Interview | Simon Allen & The Rock and Roll Lifestyle

Wales and England have just finished their Euro Cup match in France.  You might not care, but New Mastersounds drummer, Simon Allen was intently tuned in. For Allen, Skyping from Leeds, the football match meant something special.

England, his homeland squad, had come back from an early deficit in not only beating Wales, but doing so in stoppage time to take control of group play. Simon had just sent a number of celebratory text messages and screenshots to guitarist Eddie Roberts, who lives in Denver, and happens to be Welsh.

Even more diabolical, the two couldn’t care less about football, but in Simon’s words, “Eddie’s always going on about being Welsh and how it’s important or something”. It’s the same ball-busting rapport and in-the-moment grasp of humor that Allen lends to The Mastersounds between-song banters, bandmate quips, and as their undeniable voice through interviews and social media outlets.

The New Mastersounds play the Concord Music Hall Friday night in a post-Phish party with Karl Denson and the Tiny Universe. Prior to heading over to the States, Allen and I had a deep conversation on the hardships of touring, the differences between "making it" in the US and the UK, the lofty expectations that exist for any New Mastersounds audio recordings, and the long-standing requirements for NMS opening bands.

As far as live funk, The New Mastersounds are it for me. But what is even more intriguing is the story of how you got to the States and how that decision was made as a group.

Well... our first ever US show - at House of Blues in Chicago, opening for the Greyboy All-Stars, probably 12 years ago now - was where we realized there was a market for instrumental funk that didn’t really exist in the UK.

But that is what you did there (in the UK), right?

Yeah, it is what we did there, just not very successfully. We would have loved to be taken seriously as a band, but it didn’t seem to gain any sort of traction at all. It just felt like, gigs went well, people enjoyed it, there was just no sense of progress. There was no sense that more people came the next time, or that you could build.

The USA has just been a much more supportive place, and I don’t just think that’s because we’re foreign. I think it’s that people value live music in a different way. And that was apparent to us on that first night, when people came to see the Greyboys two nights in a row.

That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in the UK. The only time it happens anytime over here is if the first gig’s going to sell out or has already sold out, and a second date is added to open it up to twice as many people. In the States, that could potentially be the same people both nights.

And that’s the difference: the level of insane devotion to music and live music. So it was great for us to discover that, and embark upon what now looks to be an actual career, especially for Eddie (Roberts).  I mean, from the start, I never took myself too seriously as a musician, but it was obvious that Eddie had a very special gift and might even be considered a virtuoso in his particular style. After a decade of restaurant gigs it became apparent that this was not going to be amply appreciated in his home country.

Fast-forward twelve years, he’s now living in Denver, having lived in San Francisco, New Orleans and for a short time Portland, Maine - so this is his 4th US city --I think he likes the place!   And people in general are a lot more mobile in the US. A lot of fans we’ve gotten to know, have started on one coast and moved to the other, and then go back again. In the UK, people are a bit more set in their ways: they’ll go somewhere for a short time to go to university, and then they’ll go somewhere else and then that’s it, they stay where they are. But it does feel to us that the US is the land of opportunity, comparatively.

I’ve heard the Dave Vandenburg story directly from him, but take me to the conversation that occurred after you received the email, offering to bankroll your first visit to the States. Was it divisive within the band or was everyone on board from the start...that would have been in what, 2004?

I received the first email from [original NMS patron] Dave Vandenburg out of the blue in the early days of email. And I didn’t really believe it was real. It didn’t seem like a genuine offer. It seemed too good to be true. When I put it to the rest of the band, ALL of us were extremely keen for it to be true, but we were all equally skeptical. It didn’t seem like there could be such a person, someone whose appreciation of the music would be sufficient motivation to invest significant amounts of cash - the likes of which we’d never be able to raise ourselves - into something as obscure as our weird little band, which wasn’t of very much interest to anybody else. But at the same time, we were flattered, so we allowed ourselves to believe it and it turned out it was true!

I mean, of all the people who consider themselves musicians, the proportion who go on to make a living from it is vanishingly small. There are just so many obstacles - even more so for a British band trying to make headway in the US. We’ve managed to jump over or crawl under almost all of them, but it continues to be a uphill struggle because of the tax and immigration situation and the cost of travel.

Although Eddie now is able to make a healthy living playing music over there, for this foreign band to make sense financially and to achieve a sense of growth and progress, there’s a constant tension - even when there’s decent money coming in - because a lot of it just ends up being absorbed in running costs. I guess that’s true for a lot of US bands too, but they are probably spending their spare money on lights!

And that doesn’t even factor if you choose to tour with some horns, or if you store your kit here or what Joe does, does he rent his gear for tours?

Well, I’ve got a drum kit there now, but that’s been the case only since last September of last year. So for 11 years, we didn’t have any gear.

Joe never owned a Hammond B3 in the UK. It was only in September we started working with a new manager, and he’s based in New Orleans. One of his first revolutionary ideas was, “you guys should have your own backline”, and we said, how would that work, where would it live and how would it get to wherever we start the tour?

Anyway, he figured out a scheme to make a big tour kind of pay for the initial purchase of the backline as part of the tour budget. And now it lives in storage in New Orleans, and we have a great tour manager, and a guy that designs and sells the merch and helps out with the driving and backline - they all live in New Orleans.

And whenever we do a tour, at least since September, they’ve gone to the locker with a U-Haul, loaded the stuff up, driven it to wherever the tour bus company is based -- which is in Indiana, something like 10 hours -- then they switch it all from the U-Haul into a trailer, then they’re either driven in a real tour bus or, more often, they’re driving themselves in an RV-type vehicle with bunks in it, and they meet us wherever the first show of the tour is taking place.

Which is a RIDICULOUS undertaking from our point of view, given that in England we think it’s crazy to drive an hour and a half anywhere. We have kind of gotten used to how these long drives are a bit more acceptable to the American psyche, but it still represents a massive commitment, and feels like a huge sacrifice that’s being made for us.

While a flight to or from the UK to the US is how much? 8 hours?

UK to Chicago is around 8.5 hours, but that’s sitting in a plane eating food and watching movies... slightly different than loading a bunch of gear in the back of a truck and then driving halfway across the country, but so far it’s been working, and it’s really nice every night to have the same gear and the specific gear that we need to make the best possible sound for our music.

Because for 10 years, we would hire an opening band on the basis of how much of our ideal gear (amps, drums, keyboards) they had. It sounds callous, but we’re not actually going to be listening to the opener because at that time of day we need to be eating dinner, or napping, or writing a setlist. So the main issue for us was: have they got as much of the gear we need as possible and (laughter) are they prepared to drive it all around, set it up and pack it all down again, merely for the dubious privilege of opening for us? And a lot of them were.

One of the bands that did this is from Chicago - The Heard - and they were huge fun. We got on really well with them - they are all around 20 years younger and looked to us as kind of avuncular mentor type characters. I think they even formed the core of their band in direct homage to our band.

That’s a pretty amazing, and a great way of being mentored…

So from their point of view, I’m sure they were thrilled to be opening for us, but I warned them when we first met them... I remember saying “It’s going to get really old, really quickly, this business of being thrilled to be opening for the New Mastersounds. After two or three shows you’ll be asking: ‘why are we lugging all this gear around, and those old duffers are doing nothing?’” Well they never used to complain – not within earshot of us anyway - and we now consider them good friends, so that one worked out.  

Another opening band who might have been a little bit more resentful was Moon Taxi.  (They’ve since completely overtaken us, selling out theaters left, right and center.) I remember they’d sometimes get a bit sniffy having to carry Hammond organs up and down stairs while Joe (Tatton) looked on sheepishly, pretending to be busy on his phone... We went out on a boat trip in Wyoming with their singer, Trevor, quite recently and he seems to have forgiven us, at any rate.

Sorry, I tend to ramble...but anyway: yes – we have our own backline now!

So did that all correspond with with Kevin Calabro and the Royal Potato Family, when you guys signed with them a year or so ago?

Yes - our manager introduced us to Kevin at Royal Potato, who handled the US release of our Made for Pleasure album at the end of 2015, and our live studio record The Nashville Session in April this year.  Kevin and his team are especially good at PR – we’ve had a ton of great press for both albums and the tours surrounding their release.  

We’ve been putting out vinyl LPs and 45s right from the band’s inception but the format is definitely enjoying a resurgence of interest right now. It seems to have come back into fashion to the point where new pressing plants are opening all over the place to meet demand.

So would that include something like the Hamburg Session?

The Hamburg Session was made a few years ago for a German label and only pressed over there. It’s not exactly our favorite live recording sound - although the label had their top veteran engineers set up a portable studio next door to the venue – but it’s beautifully designed. That’s the great thing about LPs – the whole package can be a work of art.  That one was already expensive – and aimed squarely at the audiophile market - but after import costs it ends up being something like $60 in the States, so I think that one is just for the fanatical completists, of which there are a handful in the States, most of whom I know personally!  

But The Nashville Session is a lot more affordable in the US, and a lot closer to the sound we want to achieve in a live studio recording. Although I think it has pretty much sold out now…

We’ve made, I think, ten studio albums, the majority of which are out of print because we only pressed 500 or 1000 at the time. And those before 2014 were only ever manufactured here in UK, nothing was ever pressed in the States, so what we’re considering is re-pressing something from the back catalog just to go on the merch table for future tours because they sell really well. Our second album from 2003, Be Yourself, is the only one that never made it onto vinyl because we couldn’t afford to press it at the time. Maybe we’ll do a 13th anniversary pressing!

But you won’t be lugging it around yourself though, you have people for that, right?

Our lovely merch guy/drum tech...he’s called Little Greg.

So understanding the pond jumping you’ve done and for the number of years you’ve had to do it, and this mutation from 3 minute funk, boogaloo outfit in the UK, that found success expanding your songs longer than their initial structure, did you co-exist as 2 different bands or versions, a US version of the NMS as well as a UK version when you returned?

We’ve always continued to play a few gigs a year in the UK since we’ve been playing in the States and we’ve never consciously tried to revert to our original style. We just allowed the British audiences to hear how we’ve developed. But we certainly discussed it. We’ve said: ‘can get away with this tune or this extended jam?’  More often the issue is the length of the performance because British audiences have such shorter attention spans. They would consider a two-hour set to be unusually long, even if they were big fans of the band... they might be more concerned about getting home for the babysitter. In the States, if we decided to do 2 x 90-minute sets on a weekend, people would be delighted, but I don’t think there’s a UK gig where many people would thank us for it.

But during the band’s American journey we began to explore peripheral genres, next door to funk, like reggae or psychedelic rock. I think it would have never occurred to us to venture into some of those musical territories before we went to the States and started jamming out. We now do that as natural part of our set when we come back to the UK and it seems to go down just as well here as it does in the US. But since Eddie moved to the States, and Pete (Shand - bassist) moved to Spain, the UK isn’t a place we are really working on - we’re not trying to have a second go at developing a UK fan-base. It’s probably why big US jambands like Phish or Umphrey’s McGee don’t much bother playing in the UK - they would have to work their way up from a really lowly position and try to build and educate a crowd from scratch.

We’ve managed to build a respectable following in the States, the band’s been together for 17 years now - who knows how much longer we’ve got left?  One of us could drop dead at any moment, or Pete, who’s 12 years older than me, might just decide to retire.  That sounds pessimistic, what I mean is that we’re not taking anything for granted.  But looking at the older musical generation, like George and Ziggy from The Meters, and Bernard Purdie - who are still doing it with a smile well into their 60s and 70s – that gives me hope!

We sometime end up battling with our booking agent. He tries to get us to play as much as possible -- he gets a commission for every show --whereas we have to make sure we don’t overdo it and then lose interest. I mean, we’re trying to earn a living, but at the same time, that mustn’t be at the expense of the musical experience. It’s a really difficult balancing act and it must be really frustrating for booking agents and managers, because just as we’re saying we want to play great shows and want to get paid as much as possible, and build our audience… we’re also telling them we don’t want to tour for much more than three weeks at a time because we will naturally just start to get a little turned off when we get on stage, and we don’t want that. We want to be hungry when we go on stage, otherwise it doesn’t mean anything. I never want it to get to the point when someone can come to the show and say, ‘hey, those guys are dialing it in! They’re just going through the motions.’

Well the fact you can play 3 different nights at Brooklyn Bowl, and do very few repeats of pretty much all original stuff over that run, aside from a few sprinkled-in covers; people seek out that freshness and excitement, so that comes across and gets eaten up by your fans…

It does feel good to have such a large repertoire to draw from. And I have to remind myself, the first time we went to NY, which was around 2005 or 2006, I just remember feeling like New York is an unfriendly and unforgiving place: how are we ever going to make an impact here?

I can compare that feeling of playing to 20 people at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan for $500 or something… compare that with the multiple experiences we’ve since had of playing three consecutive nights in the Brooklyn Bowl, two of which might sell out!  The people there are so great, so supportive, plus it’s a luxury – a welcome change of pace - within a tour to be in the same place for three nights.  We get to enjoy similar mini-residencies in other cities too: Cervantes in Denver – those guys have been friends of ours for years – where we will play a Friday and Saturday night two maybe three times a year, and it just feels like home. The Independent or the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco. And in New Orleans we have the Joy Theater, where we’ve built up a reputation for doing our annual late-night Jazz Fest shows.

Oh yes, those are always legendary and for those of us who miss out or don’t travel, seeking out recordings are a bit of a crapshoot. But following you guys on twitter and hearing you prepare for the gig last year with Jennifer Hartswick and Natalie Cressman for your cover of Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It”, which has always been one of my all time R&B guilty pleasures in Mastersounds style was great…

(Laughter) That was Eddie’s musical highlight! And it’s funny because when we first listened to that tune to learn it, it just seemed like the vilest tune of all of them: the least groovy, the nastiest production, like, ‘this is going to be horrible’….yet it turned out to be the most fun to play.

Yeah, we’ve done some fun things there, like the cover theme nights, and the recent one was an Allen Toussaint tribute, and we had some interesting guests for that, like John Cleary…

Well let me ask something regarding the capturing of a moment...because you are obviously an audiophile from a standpoint of vetoing the sound of a recording or listening to the Hamburg Session and determining it’s a nice effort, but your standards are higher for what you want out of a representation. You are also a photographer, so you definitely appreciate the visualization of a memory that can live on for others. So are you a perfectionist? And can you allow for a spontaneous reproduction of something representing the band or yourself, or do you need the quality control to go through it with a fine-toothed comb, adjust? Do you have to plan having special shows recorded or do you guys archive?

Well, it’s funny, those (last year’s Joy Theater) shows were recorded. And there was video footage. And our manager did start working on assembling some of the footage...but the audio recording was so terrible, I just vetoed it. I just said, I really don’t want anyone else to ever hear this, especially me. So I’m sorry I’ve denied it to you, Mike, because you probably wouldn’t have found it as offensive as I did, but all the sounds were wrong and the balance was wrong. It was just so un-funky, that it made me embarrassed and it would have spoiled the memory of what was a really fun show. It sounded really good in the room, but it’s just really difficult to capture live shows well.

We are very particular about what we consider to be the right sound for funky music. A lot of the bands, particularly on the jam scene don’t seem to care about the production sound. On the road every once in a while we’ll put on a CD someone’s given us but halfway through the first tune we’ll be like “pffff...NEXT!”, because it just sounds horrible. It’ll just be a clean digital recording of the instruments, with the drum kit sounding like seven separate instruments and nothing sitting right in the mix.  Like a soundboard recording of a live show. Not a complete sound at all, but this will be something the band is trying to release as an album!

When I first heard the sound of the raw footage of the Nashville Session, I was like ‘ahh….right!’ That’s what it’s supposed to sound like, and  if I’m ever going to have to listen to a live NMS show, I want it to sound like that. Now it never will, because that had to be recorded on tape in a studio. There’s such a huge gulf between that sound and your average soundboard mix or taper recording, which is why I’m so rarely interested in hearing the latter.

Occasionally, there are taper recordings where the quality of the room was such that it naturally compresses everything, so that it sounds really funky. When that happens, I’ll share the recording and I’ll say check this out, post a link, because that’s something I can feel proud I can be associated with. But there are countless recordings of shows, and I am probably the only person that cares to check them out in the band...nobody else wants to listen to Mastersounds music when they’re not playing Mastersounds music. So I might check them out, because I’m more of an archivist. I tend to keep a record of images and sounds, videos, flyers, and posters, and all of that kind of thing. And occasionally, there will be a randomly good-sounding taper recording of a show I remember as being really enjoyable, and which matches up to my experience of the show. And at that point, I will be all over it, and I’ll be saying ‘check this out!’ to everyone. Scott Bernstein in NY and Bally Bellamy in Asheville are two tapers whose work really stands out to me.

But we do make studio albums pretty regularly, and we already have four live albums (if you include the Nashville Session) so I don’t want to dilute things too much by commissioning yet more live recordings.

Yeah, you’ve got a name and reputation you are trying to protect, and that element of quality control is appreciated considering how it could be flooding the scene with unofficial official releases and stuff that would erode what you’ve built. 

Well there is so much out there; we had to accept when we began playing in the States that people we’re going to want to tape it, and it was flattering that anyone was taking an interest, and we were just going to have to be cool with people sharing these recordings around because it really helped to get the NMS name out. I discovered quite late in the game that a lot of people only want to hear a recording of the show that they’ve been to...they don’t want to hear our studio records because they don’t link that to their special memory. And they’re not listening for the sonic nuances that I’m listening for...so sometimes it’s important to just let go and not be a control freak.

So coming to Chicago, you are being promoted as a Phish after party with Karl Denson. About a year ago, without knowing you guys were doing it, maybe a week later, I was listening to one of those to my ears, decent taper recordings, and I heard you guys rip into a song labeled as Phishy Phishy, but turned out to be Cars, Trucks, Buses. Who brought that cover to the band?

So the story behind that: somebody on Facebook or Twitter or something said, “You guys should do a Phish tune”, and I said, ‘well can you suggest any?’  then various suggestions came through. So I made a note of maybe five Phish songs, and then when we got into the studio for Made For Pleasure we were initially a little short on ideas. So I said we’re here and might as well be recording something, so let’s check out these Phish tunes.

The only one of the five that Eddie could imagine working for The New Mastersounds, was Cars Trucks Buses, and I think we pretty much listened to it once in the control room, possibly on YouTube or something, went straight in, didn’t try to think to hard about it, tried to lay it down fresh. We weren’t listening too hard to what Phish had done with it, just the essence of the tune -  the chords, the melody. There’s a Meters tune called "Live Wire", which is one that we’ve occasionally covered in the set over the past 15 years. And the groove of that seemed to fit really well with the tune that Page had written.

So that went down right away, it took us a couple of tries to get it and we moved on. Later in the year in occurred to us to play it in the live set, and it went down so well.  And not just because there were a load of Phish fans in the audience, but because the groove of it really works with our sound.

No, completely! I really think the first time I heard it, you can’t really tell if it’s a composition of yours, or the way you play it sounds like you’ve written it, and it’s explored the way I think Phish would want a cover of their most Meter-y sounding tune to be played.

Well thanks. I’m really pleased with it. And it turns up on a couple of (surprisingly good!) taper recordings from the Made For Pleasure tour. I think one was in Colorado in one of the ski towns and the other was in Mill Valley, California where we’re going to go in a couple of weeks time. So if there’s another Phish tune you can think of, drop me a Tweet or something… 

Well it’d be "Party Time". I think the theme of it with the Mastersounds fits aside from the style…

All right, nice, I’ll run it by Eddie. And with Eddie, it’s either a immediate ‘Yeah it could work,’ or a flat ‘No’. He’s like a difficult-to-please Emperor.

And this Karl D show, is it NMS with Karl Denson and the Tiny Universe, is it split sets, are you opening?

It’s Karl’s show – we were added to the bill later on - so we’re taking the graveyard shift, starting at 2am, for the die-hard, never-go-to-bed Phish fans. We haven’t seen one another since Rochester a few weeks ago.

Joe, Pete and I will all be flying into the States on the day of the show, trying to get some sleep in the hotel for a few hours before going to the venue. If Karl is still awake when by the time play I’m sure he’ll sit in – we’ve had many memorable musical moments with him over the past decade. The last time I saw him he was playing flute for my Jamcruise Jazz Lounge set. Now there’s a show I WISH someone had recorded! 

I’ve been listening to you guys for a number of years pretty routinely, tour to tour, and while Eddie continues to amaze me, and I love his signature sound, your drumming and Pete’s (Shand) bass lay it down and form that great foundation, Joe (Tatton) is the one guy that I feel year to year, tour to tour or show to show, continues to get more confident or grab a hold of what the Mastersounds sound is or is becoming and is really shaping it...

I would agree. I’m glad you noticed that. We’ve noticed that too.

And I think it’s just that he’s gradually gained confidence and just become more and more used to the way we all play. It was difficult for him when he joined we’d already been together for eight years - it took him two or three years to really bed in. But more and more these days, he’s taking control, he’s gained the confidence when he’s doing a solo to communicate with us and say when it’s going to finish. It used to be Eddie doing a windmill motion, saying carry on, do more... and he would just subserviently continue playing a solo he no longer believed in.

Whereas now, if you watch him, he really engages, and he’s like NOW, this is it, I’m taking it, or I’m on my way out, and we can all take notice of him because he has that confidence. So there’s that element, which is great, but there’s also the fact that he, even more than us, he has really embraced the experimental nature of jamband music.

He’s got a much richer sound-scape that he conjures up with his keyboards and effects, so if we ever start to sound like weird space-rock or prog-rock or something, it’s probably Joe. Joe’s the one responsible for taking us into new sound-scapes and really expanding the genre horizons I think. Eddie has his wah pedal, and is using a delay effect when we do reggae, but generally stays within the vintage soul / jazz / funk boundaries. Joe often sounds like he could be playing in the prog-rock band Yes.

And if there’s ever an additional keyboard left up on stage by an opening band – an analog synth, say - he’s not afraid to start playing that and explore sounds that aren’t part of his usual set up. And that’s marvellous because it’s one of the elements that have kept things fresh for us and, I think, kept things fresh for audiences.