of the year. As these two are the founder members of the band I thought I would ask them exactly what had happened between 1993 and now?
J: "We owed our old label Clawfist a lot of money because we were supposed to give them an album and we didn't. They were a really good label run by a friend of ours but it was really limited, so it was the worth the wait to get out of it. And of course during the wait we changed the whole line-up of the band - we've got a different drummer (Ian White, replacing Max Decharne who is now with the Flaming Stars). I did a stint with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, standing in for Blixa Bargeld who was off being a professor of German Literature in Vienna. I did the Lollapolooza tour with them in '94 and when I came back Gallon Drunk continued to write music and play gigs. We were always busy during the lay-off so it didn't really seem that long, although it was frustrating not to have any records out. I think that as a result we ended up making a much better record so we're happy! Three years ago we signed with a different manager and he advised us to get jobs so we did, but I'm happy to say that those day jobs have gone."
You've now got a new deal with City Slang, how is that working out?
M: "They've been brilliant so far, they just gave us the money to make the record, we handed over the finished record and artwork and they didn't interfere, they just put it out. We had a huge debt hanging over us so they really stuck their neck out to get involved with us."
J: "They've also got a lot of good music on the label, very different to us, but really good stuff (Tortoise, etc). Clawfist bands all sounded quite similar, and that's because Nick who ran it, based it all around his tastes."
With such a long lay-off, how have people reacted to 'In The Long Still Night', which is virtually a comeback album?
J: "Journalistic reaction has been really good. The general reaction tends to view it as a quantum leap from our last album ('From The Heart of Town'). Thankfully this time the press acclaim has crossed over a bit into sales which is good because we haven't pulled any punches, if anything it's more the sort of record we always wanted to make and we had a lot of time to make it."
Obviously you had a lot more songs to choose from - I imagine that you had an album ready to go with Clawfist, so you had all those songs plus any subsequent work to choose from.
J: "Well, sort of. We had all the stuff written and we just kept on writing. It's almost as if we missed out a whole record. That's probably why it seems like such a different record now, cos the one that would have come out in between was already written and we'd been playing things that didn't get included, and so on. The last thing that we did on Clawfist was the offshoot album with Derek Raymond (the spoken word 'Dora Suarez') and that took us right up to 'Traitor's Gate' EP which we released on our own Gallon Drunk Records, although it was funded by City Slang."
Tell me more about the line-up change?
J: "We've now got Ian White on drums, a great drummer, we had a guy called Ian Watson on guitar who left recently, Terry Edwards is still with us. Terry wasn't a full member on 'From The Heart..' He did the trumpet arrangements on 'Bedlam' and it was immediate that he was a good musician and a nice bloke. It really transformed everything when he joined, and just to compound things getting Ian on drums advanced our sound a further step."
With all the changes in the music scene were you ever frustrated when you were trying to get a record out?
M: "I think any picture of James's face during that period should be put in the dictionary alongside the word frustrated!"
J: "The main reason that the record is so good is because we couldn't make one for so long. We had time to think about what we wanted people to hear, what we wanted to fuck people off with, what could be the most exciting things we could do. We just had to shove it all on one record!"
Why did you record a cover of the Bee Gees 'To Love Somebody'?
J: "Someone at work had a cassette with Nina Simone's version on it and I ended up listening to it all the time. I stole the tape, took it on tour, vaguely worked out how to play it, and we played it in the set a few times before we recorded it. We tried to distance it from the original, give it the Suicide treatment, give it a kind of mad, acidy, electric feel. We've also recorded a great Hank Williams cover - 'Heaven Holds All Of My Treasures'. I like the idea of doing a proper EP with four new tracks - I hate flimsy singles - you want something where all the songs are good, it's produced nicely, the artwork's good. I just hate putting out throwaway shit."
There are been significant increases in popularity for acts like Dick Dale and Rocket From The Crypt since you've been away. How do you feel about people with short memories comparing you to them?
J: "What I can't understand is the way some journalists review things. I can't remember who it was written about, but there was this one review going on about David Lynch style guitar - like when did you last hear David Lynch play guitar!? We have had a few 'Pulp Fiction' comparisons, even though we did Dick Dale's 'Miserlou' (theme from Pulp Fiction) on our first single in 1991! I just wish people weren't so narrow minded that they have to put all music in specific little compartments."
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