Interview
Interview
Stage Times: Twin Atlantic
From playing to a dog in Inverness to taking over Glasgow’s biggest arena, Sam McTrusty walks us through Twin Atlantic’s most memorable performances
There aren’t many corners of the live music world Twin Atlantic haven’t experienced.
Across almost two decades on the road, the Glasgow rock band have graduated from squeezing their amps into pub rooms barely large enough to contain them to festival main stages, sold-out academies and a colossal hometown arena show. Along the way there have been broken-down vans, near-empty venues, questionable promoters, hecklers, bizarre radio showcases and more than a few nights where everything that could possibly go wrong did.
For frontman Sam McTrusty though, those memories amount to something far greater than how many people show up to see them play.
“The whole point of the band’s purpose, and being around for 18 or 19 years, is the journey of our friendship together – Ross [McNae, bass] and I, and then the four of us – and what that music has meant to so many people,” he says.
As Twin Atlantic prepare for another chapter with eighth album Separation From The Animals, accompanied by a UK tour this October, we asked Sam to look back through that journey and talk us through the shows that have stuck with him most.
The gig that made me want to play music
“It wasn’t the first show I went to. It probably wasn’t even the 50th show I went to, but I went to see Death Cab For Cutieat the Barrowlands around the time of Plans. I don’t know what happened to me that night, but they were already a huge pillar of inspiration for me. I’ve actually got a Death Cab tattoo to remind myself of that feeling I had that night.
“There was just so much musicality and expression onstage, and it was coming from dudes who didn’t look like what I thought a rock star had to look like. The way they dressed was so unthemed, and there was no pretence there. It was about the music and the emotion, and they expressed it in such a passionate way.
“Ben Gibbard would go up the back and start playing a Rhodes piano, then the bass player was so locked in with the drummer that he wasn’t even facing the crowd. It wasn’t about them; it was about the music and the shared experience in the room. I think I was at art school at the time, and I had this totally transcendent moment of, ‘Oh my God, I need to do this. That’s what I need to be doing.’ It’s quite strange to have an epiphany that vivid. I remember this feeling of, ‘If I don’t experience that, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.’”
The first
“When the four of us formed Twin Atlantic, me, Ross and another drummer already had a show booked for this mega-trendy club night in Glasgow. At the time I worked in Bloc, which became this seminal ground zero for Scottish DIY punk music. I think it was about a month out from the show, and Craig [Kneale, drums] and Barry [McKenna, guitar] knew zero songs. They didn’t know any of the stuff, so we just decided we were going to rehearse every day until the show. We got to about a week out and there was a gap on the gig roster at Bloc. People would just set up on the floor there, and at about 9pm they’d bring out a PA and move some tables. I was like, ‘Fuck man, I wonder if we can just play that as a practice?’
“Our mates were in this semi-well-known local band called dbsixtyeight. They’d been on tour, and to us they were this huge successful band. Ross knew a few of them because we lived in the same area, and he’d borrowed the bass player’s amp because he wasn’t even a bass player. He had all this guitar gear and no bass stuff. Because he’d borrowed the amp, the guy was like, ‘I’ll come down.’ I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe the bass player from dbsixtyeight is coming to this show.’ Then their drummer and guitar player came too, and our nerves just peaked.
“We basically played to those three guys and two other people. There was no one there, and we were awful. About 15 minutes after the show, Barry quit the band. He was like, ‘Guys, I can’t do this, I’m not your guy. I hated that. I’m terrible at this.’
“That was technically our first show, but it wasn’t really much of a show. I think it was about a week later that we went ahead with the actual club night, and it was sold out to the rafters. That was our first little buzz moment, although it was more to do with the club night being a sick thing to go to rather than our band being there. Plus, I was the wee guy who worked behind the bar at this super-cool trendy spot. So technically our first show was traumatic, but our first real show that people actually knew about was brilliant.”
Photo by Andy Sheppard/Redferns
The smallest
“We played the Market Bar in Inverness. It’s upstairs in an old man’s lounge pub, and once we were in there and all our gear was in – and back in the day I used to tour loads of amps – I think the venue could hold about eight people. It was like, ‘What the fuck are we even doing here?’
“There was literally a dog at the show. The whole thing was equal parts bizarre and fun, but it also felt like a test. Like, ‘Right, if you’re going to make it, you need to make the most of this.’ I put my headstock through my amp and was shaking it around, doing the full Kurt Cobain thing.
“We had another bizarre one at the Cavern in Exeter. That wasn’t the smallest room we’ve ever played – I think it holds about 250 or 300 people – but there was just one guy there. He’d brought this tiny cut-out from the newspaper with the gig listing in it and made us sign it. Our signatures didn’t even fit on the thing… I don’t think we’d ever signed anything before!
“Then we went outside after the show, and the van had broken down. Between the five or six of us on tour, we had about £200 in the bank in total. We had to spend £60 on a taxi to the hotel, then wake up at about 5am to get a train back to the venue. We couldn’t afford another taxi to the train station, so we walked across what was basically a motorway dragging our cases, jumped over a railway line and started walking the wrong way up the train tracks. There were all these normal people standing there waiting to commute to London for work. Honestly, some of the shit we’ve seen is just not to be believed.”
The biggest
“The biggest crowd we’ve played to might have been when we opened for Kings Of Leon. That was something like 70 or 75,000 people. We also did Edinburgh’s Hogmanay street party and played through midnight. There’s an actual gig down in the gardens, but we were playing the street party itself, and I have no idea how many people were there. It could have been 100,000 or 150,000. It was just so many people that you couldn’t really comprehend it.
“For our own headline show though, it was the Hydro in Glasgow, which was about 13,000 people. What’s mad is that when we started the band, that venue didn’t even exist. It wasn’t this goal that we’d spent our careers aiming towards, so the whole thing felt fucking surreal. To be honest, it still does. I look back at footage of it and I’m like, ‘Why did we do that? Who let us do that?’
“On that same tour we played Birmingham Academy, which was our biggest-ever headline show. Then we played Brixton, and that became our biggest-ever headline show. Then the next night we played Glasgow. Honestly, we probably weren’t ready to do the Hydro, but there was nowhere else for us to go. London has that jump from around 2,500 people to 5,000. Birmingham was the same, from around 1,000 to 3,500. Glasgow at the time was basically 2,000 and then fucking 13,000. There was no in-between!
“I think we had a bit of a loss of momentum after it because us, our team, our label, our agent, our fans, the industry at large… Everyone was just like, ‘How did this band even do that? What do they do next?’ We never had visions of being an arena band. Our biggest-ever headline show was this huge celebration and achievement, but then afterwards there was almost this nuclear fallout, post-apocalyptic feeling of, ‘How the fuck do you follow that?’ In a weird way, we’re probably still wrestling with that now, and it was about ten years ago.”
The weirdest
“It was probably in Bend, Oregon. We’d been hammering North American touring for about three or four years, doing this big radio push around ‘Heart And Soul’. We went to Bend because that was where this local radio station was based, and when we arrived at the venue we were like, ‘Is this even a venue? This feels like a cafeteria.’ We loaded in, and everything was set up on the floor. Then we went into the dressing room, and it had all this psychedelic stoner-hippie stuff everywhere, like they’d tried to make it look like a band’s dressing room.
“The more we looked around though, we realised it was just the office of the guy who ran the bar. He started bringing out all these porno films and going, ‘You guys want to watch some fucking porn with me?!’ He had these big inflatable dicks, and he was giving us shots. There was all this triple-X-rated stuff everywhere, and then he was trying to get drugs in for us. We were like, ‘Okay, this guy is just living out his fantasy of being in a band.’
“The whole time we were in the States, that was where I honed my craft for dealing with people heckling or shouting things between songs. You’d get people shouting Braveheart quotes and shit like that, so people trying to get involved became part of the show.
Photo by Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage
“We went onstage in Bend and, bizarrely, the show was going really well considering we were some band from Scotland playing this weird middle-of-nowhere place. There was this one guy who kept getting closer and closer though. Because there wasn’t really a stage, he basically stepped forward and shoulder-barged his way in. He said something into the microphone, but no one really got it, so the crowd started booing him. He walked through everybody, and people were parting because they could tell he was off his face. Then he punched his girlfriend square in the face, and she just dropped into the crowd. We all lunged forward to try to get him the fuck out of there, because there was no security. I think we’d only played about four songs, and we were meant to play for an hour. Our tour manager bundled us into the porno office at the back, and the whole thing just had this gut-wrenching, sickening feeling.
“We’ve done plenty of other strange ones too. When we launched ‘Vivarium’, we played in this huge glass atrium greenhouse thing in Glasgow, and you couldn’t hear anything because all the sound was bouncing around. We did the odd Red Bull thing when we were signed to them back in the day as well. We quite liked those because they involved amazing hotels and we got treated incredibly well. Once we got picked up from Berlin Airport in black stretch limos with little Red Bull presidential flags on the front, then driven through Berlin to this old airport hangar where we played on top of a bus… We’ve done all kinds of mad shit.”
The worst
“There was a three or four-year period where we absolutely hammered touring in North America. Part of that was this big radio push because ‘Heart And Soul’ was doing really well in the UK and Europe and getting played a lot on radio in the States and Canada. Some of those radio shows were excellent. We turned up to one in Toronto and there were about 400 people there, sold out, all through the radio station promotion. At those shows, it feels like all this effort is worth something, and you’re getting new fans at the shows.
“Then, there was St. Louis. As we were pulling into the city, there was this massive digital billboard beside the baseball stadium. At the time, St. Louis were the World Series champions, so the city was flying. The billboard had something like Kings Of Leon playing the arena, then it flipped over and suddenly it was us. We were fucking skyscraper-sized on the side of the main highway. We were playing so many shows at the time that we weren’t really aware of the venue size, especially with these radio shows, but we turned up and it was about a 1,200-capacity room. We were like, ‘This song must be getting hammered here!’
“We went into celebration mode the night before and went to a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. This crazy rich American dude beside us just kept buying round after round after round, so we all got wrecked. The next day we were unbelievably hungover. We were staying in this elite five-star hotel, and we probably should have seen the warning signs.
“We turned up and the only people who came were our crew and the guy who’d been buying us beers the night before, because we’d told him we were playing. It was a 1,200-capacity room, and we played to about four people. I was so hungover I could barely see, never mind sing or talk. I’m pretty sure Ross had been throwing up all day. We had these insane hangovers, and then we were met with that show.”
The best
“We headlined the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury, so that’s up there. Reading could be one too. We have this strange connection with Reading Festival that still doesn’t really make sense to me. You would think Leeds might have more of that connection with us because it’s northern and we’re from Scotland, but for some reason it’s Reading.
“There are so many to choose from, but I really liked our last show in London at Islington [Assembly Hall]. We played for about two hours and 45 minutes in total, so we were basically our own support band. We came out and played our first release, ‘Vivarium’, from start to finish, including songs that we hadn’t played in London for about 15 years, maybe longer. Then we went off, came back on and played ‘Great Divide’ from start to finish, followed by our fan-favourite live songs. That was pretty amazing because it felt like more than a gig. It was a celebration, and an achievement to even play for that long.”
Twin Atlantic play Leeds, Birmingham, Glasgow and Dundee this October. Find tickets here
Header photo by Katja Ogrin/Redferns
