Interview with Gypsy Pistoleros: ‘We decided with this album that we were going for punky rock ‘n’ roll!’

Worcester, UK-based, self-described ‘world’s greatest flamenco sleaze glam rock ‘n’ roll band’, Gypsy Pistoleros, will bring out their third album, The Mescalito Vampires, on 9 July. It oozes unadulterated flamenco rumba and old school punky rock ‘n’ roll riffs rubbing shoulders with mariachi trumpet swagger that will leave you craving a glass (or two!) of tequila.

The band originally formed in 2005 in Worcester, with Neil Phillips (The Yo Yo’s – on guitar) although the current line-up has only existed since last year. Frontman and guitarist Gypsy Lee Pistolero (Lee Mark Jones) is the founding member and he’s brought in Mark Westwood on guitar, Gaz Le Bass on double bass, Jan Vincent Vellazco on drums and Kris Jones on trumpet. Jones and Westwood are old friends, having played in the band White Trash in the 90’s, which supported Motorhead, and who Jones describes as being a bit like Rage Against The Machine.

Last month, they released the title track from the upcoming album, ‘Lost in a Town Called Nowhere’, which starts off with a phone ringing and in your face guitar riffs before the mariachi trumpet kicks in, building to Jones’ first raucous ‘nowhere’, making it one of the most exhilarating intros to any song this year for me. It’s completely unapologetic, an absolute banger of a song that pulls you along at breakneck speed and holds you firmly in its grip right up until the end, with the echo pedal giving it a cool glam punk rock feel. Jones likens it to ‘Into the Valley’ by 70’s Scottish punk band, Skids.

‘It’s about a post-apocalyptic world, about how the government treats us like sheep but some people are happy to be treated as sheep’

‘It’s the first one that Mark and I wrote together for the new Pistoleros,’ Jones said. ‘Mark was going “Is this heavy enough?” and we thought, sod it, we’ll do what’s good for the song. We decided with this album that we were going for punky rock ‘n’ roll, that we’d just go for it,’ he said, laughing. ‘It’s an apocalyptic song (the accompanying video below backs that up). It could have been about lockdown and being depressed but I didn’t want to make another bloody lockdown song! It’s about a post-apocalyptic world, about how the government treats us like sheep but some people are happy to be treated as sheep.’

Their name references ‘Gitano Gunslingers’: ‘When I lived in Zaragoza in La Puente de Aragon (a gypsy barrio), in Spain in the 90’s, the gitanos (gypsies) would call us Gypsy Gunslingers, as we used to dress very glam punk and like them were very much outcasts and outsiders in ‘normal’ Spain,’ Jones said. 

The album cover shows Jones wearing a massive sombrero and in full Day of the Dead make-up, it made me smile, particularly as someone who loves Day of the Dead and who has seen first hand just how extravagantly it’s celebrated in Mexico. ‘I LOVE ‘Day of the Dead’, it screams Gypsy Pistoleros! The sound is unique, so I thought that the new look should mirror that,’ he said.

However, for some people, they are hard to categorise musically, Jones said. ‘Places like Spotify don’t know where to put us. Are we hard rock? They’ve tried to classify us as latino. It’s the same on the radio, we’re too heavy for BBC radio but other stations also can’t work out what we are.’ He is concerned that around 190,000 plays of ‘Lost in a Town Called Nowhere’ in markets like Spain and Mexico have been wiped on Spotify, which they realised because, as artists, they get the figures in real time for the first week. The real figures would have given the song more traction on playlists, although more than 84,000 plays are still showing.

‘The culture there as musicians wasn’t going to bars but getting drunk in studios, jamming together and having a laugh’

Jones has been in bands for more than 40 years, starting out at just 15 in a band which supported The Damned. In the early 90’s, playing in a band called The Last Gang, he toured with The Ramones, U.F.O, Motorhead and The Cramps and realised that the music scene in Spain was very different to what he’d grown up with: ‘The culture there as musicians wasn’t going to bars but getting drunk in studio, jamming together and having a laugh.’ I tell him it sounds epic and he agrees: ‘That’s how I met Ketama (a flamenco fusion band). I met Héroes del Silencio (a well-known rock band from Zaragoza in the 80’s and 90’s of whom I am a massive fan) there as well. They invited us to go and see them play at the local stadium. I didn’t realise how big they were, I was expecting a small hall off the stadium but it was the massive football stadium, Real Zaragoza!’

Mescalito Vampires marks the culmination of a lifelong dream, giving him the chance the make the album he’s always wanted to make. Golden Robot Records, who signed Gypsy Pistoleros last year, clearly have high hopes for them and have given them an eight year record deal.

The second single from Mescalito Vampires, ‘The Name’s Django’, will come out on 26 April. It’s a brilliant song that starts off as a ballad before morphing into a punk song with mariachi trumpets around two-thirds of the way through. It’s loosely based on Django, an Italian spaghetti western from the 1960’s, although the character has been tweaked: ‘We’ve made him a more a reflective old Mexican rebel bandit, who fought the corrupt local government and took back his town with local commancheros,’ Jones said.

The title track, Mescalito Vampires, reminds me of the 1996 vampire film, From Dusk To Dawn, starring George Clooney and Salma Hayek. When I tell Jones that, he laughs. ‘That’s EXACTLY what it’s about, we ripped it off, haha! We haven’t done the video yet. Didn’t they film it in Texas? Maybe we should ask the record company to splash out for shooting it there!’

‘We’ve made references to their song in ours but ours is about a hotel owned by a Countess, a vampire’

The chorus, ‘Welcome to the Hotel de la muerta’, is a reworking of the chorus to The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ and people assume that the song is a cover, even though the rest of the melody is completely different to ‘Hotel California,’ Jones said: ‘We’ve made references to their song in ours but ours is about a hotel owned by a Countess, a vampire. It’ll be the third single. That video will be the one!’

References to Mexico are scattered throughout the album although, amazingly, no-one in the band actually has close ties to the country. For example, ‘Mescalito’, or ‘mezcal’, refers to a spirit made from a type of agave in Mexico, which can be up to 55% proof and, like tequila, is distilled twice. As someone who’s tried it, I can say that it tastes a bit like how a damp cave smells and leaves your mouth tingling, which is actually much more pleasant than it sounds. Unbeknown to me, mezcal was also used to make drugs in Zaragoza in the 80’s and 90’s, according to Jones: ‘It was like cocaine mixed with speed’, he said. ‘It was THE drug of Zaragoza before I got there.’

Another track, ‘Viva la revolution, viva Zapata’, is a tribute to Mexico’s Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the main leader of the peasant revolution in the Mexican state of Morelos. ‘It’s about Zapata but it’s about all those rebel leaders, like Che Guevara, the little people taking on the bigs ones. It should be a hit in Mexico!,’ he laughed.

‘Soho Daze’ is about his wild nights out in Soho in the late 80’s when he supported English/American gothic rock supergroup, The Lords of the New Church. The title neatly sums up what he remembers from that period: ‘It’s about the life surrounding that, nights at the Astoria (a music venue), out of our faces, I can’t remember a lot of it, I just have semi-memories!’

If he could tour with anyone – and given that he has already toured with U2, The Ramones, Motorhead and Black Sabbath – he picks his friends, Héroes del Silencio: ‘That’d be the tour I’d love to do, a tour with them, it’d be a different package.’

One song he wishes he’d written is The Cult’s ‘She Sells Sanctuary’: ‘It doesn’t lose anything even though it’s different for them. It’s catchy but they didn’t sell out, it’s still true to their sound.’

‘Where better to hide a problem such as ADHD than as a frontman in a band?’

Prior to writing this album, Jones admits that he’d become disillusioned with music and had turned his attention to acting, appearing in horror films such as Pandemonium, Spy Darlings and Jurassic Predator. In 2019, he took to the stage in Edinburgh with his one man show, A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide, described by one critic as ‘marmite with crack on it’. The show retraces his career journey against a montage of videos and scenes from his early life, while giving him a chance to belt out songs from his punk, glam and rock career, from the council estates of Kidderminster to Beverley Hills and back.

The show was later redeveloped by Jones alongside award-winning playwright Chris Thorpe. Jones pulls no punches, recounting hilarious stories about musicians such as Lemmy, Axl Rose, Blondie and Joan Jett. He also takes a hard look at himself and his late diagnosis of ADHD, which he tells me has had a big impact on his life. ‘Where better to hide a condition such as ADHD than as a frontman in a band?’, he quipped.

The closing track, ‘Alone Again Or’, is a delightful surprise, very pared back, sounding almost Beatlesy, underpinned by the acoustic guitar and scene stealing mariachi trumpet. ‘It’s a cover of the Brian MacLean song (which is folkier), it’s the only cover. We told Kris that we didn’t want it to be perfect, it was like asking someone in an orchestra to play some wrong notes,’ he said mischievously. ‘We told him to play it more mariachi!’

(Mescalito Vampires cover art: Photo by Derek Nelson, make up by Hemlockefx and artwork design by Mycho )