Alpha Male Tea Party aren’t your average instrumental band. On stage, there’s a sense of fun and abandon that you don’t get with other math-orientated acts. Not that they’re to be taken lightly. On their latest album, Health, the Liverpudlian three-piece deal with some heavy issues, all without uttering a word. We sat down with them at ArcTanGent Festival to discuss drum ‘n’ bass, Prosecco, and the difficulties faced when trying to get an old person to represent death on your album cover.
ArcTanGent is usually a great festival for bands like Alpha Male Tea Party to play. How did you feel the set went down?
Ben Griffiths (Bass/Vocals): It was fabulous. ArcTanGent is always really nice.
Greg Chapman (Drums/Percussion/Vocals/Piano): When we come here, it feels like we’re coming home.
I feel like the good thing about ArcTanGent is it gathers all the people that are into your kind of music and puts them in one place…
Tom Peters (Guitar/Vocals/Piano): Oh definitely, I think that’s the most special thing about ArcTanGent. Although it does give us a slightly false idea of how popular we are!
Ben: I go home and I stride around the place. “Don’t you know I played to three-thousand people the other day!”
I just wanted to ask you about the album art for Health, because it’s quite a surreal image. What’s the meaning behind the artwork?
Greg: It was originally meant to be a museum shot with a pregnant woman in it, but also an elderly couple, to signify birth and death. Let me explain why that changed. We were thinking, “who’s grandmother and who’s grandad can we use, and how do we break it to them that they resemble death?”. So, we ended up saying, “let’s just go with the new life thing, and the death thing can be the heart”.
Tom: It was also the classic Alpha Male Tea Party thing of “what have we got to work with?”. But I think it turned out brilliantly, and we’re really proud of it.
Given that you’re an instrumental band, do you write songs with a specific meaning, or do you just go with what sounds right?
Greg: The thing is with instrumental music, we don’t just want to be one of these instrumental bands that writes ten tunes that don’t have a thematic link from one to the other. Like the previous album, Droids, was about leading a monotonous life. Health kind of has a deeper meaning to all three of us, and we kind of wanted to be able to project it through the artwork, or the song titles.
Tom: With the writing structure, its more about an emotional response to what we’re doing. When we’re writing stuff, it’s about how it makes us feel when we come up with the idea. ‘Carpet Diem’ is a really good point personally. When we wrote that, it was after the drum ‘n’ bass Prosecco night…
Can you explain what the “drum ‘n’ bass Prosecco night” is? Just for our readers…
Tom: So anyway, some context for you. I work in a recording studio, that also has a venue upstairs. Me and Ben thought that we’d do some writing and pre-production the day before we started recording. We thought we’d try and do something a bit different. So, we ended up writing this absolutely absurd, drum ‘n’ bass, Skrillex, dubstep nonsense.
Afterwards we ended up drinking these two and half bottles of Prosecco, and we ended up going out in my home town to these mad, bizarre pubs. We ended up really drunk, and in a local village called Waddington, and then we walked home to my house, while the sun was coming up. The next day we were so hungover, but we were working on this idea on a baritone guitar, which we all knew was shit, but we were doing it anyway just so we could get something done. But then out of nowhere, this thing just came out, which ended up being the last point on ‘Carpet Diem’.
The best thing about it was it just made me think, “this absolutely typifies how I feel at this very moment”. It’s probably the most potent bit of songwriting on Health, for me, because I felt like absolute death, and it has this sort on infused melancholy written into it. So that’s just it: it’s about feel and mood. Because some of the earlier songs were much more positive, like ‘Nobody Had The Heart To Tell Him That He Was On Fire’, because we were in a really positive space, going back to writing and recording music again. But then lots of really bad shit happened, so the album took a much darker turn than we intended.
Would you mind sharing what happened to you around that time?
Tom: Well, for me, it was Dan from Cleft, who’s like my best friend, who’s been really sick. My mum has been sick too, and we’ve all kind of just had shit going on.
Ben: I was about to have a child and I was terrified. Turns out its way easier than you’d think!
So can you tell me about the song titles on Health? Because some of them are kind of bizarre…
Greg: Well, ‘Have You Ever Seen Milk’ is a very, very, very vague reference to anal sex…
How so?
Greg: We can’t really go into it…
Tom: We kind of promised ourselves that we’d never talk about it, but we’ve ended up talking about it relentlessly!
What about ‘Carpet Diem’?
Ben: It was something that I came up with on the toilet. A lot of the song titles are just jokes, which makes us sound like a joke band, but I think on this record in particular, we just use humour to process things that are happening.
Even your band name is kind of humorous. How did you come up with Alpha Male Tea Party?
Tom: We just kind of wanted to create a juxtaposition to show how ridiculous alpha-maleism is as a concept. Poisonous masculinity and all that shit. Some people get that and some people don’t, which is fine because everything is open and free to interpretation.
You mentioned earlier that Dan from Cleft was not very well. Is there any way our readers can help?
Tom: There already a lot of amazing things that have been done to help him, so I’d advise keeping your eyes out for more. There also a justgiving page that’s been set up that you can donate to.
Finally, what are Alpha Male Tea Party going to be up to in the near future?
Ben: We’ve got a few UK dates coming up, and we’re playing a couple of festivals. Greg’s getting married…
Greg: A lot of people are saying “why doesn’t your band play for us?”, and I’m like “you have no idea aunty Julie!”.
Ben: We’re planning a European tour for next year. With the whole Dan situation, we’ve been contacted about doing certain shows, so do keep an eye out for them.
Tom: Basically, there’s going to be a lot of gigs from Alpha Male Tea Party coming soon.
Ben: Stay tuned, folks!
Just a reminder that you can give to Dan’s justgiving page here. For all the news on Alpha Male Tea Party, click here.
