root salad The Tansads
Wigan’s finest got together in 2010 for a series of crazy sold-out reunions. Simon Joneswas punching the air.
“H
ow can anyone make order out of all this chaos?” John Kettle stands amazed at the entrance to St Helens
Citadel, contemplating the scene. The Citadel is rammed, a party has just turned up from Ireland, right off the ferry, delightedly claiming their tickets. “We had people from Germany last night!” There is incredulity in his voice.
By contrast Janet Brown née Anderton is more reserved, “I had to think long and hard before agreeing to this,” she concedes.
This…This! The reunion of the finest,
reactionary, raggedy-arsed, bunch of wide-eyed, roots pop ever from the North… The Tansads. For three short nights St Helens is the centre of the uni- verse. Here the stars collide with a heaving moshpit, a mass of joyous unity, high on every note and lyric. Songs of the under- dog rampage on tunes which tumble from guitars, keyboards, drums, twin vocalists and er…mandolin. This is band with audi- ence symbiosis. Roughly 30 northern songs later we all tumble out into the night, high on re-ignited memories, melodies and the sheer exhilaration of seeing Wigan’s cho- sen few on stage, a decade since they put the Tansads name to rest.
Even John Kettle is grinning, accept- ing plaudits, handshakes and best wishes. I leave him and manager Damian Liptrot crowded amongst keen enthusiasts, still bemused by everything but proud that the band could still engender such passion.
“It was the most profound rock’n’roll experience of my life,” JK concedes when we next meet, a couple of weeks later in the more sedate surroundings of Tarpor- ley. “There is no higher praise as a song- writer than to go on stage and sing for two and a half hours and to have every word sung back at you.”
I put it to him that the reunion gigs had cemented The Tansads’ legacy, that as much as record companies had tried to change them back in the ’90s, it was their audience who really defined them because they really cared for the band.
“In a thousand ways,” he nods, “we’d listen to the label, they’d say things like ‘change your manager or lose a couple of members’, some of the worst decisions we ever made. I think they wanted The Tansads to be more of a regular group, whereas we were far more idiosyncratic than that.”
Nope, The Tansads were a free wheel- ing collective, rolling membership, career- ing up and down motorways playing fan- tastically colourful English roots, existing on egg and chips. We put them on the cover of the June 1993 issue…
L
“We didn’t really care about the busi- ness side of things. We were on a mission and had a way to deliver it. Sometimes it was bizarre, like how many people were in the band (nine plus at one point). We never thought of session men or multi- instrumentalists, everybody played one instrument. The Tansads even had a spoons player at one point!”
ooking back, how had those shows done for the group? “For me, I reconnected with the band. If I meet them in the supermarket I can speak to them without any baggage attached. For the group, I hope they can look back on what we did and feel a sense of pride. And for the reunion they all had to pick up the music again, despite the fact that clearly none of us are the same people. Janet is married with a family, our bass player Ed works at Wigan Athletic, my brothers didn’t really do that much…”
Has it drawn a line under The
Tansads? “Yes, for me we’ve reached a full stop. Those concerts were such a profound, uplifting experience that I don’t think we could better them. Some of us still want to work together so are forming a new band- Merry Hell –which is in the studio just now.”
Indeed, not only is John Kettle present but crucially both his brothers, vocalist Andrew and guitarist Bob. Shipping in for- mer Tansad keyboards and drums as well gives them a familiar platform on which to
build, though John’s keen to point out this isn’t Tansads reborn. “We may do a couple of the old songs but we’re working on fresh material and I’m keen to get the oth- ers contributing too.”
Should that however not be enough
to satisfy, there is Rough & Ready, a fasci- nating document which gives a glimpse into the days of embryonic Tansads, tracks sourced from a series of early short run cassettes. John gleefully picks up my copy, expanding on the time he had in the stu- dio to master and how he kept finding better takes, wanting to add or delete almost at will.
“Warts and all, it’s just how we sound-
ed. You go from the acoustic stuff to the rougher, crunching guitars before our debut album Father’s Day. That’s got lyrics about Ed Jones’s dad; it’s a very poignant song. Pendle Hill, Nursery Rhyme For 89, all great rolling, driving tunes. Untitled, that went on last. There’s a brilliant vocal from Janet and it sort of sums up the world that we existed in. Daytime televi- sion, socialist dreams, a great sense of humour and our cobbly back yard, that fed our scatological writing style. We once rhymed Morecambe – the seaside resort – with tourniquet!”
way. “Yes, Tansads 1, Music Machine 0.”
www.tansads.com
Ultimately then, John, you did it your F
17 f
Photo: Bernard Platt
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