The Tubs on Touring, the London Scene, and the Perks of DIY

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Here's what is cooking today: The Tubs are simply a sensational rock band and they've been building perpetual steam with every release. Their latest, the Merge-released Hard Life, is as good of a collection of songs as these guys are known to turn out, and that's a testament to how consistently strong they've been right out the gate. I've been a fan of what the guys in this band have been up to for quite some time, as they share members with former UK indie rock acts like Joanna Gruesome and Ex-Void—including bandleader Owen Williams, who I had the pleasure of hopping on a call with as the band was signing copies of Hard Life for shipping in Secretly Distribution's London offices. Owen was hilarious and forthcoming to talk to, and it's always a pleasure to speak to a musician who's both a straight-shooter and someone with a very solid sense of humor. If you're a fan of these guys, you'll love reading this interview—and if you're new to them, you just might walk away a fan regardless. Check it out:

These Tubs records seem to come pretty quickly in general.
I tend to have the next one written when the current one comes out. It all happens in a week or so. I don't really think about making music very much. I just go, "Ah, I'm going to sit down." It happens pretty quickly, which is kind of weird. I don't think that's how most people operate. I also write like fiction, and to me, that's agonizing and takes forever. Our drummer he writes songs, but he's had writer's block for two years—but I can go quite a while without writing a song, and then suddenly I just write a batch. They're not very long songs, I suppose. I suppose bands back in the '60s used to release an album every year. I don't know what happened. Everyone got lazy, I suppose.

I do think sometimes people are buying into the wisdom of music industry people saying that you can't do the Robert Pollard method anymore—or, "You can only release singles now. No one cares about albums." Most of the time, that's just people lying though.
I mean, I think [the label] would rather we did the albums less frequently. Maybe I'll have to sit on the next one for, like, two years—but I've already written it. If it was up to me, that would come out next year.

In terms of what you and your fellow bandmates have done over the years, it does seem like there's genuinely been more interest in every successive project. Is that something you guys have perceived as well?
I mean, we spent quite a few years playing to barely anyone. Especially here in the UK, we're not particularly on-trend in terms of what a lot of the indie bands sound like now. Being melodic is quite seemingly out of fashion, and just saying stuff over some music is [in]. It took a while for anyone to actually know who we were, and we spent a lot of time playing to, like, five people in Bristol. It's nice, because it's come together in an organic way. It's been a bit more word-of-mouth than some bands tend to operate. When we wrote that first album, I genuinely just expected it to be a small release on Trouble in Mind—so it's all been very surprising.

How have you perceived your songwriting mature and grow over the years?
When I was writing for Joanna Gruesome, it was very much a genre worship band. I didn't have ambitions beyond emulating early My Bloody Valentine or something. But as that went on, we started putting in some hardcore aspects, and it's been a similar process [for the Tubs]. Every album, I try and open the door to more influences. We get a rep for being a bit derivative, but in my mind, it's just a weird, anachronistic combination. I'll combine some folk stuff, some '90s indie rock, or some Morrissey jangle stuff. I don't think anyone's making new guitar music. You have to just go and mix up things that you haven't thought to mix before—but I like doing that in a way that isn't too on-the-nose. On this album, we sound like just the Tubs, rather than the Smiths.

You mentioned Joanna Gruesome. At the time you guys put those records out, doing something a little shoegaze-indebted was a tad more against the grain, trend-wise. Now, shoegaze is maybe the predominant rock sound amongst young people. Even Ex-Void was a few steps off the beaten path of what was trending—which, I want to be clear, is a very good spot to be in.
When we started making music, it was early in social media days, because we were 17 or 18, and there was more of a connection to the DIY infrastructure, which was still much more of a thing in the UK. We were working in that lineage to some degree. But now, if you're really young, the shoegaze stuff comes from a weird, slightly random, artificially engineered place, where it's disconnected from the actual history of music—because, obviously that culture has become so atomized. We've just acted as if none of that's happened and have kept following the same instincts from when we were younger. Hopefully that comes across. We're never completely on-trend, so we never actually make any money—but maybe it means we can occupy a place of more longevity than the flash-in-the-pan, buzzy bands.

With younger listeners, there is this almost ahistorical approach to music discovery where, I feel like they love music more than ever before, but then they're talk about how important Duster was—but that's not really how it worked back then.
It's just so bizarre, isn't it? Because I can't really work out what the actual reason for someone like Duster or whatever X band from that was pretty obscure becomes like at the top of the pyramid. [Looks towards a band member off-camera] This guy over here loves Duster, so he's saying it's purely meritocratic.

I mean, Duster are great.
I prefer Low.

Low are the better band. To me, they're one of the great American bands. But Duster are really good too.
I just don't understand the logic [of younger listeners]. It does mean that all of our fans end up being, like, old men. [Laughs] We do have some young fans, actually. One young fan made a meme account about us. He was a good man, and he was very into music. They're very passionate and nerdy about it, which I do like.

I do too. I always use Duster as a case study for talking about this phenomenon because, as someone who did a lot of the work studying the musical blade growing up, I never heard anyone talk about Duster until, like, 2019. It's weird how things happen now, and it's obviously related to a lot of internet context collapse.
When I was a teenager, I was discovering bands through file-sharing, so I'd download the Heavenly back catalog on Mediafire file. I share that thing of having a bird's-eye-view of the history of indie rock stuff in a way that maybe people older didn't have, so I understand their weird way of ahistorically mixing it all up. But I do find that even just promoting yourself on the platform too much makes you become part of that insanity.

I definitely agree with that. I was going to ask what your general relationship with the internet is like at this point.
I'd rather not use it, but obviously we have to for the band. You do see some bands our age using TikTok and stuff, which seems a bit humiliating.

Your vocals are very distinctive to me, and I honestly think it's a huge part of why you guys have continued to grow in popularity. There's something very passionate how you sing in general. Talk to me about what you do as a vocalist, and if there's vocalists that you look towards as well.
It's funny, because I never really used to sing that much. I did backing vocals a bit in Joanna Gruesome, but it was only when I started singing in my own accent—rather than a weird, American, transatlantic accent—that I was like, "Oh, actually, I do quite like how I sing." I tried to improve by learning a lot of folk songs and learning how to trill—which, you don't really get that much trilling in indie rock. Some people can't really do it for some reason, but I like doing it because it keeps you in tune, so you can continuously trill. Shogun from Royal Headache and Antenna did quite a lot of trilling, but in a soulful way.

In Joanna Gruesome, the lyrics literally didn't mean anything—they're just complete nonsense. So I was seeing [singing] the way My Bloody Valentine do, which is using the voice as an instrument. With this band, because I started writing prose, I developed a voice which I brought to the Tubs, with humor and playing characters that are more grotesque versions of myself—so I combined those two advances in my singing style and my writing. The [comparisons] I always get are Richard Thompson—who I obviously really like, but it's just like never occurred to me at all until everyone said it. Now I'm like, "Maybe I should start a tribute band." I guess I'd have to wait 'til he dies, because he's still doing his thing.

I'll admit, I've never thought of Richard Thompson while listening to your music.
The funniest [comparisons] I keep getting are Eddie Vedder and—who's the guy who did "Mr. Jones"?

Counting Crows?
Yeah, Adam Duritz. That's what the Americans tend to interpret it as. It kind of disturbs me whenever someone says something like that.

Have you ever been into Pearl Jam?
Yeah, I do quite like Pearl Jam. But the idea that I sing like that over jangle pop—on paper, it sounds like the worst kind of music you could ever imagine, Eddie Vedder fronting an indie-pop band.

Let's talk about the Gob Nation collective and its inner machinations.
[Bassist Max Warren], who runs it, is here with me. Do you want to say something, Max?

Max: I guess it started as a central point for everything that we were all doing—running the shows, being able to perform under a banner. It's kind of like being in a gang.

Owen: In London, there used to be more scenes and distinct gangs of musicians. At some point—I guess it was a mixture of people getting older and all those places getting shut down—that started to die as a thing. It wasn't initially a concerted effort to have this established group, but there was a Guardian article about it, because there's 15 of us, we have a million different bands between us, and we're all really good friends. That kind of formalized it a bit. Max had the record label that was already called Gob Nation, so it became the Gob Nation universe.

I loved the Ex-Void records so much. When that band disbanded, I was like, "Damn, this is a shame—but it's a good thing that these people are doing a whole bunch of other stuff that I also really like." Given kind of the lifespan of certain bands, how do you decide when something's run its course?
I don't really like know why Ex-Void broke up. It was because Taylor from the Tubs joined as our drummer, and then we were like, "Oh, we've got a band, we're ready to do some shows, and we all get on really well." And then Lan was like, "Yeah, I think we should stop doing it." Lan vibes. But no, I think it's partly because Lan was doing solo stuff more, and the Tubs were getting busier. I think it was the right decision, because it's like having a load of horses. If one bolts forward, then you put your money on that, you know?

I did quite enjoy writing for two bands, but I was also being a bit adulterous with it. I'd be like, "I'll give this to Ex-Void," and then I'd be like, "Actually, no, I'm going to give it to the Tubs." It's probably good if I only have one thing I'm writing for at the moment, because it annoys people if you do that too much.

Talk to me about the business of touring on your end. What are the highs and lows?
The lows are spending time around the other members, mostly. [Laughs] Me and Taylor were just talking about this today—when we're on tour, we're like, "We fucking hate this. We want to go home." And then we have a few months of fand we're like, "I can't wait to go on tour again." I do hate sleeping in a bed with my bandmate every night in an Airbnb. I think that's just crap. The drives, especially in America, are pretty fucking terrible. But it's fun. I mean, we tend to party quite a lot, which makes it worse and better at the same time. You could do it in a way where you're super healthy, but all you would do is be in the van, play the show, and be in a hotel or Airbnb. That's quite a miserable existence, At least you get to go to some bar and talk to some crazy American for an hour—and we meet quite a lot of them.

Let's talk about the financial aspects of being in a band, especially for a band that's as DIY as you guys have frequently operated.
I feel like I'm a conspiracy theorist about this, because we play with these other bands and they often have loads of staff. These will be bands where they're obviously bigger than us, but not that much bigger, and they end up making about the same amount of money as us—but they should be making a lot more. What happens with a lot of bands is, they get signed and it's treated as standard that they get these staff who are there to make the band members' lives easier—which, obviously, they do—but it ends up costing the bands a lot of money. A lot of them don't even seem to know that they could save money and just set up their own gear. If you're playing in DIY bands, you just assume that you have to do that, because that's what you always used to do.

It's the same with managing. Me and like Max share the managing duties. Obviously, we have a booking agent, because I don't think you could really—I mean, you could book your own shows, but that would just take a fucking million years, and our agents have good relationships with the venues and stuff. But beyond that, who do you need? Apart from a label, do you really need to be hiring all these people? So we just about make it work. I mean, hopefully, on these tours, we'll make a bit more money. Obviously, since we signed to Merge, we had a bit more of an advance. The difficult thing is getting flexible work in our off-periods. I'm quite lucky, because I work in an art gallery where I can just pick whenever I work and just fuck off for a few months. They don't really care. For the rest of them, they get tend to get in a bit more of an unstable situation when it comes to being in the band—which, hopefully, we're betting on that being less [unstable for] them in the future. But a lot of it is just investing in stuff and hoping it pans out.

The tale of the last 20 years, in general, is overscaling before you break-and-bust pretty quickly. Anybody I talk to who has experience working in a DIY mentality is usually a lot better at managing that.
They do just spend a lot of money on nothing—and all these people who they hire, have their set wages, which is fair enough. Like any other kind of freelancer, they say, "This is how much I get paid for doing this." But band members don't really get that sort of luxury. It's just accepted that you'll get what you're given, or the remainder of what's left. A lot of these industry or touring people somehow have the right to demand a decent wage—which is good, but just isn't possible if you're in a band.