3 Daft Monkeys make a date with this year’s Southdowns Music Festival in Bognor Regis

SussexWorld

The pandemic was a horrible time for everyone, but 3 Daft Monkeys emerged from it bigger and better than ever, says Tim Ashton, vocals, 12-string guitar and penny whistle. They play this year’s Southdowns Music Festival in Bognor Regis on September 22 on the back of their new release 21 Years Wild... Live!

Transcript

00:00 Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Now the

00:05 South Downs Music Festival is always one of the great events of the autumn in the area

00:09 in Bognor Regis, mid-September, and great to say Three Dwarf Monkeys are one of the

00:14 bands coming to the festival, which this year is taking place without the main venue, the

00:19 Regis Centre, but they've adapted. And Tim, you're going to be there.

00:23 We are going to be there.

00:24 It's on the back of a new album.

00:26 On the back of our new live album, yes. And we're going to be doing some new songs as

00:30 well from the next album. We're going to do a crowd funder in the next couple of months

00:36 to fund our new album, and we've got a good number of songs. It's hard to know how many

00:41 new songs to do in a show because people like the old stuff as well. So we're going to put

00:46 a handful of brand new songs in the show as well, so that's quite exciting.

00:50 That must be one of the tricky things really about live performance, because I think most

00:53 people do go along to hear the familiar things, don't they?

00:57 Well, exactly. It is a balancing act, but you sort of get a... I always write a setlist

01:02 before we do a show, and we try and stick to it, but you get a feel for the audience

01:08 when the first few songs, and you sort of know which way to take them.

01:12 You're doing it on the hoof then?

01:15 Yeah, yeah. So if they're going to be up for some more new stuff, I'll completely look

01:20 down at the floor, look at my setlist and go, "Actually, no, let's do something else."

01:23 And the rest of the band are well with that, you know, as long as I tell them what we're

01:26 doing before we start the song, they seem to be quite happy with it.

01:30 They go along with it. And when might the new album be out?

01:34 Well we're hoping to record in the wintertime, so it'll be out next spring, hopefully, April.

01:40 But in the meantime, this album in Bogner is on the back of the new live album, which

01:44 has got quite a history and was checkered by the pandemic.

01:48 Yeah, well we don't like to talk too much about the pandemic, but we were supposed to

01:54 be doing our 20 years live in the April of 2020, was it? I think it was, wasn't it?

02:01 2020, 21, I can't remember now, I've forgotten. Anyway, but yeah, that all got cancelled.

02:06 We had a big show lined up, we had John from the Levelers coming, we had guest musicians,

02:10 we had it all sorted out. We had a brass section and a string section, and then it all got

02:15 cancelled. So we had to move the show a couple of times, and we did it last December with

02:22 a string section this time. We didn't get the brass in because they were booked elsewhere,

02:27 but it's still a beautiful, beautiful album. And it was actually chosen by our fan base,

02:32 they chose the setlist of all our previous songs. We've got eight studio albums out already

02:39 previous to that, and we said, "Look, what songs would you like to hear?" And the beautiful

02:44 thing was that at least one or two songs made it onto the setlist from each album we've

02:49 ever done, from Year Dot to...

02:51 Wow. Well, that shows the evenness of your qualities.

02:54 Well, yeah, that really blew us away that at least one or two, well, two, I think, two

02:59 of two, yeah, from each had made it onto the setlist.

03:03 But you're saying the lovely thing about the live album is that you can sense, you can

03:07 hear in that live album, the relief and the excitement from you as a band just getting

03:11 back out there, but equally so from the audience.

03:14 Yeah, yeah. We'd done one show, one big show previously to that, which was a couple of

03:18 weeks before, which we did at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, which is an outdoor theatre,

03:23 absolutely gorgeous. We sold that one out, and it was an outdoor, so people felt really,

03:28 really safe because they were creeping back out into society, and they were all sort of...

03:35 It's all very sort of nice, but it was a non-dancing affair because it's on a very steep slope

03:41 with the city and all things. So that was really nice. We recorded that as well. We've

03:46 got a DVD of that. And then we did this indoor show, but the excitement and the thrill of

03:54 everyone being back together, and there's people coming from Scotland, there's people

03:58 come over from Holland, there's people from France. It was just an amazing meeting of

04:02 the tribe.

04:03 It's great to have captured that then, isn't it?

04:05 Yeah, and you really feel it. It makes you tingle to listen to it.

04:09 So you're on good form as you head to Bognor then?

04:12 We're having a great time, actually. This year, we didn't really know how it was going

04:17 to go because we got the new live album out. We thought, "Oh, I haven't got a studio album."

04:22 So we didn't get the big PR push that we sometimes pay a PR company to help us sort of... But

04:27 we didn't do that this time because we were sort of feeling our feet again after two years

04:32 of not gigging. And we've been getting shows and offers, and we've done 25 festival appearances

04:43 this summer alone from May to now. We've been out in Europe doing stuff, and it's just snowballed

04:48 into this... Without us actually searching for too much at all, this is all stuff that's

04:53 come to us, which is really, really good for a band. It's really good for morale, really.

04:57 It's really good for the idea of combination of being so well-established, but also the

05:01 pent-up frustration of the...

05:03 Yeah, yeah. People just wanting to... Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

05:07 Well, really lovely to speak to you. Good luck with everything.

05:10 Thank you.

05:11 And look forward to seeing you in Bognor.

05:12 Oh, we can't wait. We can't wait to come back to Bognor.

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