Holy Moly and the Crackers at CHRISTMAS

We are delighted to welcome back Holy Moly and the Crackers after their amazing sell out gig earlier in 2019. If you saw them last time round you won't want to miss this special Christmas show which is sure to kick off your Christmas week in some style and put a huge smile on your face.

Holy Moly & The Crackers make riotous party music for the masses. Their latest album, Take A Bite, is concise, passionate take on folk, blues and indie rock. The sound of a band who have been searching and experimenting for several years; arriving at a place where they can say “this who we are and this is where we want to go”.

Formed in Newcastle in 2011, the group began as little more than a laugh, an excuse to busk through some foot-stomping folk pop. They developed from a four piece to a six piece, with Ruth Patterson on vocals/fiddle, Conrad Bird on vocals/guitar/trumpet, Rosie Bristow on accordion, Nick Tyler on electric guitar, Jamie Shields on bass and Tommy Evans on drums/backing vocals. “When we started we were a real ragtag folk band,” Conrad says. “We want to tell a different story now.”

To that end, while the violin and the accordion remain, the whole thing feels rawer now. Riff-heavy, even. With melodic choruses more in the vein of American rockers such as The Black Keys and Jack White, than the tweed and waistcoats of traditional UK folk. It reflects the diverse tastes of a band, comprised of six friends with six individual music tastes, who come together to make a sound greater than the sum of its parts. “We’ve kept an element of the folk side but just kind of fused it together,” Ruth explains. “We all listen to each other, we all share stuff, but the music’s less about storytelling in the folk tradition now. It’s more observational. More about real experiences.”

A turning point came when the band first met producer Matt Terry (Ocean Colour Scene/The Prodigy/The Enemy). “We’d started listening to things like The Gossip and Jack White and thought, this is really cool but we don’t know if it relates to us,” Conrad says. “Matt started saying, okay, I really want to make this type of music with you. This is how you do it.”

Decamping, for a month, to the historic VADA Studios on the Warwickshire/Worcestershire border, the band recorded their 2017 album Salem. A record influenced by an eclectic range of folk and popular music, it showed the band heading in a heavier, crunchier direction, with barnstorming lead single, Cold Comfort Lane, finding significant sync success, most notably over the end credits of 2018 summer blockbuster Oceans 8. “I think that opened things up for us,” Ruth says. “It was like, okay, they’re not just a band having a laugh. It gave us a bit more weight in a commercial sense.”

The traction meant that the band were able to tour the UK twice, taking their party-like live show to venues up and down the country, as well as making successful debuts in France, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands. "For us, everything we do is to feed the live show,” Conrad says. And the success continued on the festival circuit, playing over 30 in 2018, including an acclaimed spot at Glastonbury.

“All roads lead to the stage,” Conrad continues. “The arguing, the loving, the making, the listening – it boils down into one manic, riotous party. That's where we connect with the audience and with each other and that’s what we're all about." It’s an all-systems-go mentality. One that fed directly into the recording of Salem’s follow up, Take A Bite – released via their own label, Pink Lane Records, in April 2019.

“I think we’ve had two weekends off this year!” Conrad says. “When we got to June we were like, oh, shit, we’ve got an album to write! But because we’d been thinking about it for so long, it just kind of came out quite quickly. It became a real fun, natural process.”

Whereas previous writing duties had been shared, primarily, between Ruth and Conrad, for Take A Bite, the band made a conscious effort to open up the writing process to collaboration. “At the beginning of the year, we said that we want everyone to come up with ideas,” Ruth describes. “Even if someone was on the bus and had an idea they could send it over. So over six months, we just compiled all these different parts: bass riffs, psychedelic chord progressions. And then we pieced it all together.”

It was a process marked by a shift in recording technique too. “For this album, we did it song by song,” Conrad explains. “Usually, you’ll record all the drum tracks and then all the bass tracks. But this time we recorded one song at a time and completely lived it,” The band even went one step further during the recording of the Byrds-influenced, folk-rock Can’t Get Enough, with producer Matt creating an immersive 60s experience in the studio. “Matt’s a mad bastard, and for that one he made us dress up in 60s clothes, bandanas, suits, flares,” Conrad laughs. “And it was really silly, but it really got us to live it.”

The first taste listeners will be treated to arrives in the form of euphoric lead single, All I Got Is You. Combining deft pop song craft with a stomping, four to the floor backing, it demonstrates the band’s commerciality and ambition, as well as their ability to tackle personal lyrical fare in a two-minute pop song. “Before we made this album, I remember we were sitting in our kitchen and Ruth said to me, look, whatever we write, it needs to feel authentic,” Conrad describes. “As the singer, she needs to believe what she’s singing. And I don’t think that has always been the case in the past. So that was a real aim with this album. And because it’s authentic, hopefully it will relate the listeners. Whether it’s being angry, or in love, or losing someone.”

“This album is asking the audience to take a chance on us,” Ruth continues. “Obviously we’ve got a bit of a daft name and we look a bit mad, but I think once people actually come to a gig, they’re always pleasantly surprised. We get kids, old people, Goths, hippies, whatever. Everyone’s invited, everyone’s part of it. And people seem to lose themselves. No one’s like, “Oh, how do I look?’ while dancing. They don’t care. It brings everyone together.”

It’s a refreshing kind of inclusivity. One that you can imagine comes, in part, from Ruth’s powerful position as a disabled front person. “I’m a wheelchair user,” she says. “And I think that’s something that always hits people. I think it’s where some of the closeness of the band comes from too, like some crazy dysfunctional family, zooming about Europe. Because it’s difficult to tour, there are hardly any accessible venues. So I think it comes across how much we look after each other.

“I’m sometimes quite shy, but I really come alive on stage, because it’s the one time I’m in control,” she says. “I’m leading the party. And I think that’s quite powerful as a wheelchair user.”

It’s not really something Ruth’s spoken about in the context of the band before. But the fact that she feels able to now speaks volumes about where the group is at: making their most authentic music in years, at a place where they finally feel able to be their most authentic selves.

“I genuinely believe that this album is really good,” Ruth says. “And I’ve never felt like that before. It’s nice to be able to say we feel confident that this speaks for itself, so therefore we can talk about other things.”

“We’ve not by any means finished our journey,” Conrad continues. “But we’ve arrived at a place here, with this album, where we can start the journey that we want to be on. This is who we are now; this is what we’re doing.”

He pauses. “You just have to take a bite.”