Red Snapper interview – “We’ve always been the underdogs”

Snap back into action

Red Snapper‘s Rich Thair (above, right) remembers very vividly the moment in the early 90s that the band truly arrived.

“We were very lucky,” he tells Juno Daily, “I remember Ashley Beedle had a night in Ken (Kensington) High Street.  We played there, it was a Wednesday night, but it just happened that all of the DJs, the Full Circle lot, they were all there.  You had everyone from Justin Robertson and Weatherall, Rocky & Diesel, I think even though they were all house DJs, they’d grown up with such a cross-section of music and I think that we really captured their imagination. 

“I think it was the combination of hip-hop beats, but surf guitar, jazz soundtrack saxophone, it was a bit soundtracky and a bit dubby.  Most of the crossover stuff, apart from the baggy guitar thing, was mostly electronic acts.  There weren’t really many people with live instruments.”

It was a moment that would propel the band into a career that has lasted more than three decades – and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, just as Warp Records has reissued their debut album Reeled & Skinned, a celebrated collection of their early, self-released EPs, as part of their 30th anniversary series, so the band have also just produced a new studio album Barb & Feather, out via the ever reliably ace Lo Recordings.

The band have also – just as one would expect of them, given their relentlessly regular touring schedule in the time that’s passed since their initial success in the 90s – recently returned from a 13 date tour around the UK in support of both albums.

“The dates went really well, a lot of sold out shows” says Luton-born Thair, Snapper’s drummer but also half of its central core together with multi instrumentalist Ali Friend, chatting to us from his now longtime home of Mumbles, Swansea.

“I moved down here from London about 20 years ago,”  “I bought a house and put a studio in it, it’s great.  I can see the sea from here.” As well as his home and creative hub, the Welsh city was also the first stop on the latest tour.

“The first gig of this was in a place called The Bunkhouse and it was great, it was a good place to start…” ” he says, adding with a laugh: “I say that, although it was really stressful because it was full of people I knew.”

The Bunkhouse is one of the first venues to buy its own leasehold with help from the Small Venues Trust – “so no-one can ever sell it out from under their feet” – and Swansea’s scene, he says, is highly collaborative, with venues working closely together to ensure the success of all. Certainly makes a change from the usual dog-eat-dog politics of the music industry.

The band – now completed by Tara Cunningham on guitar and Tom Challenger, who’s been their sax player for a decade now – have noticed a distinct shift in their audiences of late, doubtless linked to the boom in live jazz and the relatively recent rise of acts like Ezra Collective and Emma-Jean Thackray.

“It’s funny because we have a lot of youngsters to come to our shows now, that’s changed over the last five years.  A lot of them think it sounds really current and in tune with what those acts are doing.”

People like Gilles Peterson have done a great job with British jazz – well, and global jazz.  Back in the 90s, Gilles and Partrick Forge had their show on Kiss and that was it.  I don’t know how many millions of people listen to Gilles’ show now, but he’s kind of heralded that whole scene.

Snapper do have literal skin in the new jazz game though, giving Shabaka Hutchings, later to become famous in new jazz circles with Sons of Kemet and – played with the band as their dep sax and clarinet player in the live arena. “It’s fantastic what he’s done,” says Thair.

The jazz boom is part, if not all, of the story. It’s also worth considering that that same genre-mashing approach that enraptured Weatherall, Robertson et al back at that Kenisngton show is now much more in tune with the post-streaming world that younge listeners are filling their sonic boots with these days.

“People are listening right across the board now,” says Thair, “probably because of streaming.  They’ll listen to an experimental jazz album, then some rock, then some Americana and then hear a house record.  Whereas perhaps in the 90s we were all a bit locked in on the area we liked.”

He feels things have come full circle, in many respects, back to their roots.

“We’ve always been the underdogs, we don’t really fit into any kind of pigeonhole, and particularly through the 90s, when everyone was desperate to pigeonhole us as trip hop or big beat, acid jazz or whatever, the live thing, if anyone saw us they were like ‘wow, this is different and it’s got a lot of passion.”

Even the Barb & Feather album, he notes, has similarities with Reeled & Skinned, being a collection of an recent EP made in collabroation with David Harrow with a selection of newer tracks. Not to mention their first ever cover version.

“That was the EP that we put out at the end of last year.  That was a great thing, I’ve known David for years, he was involved with On-U Sound and I kind of got to know him through the stuff he did for Weatherall, his Bloodsugar stuff.  He’s done so much music.  It was about a year ago he said ‘it’s my big year for a birthday and I’m going to try to do a release every month.  I just messaged him and said ‘would you be up for collaborating with Red Snapper’.  He’s in LA so it could have been really tricky but it worked really well.  We passed parts backwards and forwards, he sent some modular stuff that he’d done, just modular loops, and me and Ali played on top of them and sent them back.  Then me and Ali sent some drum and bass rhythms and sent them to him, so it was a proper collaborative EP really.

“The year before that we did live at the Moth Club, and we’d done a few gigs last year and really, it’s how Red Snapper works, there’s always ideas knocking about, and Ali and I worked on them  We’d done a gig in Athens two years ago and we did a version of (David Bowie’s) ‘Sound & Vision’ just for the fun of it.  We always felt that track had such a great feel to it, and would have worked for it if ever Red Snapper did a cover version – so yeah, that’s was our first.  We’d rehearsed it anyway and it went down well in front of 600 people in Athens so we knew it worked.

“The other new things we did, some of them had a North African feel to them, some of others were more like our early recordings, on a surf tip but with lots of brass going on.  That took a while to get done, we spent most of the last year to-ing and fro-ing on those last four tracks. We realised we needed to do an album and so, like the way that Reeled & Skinned was a collection of those early EPs, we kind of did a similar thing with this one and I think it’s worked really well.”

Even after all that, there’s rest for the Red Snapper wicked. There are plans for a second four tracker with David Harrow, but this time involving Tom and Tara, as well as gigs in Greece in October, something special in London in November and another UK jaunt in March 2026.

Meanwhile, the next Flightpath Estate album, where friends and supporters of Andrew Weatherall raise cash for charity by donating tracks, features no less than three Thair productions, one from Snapper, a tune from his wonderfully lounge-laden Dicky Continental solo alter ego, and a remix of A Certain Ratio by he and Ali Friend’s other band The Numbers.

There’s also the not-at-all slight matter of Thair getting back behind the drums to reprise his role in the live Sabres of Paradise line up, with shows at Fabric, Primavera and more.

The reformation has caused some controversy, as well as delight, due to the fact that the late Andrew Weatherall will not, obviously, be joining the band. But Thair is undaunted.

In any case, we suggest, wasn’t it the case that Weatherall, as Jagz Kooner and others have pointed out, quite ‘hands off’ when it came to the live Sabres band?

“I think so anyway, my memory of when we did that tour supporting Primal Scream, through choice Andrew was very much at the sidelines, he was much more of a producer and a guider.  It was a real chance for Jagz and Gary to display their talents as producers and musicians.

“It was always going to be slightly contentious, there were always people who were going to be critical.  The way I look at it is, two thirds of the band are very much alive and I think Jagz and Gary probably feel there’s unfinished business there. I think it’s going to be great.”

Ben Willmott