MacD on Music: Woke Up This Morning, Got Yourself A Gun

Depending on your tastes, today’s headline will either remind you of a song by Nas or one of the most iconic opening title sequences of all time.

This week’s interview comes direct from London via Alabama. Much like with Rock For Choice, the subject of this week’s column can be found currently in the window of Sandino’s.

Currently residing in that esteemed window is the poster for the upcoming concert from Alabama 3, playing an acoustic set upstairs on the 28th October. Ahead of the gig, I got a chance to talk to Rob Spragg, aka Larry Love, frontman of the group, and we discussed, among other things, his thoughts on playing Derry for the first time and the story of that title scene.

Our first point of conversation centred on Rob’s history with Ireland. Prior to that…event in March 2020, he tells me, the group would play Ireland a lot. In fact, Ireland was the Alabama 3’s first non-UK tour.

Most recently, he says, they played a full-band set in Dublin this past March. We spoke of the difference between acoustic and electric gigs (for the band, not just in general). Rob describes the electric sets as “more full on” compared to the much more intimate acoustic shows.

He says that the Irish gigs, in particular, are “carnage”. With the acoustic sets, though, he told me about how it allows the crowd to get a lot closer to the group, something a lot of us will get to experience first hand at the end of the month.
Our next topic was one that is undoubtedly on a lot of people’s minds as they read this: his opinion on Nas sampling his song on Stillmatic. What? It’s not? Okay. Let’s move on to the Sopranos then.

I asked Rob how the now-legendary sequence came about. He told me that David Chase (the behind the show, and man with obviously excellent musical taste), was driving along the New Jersey freeway (sound familiar?) when he heard ‘Woke Up This Morning’ come on the radio.

The group, then signed to Geffen Records (one-time home of, among others, John Lennon, Guns’n’Roses and Cher) was approached and the rest, as they say, is history. I, of course, asked Rob his thoughts on the show and learned a truth that shocked me to my very core: he has, in fact, never watched the show! (Although he has seen the Many Saints of Newark). His reason, he told me, was that he didn’t want to hear his own voice in every episode. Understandable.

As someone who hates the way they sound on tape, I know the feeling. He has, however, met all of the cast of the show at a convention.

Asked about how he feels about his most famous song, he tells me he is “very proud”. The Sopranos is a show that has crossed generations. It’s just as popular now as when it first premiered over twenty years ago.

Over the past few years, in particular, the show has found a newfound popularity, when people couldn’t leave their house for one reason or another (let’s be honest, it was just one reason).

The constant stream of people discovering the show has, I’m sure, led to more and more people finding the music of Alabama 3 (and Johnny Thunders, Heart, the Police, Nick Lowe, the Rolling Stones, Nancy Sinatra, the Kinks, Simon and Garfunkel…I could go on all day. Let’s just accept that the show had incredible music and get back to the conversation).

Considering the unique sound of the Alabama 3’s music, I asked Rob about his own musical influences.

Unsurprisingly, it was a very mixed set of names, including Joy Division, Wu-Tang Clan, Johnny Cash and a healthy dose of “cigarettes, whiskey and wild, wild women”.

He tells me this comes from growing up in a “multicultural community in Brixton”. As someone with a…varied taste in music themselves, this is something I can appreciate (I shared the story of how, last year, I bought both Taylor Swift’s ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Body Count’s ‘Bloodlust’ at the same time).

This range of influences comes across in the Alabama 3’s music. According to one review of their first album, ‘Exile on Coldharbour Lane’, their sound owed “huge debts to both Hank Williams and Happy Mondays”.

Anyway, I could be here all day, but I’ve only got so much space so I’d better get to the other business. Today sees the release of Adam Leonard’s album ‘Octopus Part 10’. Adam is a member of Invaderband and hopefully will feature in this column next week. The album can be found on his official Bandcamp page.

Alabama 3 play Sandino’s on 28th October. They can be found on Instagram @alabama3official.