Interview with Red Rum Club: ‘The brass is the glue when I’m not singing, it plugs the gaps’

Rapidly-rising Liverpool-based sextet, Red Rum Club, brought out their album The Hollow of Humdrum earlier this month, offering us blasting choruses, majestic trumpet riffs and funky bass lines across 10 incredible tracks. Here, frontman Fran Doran and drummer Neil Lawson talk to us about what the album means to them and where the inspiration came from.

The band also comprises Doran’s cousin Tom Williams (guitar and backing vocals), Mike McDermott (guitar and backing vocals), Simon Hepworth (bass) and Joe Corby (trumpet).

The name of the album references the humdrum in their lives, according to Doran: ‘We made the title up but we knew we wanted ‘humdrum’ in there. We’re in a band and it’s going well but we still have humdrum in our lives. For us, the band is our escape from humdrum.’

Interestingly, they didn’t set out with a pre-determined idea of how they wanted their latest album to sound, according to Doran: ‘We never sat down and said let’s write it like this, we just took it on a song by song basis. We had a lyric, a person or a situation in mind and then it sort of went from there. We were conscious that we didn’t want to write love songs or we want to disguise them if we do.’

Their mariachi-infused songs peppered with soaring trumpet solos from Corby are also somewhat serendipitous, according to Lawson, when I ask them how they became inspired by Mexico’s mariachi music scene: ‘We like Mexican food,’ he laughed. ‘When we were a band, just five of us (Corby joined them around three years ago), we were looking for something different, we wanted not to sound like everyone else. We’d thought of adding strings but Mike had met Joe, who had just come back from uni and who’d been playing brass for the last five years. He invited him to a session, so the sound is a happy accident. Joe had been to Thailand to find himself, he didn’t find himself but he found us instead!’

Doran acknowledges just how instrumental the brass weaving through their songs is: ‘The brass is the glue when I’m not singing, it plugs the gaps,’ he said. ‘Some bands use synths or drums instead.’

They got more interested in mariachi music after playing the annual music festival, Tramlines, in Sheffield and hearing the mariachi band from the Doritos advert (The Mariachis), according to Lawson.

‘It was a real life Billy Elliot moment, so we added a bit of swagger and romance to the song’

One of the standout tracks on the album is ‘Ballerino’, which has a moving backstory: ‘We were at a party and the boys were outside playing football and the girls were inside dancing,’ Doran said. ‘One boy – he’d have been about 9 – took the limelight dancing with his sister and got a standing ovation. It was a real life Billy Elliot moment, so we added a bit of swagger and romance to the song. Maybe not for our generation but if a boy in the past had done that, he’d have been told to stop dancing and get outside to play football with the other boys but this boy’s dad was proud of him.’ I ask whether the boy knows that the song is about him and Doran shakes his head: ‘We can’t find the kid or remember whose party it was!’

As the song goes: ‘There’s a place that we know, why don’t we go, darling, it’s just me and you, everybody’s watching so, ballerino, show them what your feet can do.’

The most pared back but beautiful track on the album, ‘Favourite Record’, was actually the last track that they wrote. ‘We recorded two other songs but management said they weren’t quite right,’ Doran laughed. With three days left until the deadline, Williams went away to Dublin and wrote half of the song on his outward and return flights. When he was back, they finished a verse and chorus in the studio. Doran calls it ‘the most dynamically sparse track we’ve ever made and it’s appearing to be many people’s favourite’. Lawson describes it as ‘sounding very classic’ – ‘it’s slow and acoustic, there’s nowhere to hide’. Doran chips in: ‘I was reading 1984 at the time and the song makes me think of their little hideway (he’s talking about Winston and Julia’s hideaway). For me, it could be about that moment in the book.’

The end track, ‘Holy Horses’, was one of the first songs they wrote for the album, Doran said: ‘We’d come off the tour of Matador (their album from last year) and we had a trumpet line for ‘Holy Horses’. I always think of a fiesta when I hear it.’ He looks at Lawson, starts stroking his beard, and laughs: ‘Maybe for the next album, we get rid of the beards and have big moustaches instead?’ Lawson initially had misgivings about the song: ‘It was one of them tracks, I wasn’t really sure about it.’

Lawson describes the song as being about a guy who’s ‘done stuff [his girlfriend] wouldn’t be best pleased about’. It ended up being one of the strongest tracks on the album with punchy lyrics: ‘The accusation made her smack my cheek, we’re not the same people as we were last week, girl, let me speak, days turned bleak since Rosie caught me riding with the cavalry.’

For Doran, the opening track on The Hollow of Humdrum, ‘The Elevation’, is his favourite: ‘It’s the coolest thing we’ve ever done, I croon a bit, I don’t have to shout. I can just stand there and be cool [laughs]!’ Corby had had the brass riff for a while but it was just sitting there, so Williams took it and turned it into something, then they added an ‘Apache’ style guitar, which gives off big disco vibes. Ultimately, the song talks about how DMs and notification rushes are the new love letters.

‘It encapsulates the whole album, you can totally imagine driving along in LA in a convertible’

Lawson’s favourite on the album is ‘Dorado’: ‘I always liked the demo of it, it encapsulates the whole album, you can totally imagine driving along in LA in a convertible and I get a nice drum solo in it as well!’

‘Matador’, the title track from last year’s album, was another one they were initially uncertain about: ‘We weren’t even sure it was going to be on it,’ Lawson said. ‘We fell in love with it then out of love with it then in love with it all over again.’

They have recently started work on their third album. Next month, they will put out an online gig from the Palm House in Liverpool, to which they will sell tickets, where they play the full The Hollow of Humdrum album in the track order.

Many of the bands I’ve spoken to in Liverpool in the last few months have cited Red Rum Club as their inspiration, not least because of their work ethic that has seen them tour around the country. Both Doran and Lawson are clearly proud of their roots but at the same time say that they don’t just want to be defined as another band from Liverpool.

Doran grew up with bands such as The Beatles and Oasis but said Arctic Monkeys was the band that made him realise ‘that’s what it’s about’. Lawson adds that he was a teenager when Arctic Monkeys started to become huge: ‘Their drummer (Matt Helders) was the reason I got into it, a real focus for me. They can’t do no wrong.’ Doran laughs. ‘If their next album is Alex Turner just clapping his hands, it’d still go to number 1!’

They’re torn when it comes to picking their dream tour line up, mulling the importance of picking ‘someone to show you the ropes, who knows where the good bars are’ (Lawson). ‘I’m saying Arctic Monkeys,’ said Lawson. ‘It’d have to be, to go on tour with your musical heroes.’ Doran says he’d like to tour with Liam Gallagher. Not Noel, I ask? ‘We’d go with either of them,’ he says, diplomatically. (Lawson looks as if he is trying to decide which Gallagher brother to pick.) ‘That could be your headline: Red Rum Club splits the Gallagher brothers!’

(Photo from left to right: Michael, Neil, Simon, Fran, Tom and Joe)