Live4ever Interview: Hooton Tennis Club @ South By Southwest 2016


Hooton Tennis Club at SXSW 2016 (Photo: Paul Bachmann for Live4ever Media)

Hooton Tennis Club at SXSW 2016 (Photo: Paul Bachmann for Live4ever Media)




Bands crashing out of Merseyside? Hoping to win the hearts of the kids in America? It’ll never catch on.

“For the past six months I’ve just listened to The Beatles, like, all I’ve listened to. And I can’t get out of it, I need someone to help me!”

Hooton Tennis Club know and love their history. Know all about the path well trodden by bands of yesteryear, a path which they hesitantly stepped down when boarding a plane for the US and this year’s South By Southwest Festival. “We were in a rush leaving for tour because our plane was delayed on the way back from New York and we had a gig the next day,” they remembered during an exclusive interview at the 2016 ei8htball sponsored SXSW Live4ever Media Lounge.

“So we flew back to Heathrow and had to get a train up to Liverpool to pick up the van and then drive back to Bristol. So we were in a rush and we couldn’t pick loads of CDs for the van so we just got the Beatles discography, ‘cos it was all in one box. So we did that chronologically – over about four weeks we just listened to that. It was just ridiculous.”

You know the history too. You know how Mersey Beat once conquered a black and white world. How The Beatles stepped out of Liverpool and the Cavern Club, on to a million flickering 19” Admiral TVs, changing pop music forever. How they launched a British Invasion and a grinning gaggle of imitators sporting sharp suits, sharp mop-tops and even sharper pop songs.

But do you know Liverpool is right now swaying to a far more modern rhythm? How natives are stirring to the psychedelic pop of Stealing Sheep, to the metal thumping of Dragged Into Sunlight, to The Coral‘s new found seventies fuzz, to that band’s former guitarist Bill Ryder Jones‘ deeply earthy take on the mysterious solo troubadour role. Yes, to the lo-fi jangle of Hooton Tennis Club; four long-time friends who’ve homed in from the Wirral and close neighbourhoods to find themselves almost accidentally at the heart of it all.

“This started when we were in uni still, and we had a week off and we just decided to make an EP,” the band told us. “We tried to do an EP where we could make as many songs as we could write, record, mix and get online in a day. We did six but only put four out, then there was a lot of time in between another one and we changed the rules for ourselves because that was supposed to be as fast as we could – sort of punk, messy, experimental aesthetic – and then the next time round it was like, ‘OK, that was a dark sounding noisy thing, now we’re going to make pop songs, as poppy and clean as you can make’.”

“We put a song online, Dave Monks from BBC Merseyside heard it, played it on his show and the same day Carl Hunter from The Farm heard the song on the radio and was looking for two songs to put out on a label that he’d set up, so he chose that and another one. Then that came out just as a CD single thing, passed around Liverpool, and then Jeff (Heavenly Records founder Jeff Barrett) came to a show and then we were signed. And so people ask us, ‘how did you get signed? What’s the plan? What’s the formula?’, we can’t give anyone any advice because we really don’t know.”

What we know is Hooton Tennis Club are at the heart of it all thanks to ‘Highest Point In Cliff Town‘; a faithfully antiquated album based around the old recording laws of the 8-track. The band revel in its limitations and leave those 21st century tribulations of iMacs and Pro-Tools very much to their small crew centered at Liverpool’s Parr Street studios. “None of us own a Mac, we’ve never used anything like that,” they say.



“If we did use anything like that it would really alter what we sound like; if someone gets a guitar riff wrong we can’t just easily chop that out. It makes us leave in little errors.”

If the all conquering ambitions of their sixties predecessors are a long way from the thoughts of this particular band, this fetish for Luddism is undoubtedly the bond which keeps them together. Yet Hooton Tennis Club are today facing up to a very different music industry. One where free music flows on the Internet like water from a tap. Streaming is here to stay, but so are the arguments. Be it the high-end, lossless quality subscriptions offered by Jay Z’s Tidal service, or the never-ending catalogue free to pretty much anyone with an email address and Spotify, the one guarantee is the digital revolution won’t be making millionaires out of independent artists any time soon.

“It’s good and bad,” the band reflects. “It’s great everyone can hear your music, but you don’t get any money from it. The business hasn’t found a good way of exploiting the technology for money. There’s that many free places where people can listen to music, that promote this idea that music is this free thing that people don’t have to pay for.”

As in love as they are with the past, and unsure as they are with the present, so they are just as relaxed about the future. “We’ve got a few festivals, we’re not doing a tour in the US,” the band reveals. “We’re going to go home, record more songs. Hopefully make an album at some point. We’re supposed to be recording in April but it’s not booked in yet, so it’ll be nice if we’re going to do that.”

They’ll return to Liverpool’s welcoming arms then, back to their adopted city which we now know is still nurturing music around every corner. They’ll probably record some more songs. Probably do an album. Visit a few festivals. Tour again. Try kick that Beatles habit. Continue existing by some of the Fab Four’s sound advice:

Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting.

(Dave Smith)


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