We spoke with Nick, The Fang, Smyth lead singer and guitarist of folk punk legends The Dreadnoughts about music, festivals, and cider just before their June 2023 UK Tour.
Tim: Hi, Do you prefer to be called Nick or Fang?
Nick:. Nicks fine.
Tim: Okay. Well, first of all, it’s an absolute pleasure to be speaking to you. I’ve listened to the Dreadnoughts since 2014 and, I’m really excited about your coming up English tour. You’re quite brave saying you’re going to Welsh England.
N: Yeah, that’s fun, The Welsh are a little sensitive about that. So we like to poke them, just a little bit, see if we can get any responses. And sure enough, there was someone on the Facebook post, like so yeah, so that was, that was something else that was like, yeah, it was just fun. It’s just good fun. You know, and, you know, obviously, you know, there’s the whole colonial empire thing that England still dealing with and sorting out and I get that I do.
T: A lot of your music really touches on it. Like Roll Northumbria.
N: yeah, yeah, that’s right. And obviously, like, for real, no one’s like, we’re not like hurray for the empire or anything. But it does set up some opportunities to tease people. You know, with Wales, what was that, like 700 years ago or something? Like, come on?
T: I mean, you can argue they’ve done much more colonialism than they’ve been subjected to.
N: Right, right exactly, So hey, thanks for the help. Appreciate it.
T: So going forward, when was the last time you were in the UK?
N: I forget. I believe it was last year. Yeah, it was a lot. It must have been last summer because we tried to go every year. Oh, right. Because we were right outside or so would have been August of last year.
T: That makes sense. Yeah. It was Kev from Fueled by Cider who put us in contact. Do you know them particularly well?
N: Yes, it was years ago, we did our first English tour. Surfin’ Turnips in Bristol and Kev was the guy whose house we were supposed to stay at. They hadn’t even started fueled by Cider yet. This is 2009 and, so uh like ancient history now. But they just you know, he hadn’t tried to start some cidery band himself or anything yet. And so we just saved that place and fell in love with the guys and the whole crew, and watched as their business kinda blossomed to a sorta band, festival extraordinaire. Now they’re putting on all these festivals every year. So we try to go over and make sure we get to at least one a year because there’s so much fun. When we live in a country I do America, where a festival is a parking lot with the Foo Fighters in it, you know, it’s like, here’s a giant parking lot and there are the Foo Fighters, 500 feet away. Try not to get stabbed.
T: That leads me to something. Do you think there’s a big difference in the festival culture between the UK and the States and Canada?
N: Oh, it’s massive. It’s, I mean, obviously, you guys share that with a lot of mainland Europe, too. There’s like, there’s this real rooted thing, young people get involved from a very young age, even kids, you know, will be taken to these big fields. There’s a bunch of green space and, you know, local vendors and all these kinds of things, the ones I’ve been to are very friendly, very family friendly.
There are big giant festivals that are a little tough to navigate everywhere. But you know, in the States there’s and in Canada to a certain extent, (Small festivals are just not as part of the culture. It’s not something children do. because as they grow up, it’s not something we teach kids about. And then in America, particularly the drinking age, really destroys these eventsbecause you have massive amounts of security just to have an alcohol license at your festival. And, that really puts an arrow into a lot of potential music festivals. Yeah. So I mean, you know, better than I do, but I imagine there are massive advantages to holding festivals in a place where there’s a little bit more of a friendly culture around it.
T: Yeah, the attitude to drinking in the UK makes this a lot easier because you often get a whole crowd of 16-year-olds who are smashed on cider and most people at the event don’t really care.
N: Yeah, and it’s kind of part of it. And, you know, you can talk about, you know, like, obviously, there should be, people should be careful, and all that stuff. And if you got kids, you watch them. But exactly, that’s, that’s a big, big plus. Whereas again, that’s when you have to be 21, for alcohol to touch your lips in this country, which is, as far as I can tell, completely uncivilised and what it leads to is binge drinking among, you know, 16 to 21-year-olds, who as soon as they can get their hands on something, they go absolutely crazy with it. And they die, they literally die from it, and at higher rates here than they do in Europe and UK. And so, whereas you guys have this kind of again, you sort of ease people into it.
T: Dad gave me a pint with a football game when I was 12. It’s just how it starts, you learn to drink and you get good at it. And you see you’re mates throwing up in the park and you decide that’s not going to be you.
N: So for festivals, and again for music in general. It’s a huge, huge plus. I’m starting a US-based version of The Dreadnaughts here in New York, and we’re finding booking concerts, it’s like you have to tell 20-year-olds, they can’t come to your show. 20-year-olds can’t come to the show! They’re 20 they could have been in Afghanistan for three years getting shot at and they can’t come to your show. That’s how crazy it is. It’s like, I mean, I’m sure there are tonnes of fake ids and people just figure it out. But it’s just like this Puritan thing that the US had really messed it up.
T: Is it better in Canada?
N: Well, Canada is interesting, because there’s there’s actually quite a lot more friendly festivals in Canada, I believe. But that’s because there are fewer people, fewer big giant urban areas, there’s more green space that’s preserved, where people live, and not everything that’s been converted into a strip mall. So So yeah, the US has its benefits, but I think Canada has retained a little more of that sort of friendly feel, as you might imagine, that’s kind of what we’re famous for. So yeah, you do get them but, again, it’s not something children are raised with, in Canada, it’s not something you necessarily, you know, grow up with.
T: Okay, so on a similar note, one reason I know you guys love the UK is the cider. Do you have a particular favourite?
N: Oh boy yeah, I mean, this is, it’s tough to again to live on this side of the pond because people ask me about cider and I sound like the biggest snob in the entire world because they ended up saying “oh, what can I get you? I hear you like cider” and I’m like “Nothing.” “You can’t get me anything, there’s nothing you can get me, they don’t grow the right kinds of trees here, and if they do they don’t grow the right way as you know they do in the old country.”
So I sound like the biggest snob in the world because which I am because it’s just it’s not that amazing. If it’s not Dorset or Somerset stuff I just don’t like it. There are a lot of small producers out there who make some amazing stuff. Hertfordshire is really good too. We have a few bottles still left here but like it’s the Brits don’t realise how lucky they are. They have this incredible stuff. You can buy in the grocery store. You can buy it in Aldi you know. You can get on a farm and some guy’s got a shed and a big jug from the vat. It’s just this incredible culture all over the Southwest. And I find that to be, again, it’s one of those, those things that you might take for granted a little bit, but it does, it makes this incredible cider taste and it just changed my life. So I’ve never looked back.
T: I’m surprised you aren’t importing this stuff.
N: It’s very difficult to actually it turns out. Yeah, tariffs and farmhouse stuff in particular needs to be pasteurised if it’s going to make it across the ocean. I had a friend who unwisely had some Wilkin’s farmhouse ciders smuggled in a bag to Indiana because he was so excited about it. I don’t know how it didn’t explode in the bag first off, but I guess it didn’t. He said he made a video of himself and everything was he was so excited, he’d heard our band singing about it for like 10 years and then he drank it and said, “This tastes like stale feet”. And I was like, “What did you get?” And he’s like, “I got it from Wilkin’s cider.” And I’m like, “Oh, man, that’s not, that’s just straight out of the vat. It’s still fermenting! Like, it’s going bad as you drink it. You have to like, you have to be there.”
And that, again, that is another huge thing about this festival. Cidery festival culture is that like, local producers will bring stuff that they just made. And everyone talks about how the apples were this year, and which varieties they used. And they had cool names for each of them. Yeah, so there are a lot of great one. Cranborne Chase is amazing.
T: They’re sponsoring the festival aren’t they, Cursus.
N: Yeah, so that’s where Cursus is being held and Cranbourne Chase is award-winning for a reason. They just have spectacular stuff.
T: I’m looking forward to trying it.
N: Yeah, something else, man. But anyway, yeah, you. You’re, you’re in it for a good year for a treat.
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T: So that leads me on, what’s your favourite UK festival?
N: Oh, gosh. We haven’t played very many, to be honest with you.
T: Oh, well, you need to try some more.
N: I know there’s so incredible. Obviously Outcider every year is fantastic. They have just the right vibe. You know, it’s like 500 to 700 people. It’s not a huge thing you can get around, it’s all very local. There’s a lot of like, the music they get is spectacular every year. I mean, it’s Outciders where I’ve had the most fun, but that’s because that’s where my friends are.
T: Have you been to Boomtown?
N: Yes. Well, you know, we had some positive and negative experiences with Boomtown, it is so huge in a way that for a band, it can be kind of a difficult thing to get in and out. To find where you know where you’re sleeping that night, it’s, it’s actually really, really hard to run a festival of that size, I would say the bad about the organisers, but we’ve definitely the size of it. Combined with you know, sometimes you can have weather events, and then they’ll put you on at 3 am you can get kind of insane. You don’t want to show up to a festival at three, drink for 12 hours and play at three in the morning like.
T: Back when you started maybe.
N: It’s really cool. I mean, I love wandering around Boomtown. As you know, what they do with that area is, I mean, I don’t know what else there is in the world like it, but I’m not a festival expert. So there must be a few I guess. I’ve never
T: I’ve never seen anything that combines the scale with the level of art. So your last album, it’s got a bit of an English folk feel to it.
N: Ah yes. Right. Yeah.
T: I really, really liked it. Is there? Did you think consciously to do that before you wrote it? Or was it like, something that developed as it happened?
N: Yeah, no, absolutely (it was planned).
It’s really funny because it’s almost like the genre we were in when we started when we started with, you know, being inspired by say the Pouges and flogging Molly and all that stuff. The genre was called Irish punk or Celtic punk or whatever. It’s relationship with England is really weird and antagonistic, because they, you know, the whole image of the thing is built on like Irish rebel music and all this stuff. That’s really historically very important. I have Irish family members, so I mean, I get it, but there’s a tonne of English influence on those groups.
So the Pogue’s, for example, were mostly English, almost all of them were from England. And they played, you know, a lot of material that was inspired by Steeleye span. One of the members was actually in Steeleye Span for a little bit. Like it’s this is there’s a huge, huge amount of crossover between England and Ireland, England and Scotland, like all this traditional music goes in both directions. But if you start playing it, you know, with some of the guys that I’ve toured with, they’re like, What is this shit? You know, put the Dubliners back on and it’s just kind of like it’s really this weird Irish chauvinism and let’s be real. These are guys who were born in, like, Winnipeg, Canada.
T: So they’re plastic paddies.
N: Plastic paddies exactly. And I think people who live where you live, have a better understanding of how the cultures do kind of meld together. if you’re travelling, you know a very far-off country and you meet an Irish person, there’s a lot you can talk about and bond over.
T: It’s essentially like meeting another Brit, we’ve got so many Irish people over here coming back and forth. It’s just, yeah, it’s it’s just like that. It’s very much like someone from parts of the country that’s independent. Which they’d hate me saying that, but.
N: No, but it’s partly true. It’s because there’s some truth to it. So I started doing things like wearing the Union Jack at shows on St. Patrick’s Day shows to piss the audience off, because I was like, Well, this is gonna piss you off but we’re a punk band so we’re supposed to piss you plastic paddy’s off. Like you’re not even from Ireland, why are you mad that I’m waving this flag around?
On our first English tour, we meet Kev and Fueled by Cider crew. We meet the surfing turnips, we meet like all these guys in Bristol and all the fans. You know, England has this weird image worldwide, this colonial thing we talked about earlier, but the actual ordinary people can be extremely forward thinking nice, really sweet, really community-oriented people. Like you realise the image of the country has worldwide doesn’t reflect the ordinary person very well. And then there’s all these arguments about Brexit and everything. But I mean, it’s just like, it’s such a sweet place to be for me. So it became my favourite destination. I’ve tried to move there a couple of times, unsuccessfully.
And so then the folk. When I wanted to put a traditional album together, I just looked at the music that isn’t represented in our genre at all and it’s english folk. People are doing sort of Eastern European stuff. Gorgol Bordello’s had the line on that for 20 years now, The Real McKenzie have the Scottish thing down, and Flogging Molly’s got the Irish thing already done and dusted. It’s basically over. There’s no one else doing that as well as they did. So what’s left? No one’s doing straight old school English folk, but like pumping it up. I mean, some bands in England are, but you know what I mean? We’re trying to join that group. And I think it’s really important because people gotta realise that the English tradition is just as rich as all the other ones. It’s just that you’re not, it’s not trendy or cool. And no one’s gonna build a pub in Philadelphia, called like, I don’t know, Dan’s English Pub. It’s always gonna be Paddy’s Irish Pub. And that’s sad in a way, so it was definitely intentional putting all those songs on the album.
T: Yeah. So Twankidillo?
N: Yeah that one.
T: I love it. But on the first listen, it was a lot going on.
N: Yeah like what the fuck.
T: Well done. It’s brilliant. 10 out of 10. But…
N: Oh, well. You don’t have to love it. But it is like a Maypole dance song. You know, it’s like a 17th century fucking, Like, childish dance around the pole kind of thing. Like, straight out of the English dance tradition. It doesn’t make any sense and what the hell is it even about? But I have always loved it. And I just, you know, again, I heard I heard Maddie Prior do it and I just thought well, you could pump that up and we had our wonderful Fiddler Stef sing high harmonies, we finally got like female high harmonies on an album for the first time ever. And I just like just Yeah, that’s one of my favourite sounds but I can imagine to someone from your side again, you’re in England, it sort of sounds a bit like “Oh God, what are they doing?”
T: I suppose the weirdness isn’t so weird when you haven’t heard it before. But like?
N: Yeah, what is it even about?
T: I’ve figured that. I think it that is definitely about a blacksmith who’s probably a Republican.
N: I also think it’s sexual I really do. Again, Jamie from the Surfin’ Turnips always tells me that a lot of old lyrics are in English folk are hidden, there like like cockney rhyming slang, kind of like there are hidden references to things that you wouldn’t necessarily know. It’s one of my theories, but it won’t be playing it live unfortunately, it’s way too complicated,
T: Having not seen you play before, I almost don’t mind because, quite frankly, I want to see all of your tracks live, I don’t mind just play as long a set as you can.
N: My voice isn’t what it used to be, I get pretty shredded, after 75 minutes or so. So we might keep it to an hour and a half. But that’s, that’s sufficient.
T: Oh, well, I’ll be yelling for an encore. So do you have a favourite traditional track to perform live at the moment?
N: like in the set? What do we do? We’re going to be adding funnily enough with all this talk about England, we’re going to be adding the Foggy Dew which is the Irish one on the album. But let me see what other traditional stuff is there. I forget. It’s mostly original these days, actually.
T: Which you play live?
N: Yeah, actually, this is this was one of the goals was to not be too reliant on the trad stuff, which a lot of Celtic punk bands are they play the Wild Rover and they play like Whiskey in the Jar and stuff like that.
T: I’ve heard Whisky in the Jar played five times this year, twice at one festival.
N: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s just going to be a drunken sailor, like, you know, it’s going to be like the sort of Sweet Caroline’s of the Celtic folk world is going to be out in full force. And so we were pretty proud. And it’s been long enough now it’s been 15 years. My god, no. Oh, God, 16 years. And so, we’re pretty proud to have a list of songs that are original, but which can sort of go toe to toe with some of those old standards. And that’s, that’s kind of it. Yeah. Do we have a favourite tradition? I don’t know. We’re gonna do a Wurzels tune on this too. But that’s not traditional.
T: Wurzels are almost traditional at this point.
N: Yeah, right they’re old enough. Geez, like one of them’s gonna be alive and their songs are gonna go into the public domain for being that old.
T: Isn’t he still performing?
N: Like, yeah, Tommy. What’s his name? I forget the other one. But yeah, they’re still going. It’s kind of wild. We’re gonna play with them at Baltar festival. And the tempo is very slow. It’s amazing, but it’s the same jokes every time. I was like, “Oh, boy. Okay, I see what you’re doing”. But yeah, the energy is, is I mean, look, I won’t be alive when I’m that age. So yeah hats off to you for carrying on, like seriously.
T: Yeah. Um, so a lot of your songs are very water-based, like nautical. And, like, obviously a lot of that is Stan Rogers influence but I’ve got to ask, have you spent much time with boats or sailing?
N: Yeah, no, as I like to say most of us get seasick crossing a wet lawn. Like , it’s really incredible cosplay is what it is. There’s family history where my grandfather was on the Northwest Passage for a while and like you know, there’s a lot of family history that we have with nautical stuff. The West Coast people in Vancouver actually usually have that, or can often have that, but it’s like it’s just cosplay by all it is
T: Thats really disappointing. To think you don’t sail!
N: I know right? Like Northumbria is weird. It’s become this little anthem of sort. I’ve heard recordings of it at sea shanty clubs and stuff and you see these like grizzled old fisherman singers singing it and you’re like, if you only knew who wrote this
T: They’re listening to it unironically as well, aren’t they?
N: Absolutely. It is (a tradition coming down) through Stan Rogers. Stan was from Central Ontario in Canada, which is the least nautical place in the entire world. It’s like the centre of a giant continent. He never lived on the east coast or the maritime areas. A lot of Maritimers think he did but they’re wrong, he was just a guy who researched the tradition and listened to a lot of stuff and got influenced and then went for it. So you know, we’re proud to join that tradition such as it is of cosplayers. Like I mean, I play a submarine simulation game, so I know what a nautical mile is. And I know video games where like, I know how to chart a course. And what a thermal layer is. But it is entirely a simulation. I mean, one day, it’s gonna happen. I’ve got to do it.
T: I mean, I’ve got the contacts if you want to come out on a big diesel-engine fishing boat. How long have you in England?
N: Oh Man. Yeah. If I didn’t have a two-year-old waiting for me to release his poor mom. I would stay for longer but no, that’s definitely my future man. So let’s make tentative plans. Because it’s getting ridiculous.
T: We’ll take you on a trip. Maybe we should take some seasickness tablets, just in case.
N: I think I’m actually okay. But yeah, some of the band. Definitely. We had been on a couple of ferry rides, to Scandinavia or whatever, and they did not do well.
T: Your tour seems really hectic. Like you’ve got four gigs night after night. Are you? Are you here for just that? Or are you on?
N: It’s not even a tour. Tour is very generous, like touring is what we used to do. Back in the early days, we had no money and had to do it just scrape by, barely making even. but this is a weekend. This is an extended Thursday, Friday, and Sunday weekend and we will just enjoy it. It’s essentially a holiday. Yeah, and we are Canadians, we are used to driving 12 hours between shows. So like getting in a car, a van in you know, you’re in Cardiff or something and going over to just east of Birmingham. That’s like, what four hours maybe?
T: Not even, what you’ve got. You’ve got Cardiff, you’ve got Dorset, you’ve got London and you’ve got one near Birmingham. That’s really close, you’ll be two hours all the time, you’re actually gonna get to enjoy the festivals.
N: Well, exactly. It’s huge. This is the opposite of what playing in Canada is like, which is the story I always tell is we got in our van in Calgary, and we put the next destination venue in our GPS and the GPS said drive for 1200 kilometres and your destination will be on the left. That’s, that’s what it’s like touring in Canada, there’s one road through the middle of the country. So for us, those are hellish drives. So just be able to skip around for a couple of hours, maybe visit a cidery or a cheese maker on the way and I feel like you know, this is incredible, this is a holiday. There’s a German booking agent who won’t book us anymore because he accuses us of wanting to be like what he calls tourists punks? We’re just embracing the tourist punk identity with all, with gusto because it’s who we are. It’s who we are.
T: I think I’m gonna remember tourist punk.
N: it’s a life goal and I’m here so I made it. And I’m gonna do it.
T: So that’s actually what I was going to ask you about, you know the pandemic sea shanty boom?
N: Oh boy.
T: Did you guys do well out of it?
N: So most bands who had a song on the Spotify sea shanty playlist or something like that saw a huge crazy increase, for about a week and a half there were eight times as many streams. There were like a few more sales of the albums but it was mostly streams because as you know it was all TikTok based. It was pretty cool, but I will say it was hard at the time in a way because a lot of shanty singers thought “Oh boy, this is cool but some of this music really matters to us and it’s almost like it’s being gimmicked”. Like, “Oh, this a fun thing we’ll do for three weeks and then forget about entirely” but as always with this stuff it does lead to more visibility for the style and everything, and now there are sea shanty festivals., what, there must be a hundred of them in England every year now. Every sailing club or pub on the ocean’s got its own little group that sings there. It’s less so in the States, but even then, this weekend is the Connecticut sea shanty festival. It’s huge, like they’re expecting a thousand people, so you can’t complain about that. It was a good thing even if it did have a certain superficiality to it.
T: Yeah, I had similar feelings at the time.
N: Yeah, they’re ten people taking the piss, but then there is one person who just like can’t stop listening to it and finds themselves drawn into it all and all of a sudden they’ve bought a concertina so it’s sorta just how it goes and it’s better that it happened but it was a little odd at the time to see these like goofy videos and all these think pieces.
The thing that really pissed me off was the media, like the Canadian media in particular. A national broadcaster hasn’t done a story on us once, which is fine, we’re not a big band but we have, and our label has tried many times to get stories in. “It’s a traditional band, they’re doing pretty well, they’re touring around, they’ve got some fans or whatever. They certainly never bit on any of that, and then as soon as it takes off they were publishing article after article about sea shanties. “Sea shanties are the music we need to band together and blah, blah, blah.”
They would me lists of groups and me and our group and other groups we love were on those lists. They were just like these random bands from the States. It was just so, “Oh god, I have a journalism degree and this thing is really big now so I have to write about it and I have no idea so I’m gonna Google sea shanties and the top five hits I’m just gonna say those are the groups”. It was just, like, such a crazy time.
All the people singing, that was great but the media was weird. Like you couldn’t get them to pay attention to sea shanties if your life depended on it in 2019, and then in 2021 all of a sudden it was all they wanted to talk about in the music section.
T: Media is weird.
N: Yeah music media is so weird, don’t even get me started.
T: Thankfully I just do this for fun and tickets, you’re alright with me.
N: The sort of stuff you do is completely different, you are like an artist/festival support network.
T: So, on that note, do you have any favourite up-and-coming folk punk artists?
N: Oh gosh. Getting older, you start to lose touch a little bit. There’s a great band in the States called the Killigans, they throw some polkas and shanty-ish vibes into their amazing punk set, it’s really good.
It’s tough man, it’s a popular genre, but I don’t want to say too much, but every band sounds similar. We were sitting at Outcider with this group called Damn Emmanual and the Stolen Band and they were these amazing ladies who just played this most incredible blues rock, soul stuff. We were just hanging out with them after their set and they didn’t know we were one of the bands. One of them looked at me and was like “Why does every band play just play drunken sailor over and over again.” And I was like, yeah, I know, there’s a little bit of that, everyone is just working with the same template, but you know, Ferocious Dog is a great group who try to put a spin on a lot of their stuff. I think, a lot of people our band included get sucked into what is normal and it kills the creativity of it. Skinny Lister are great, and there are a bunch of other ones but I can’t list them off the top of my head.
I actually think England is the most creative place in the world for this right now. The bands there are doing more with the stuff they have then, you get over in the States man, it’s just like plastic paddy stuff up and down the coast, everywhere, it’s all people are doing.
T: But that’s not true! You were playing with Days N Daze a few months ago, and they’re definitely not that.
N: No, no, but that’s actually a very different genre that they also call folk punk now. They’re cool but they do their own kind of thing. You know, that’s like a different. It’s not really traditional music. You know what I mean?
T: It’s not folk music in the way you love it?
N: No, no, but, the thing that drives me the craziest is when bands or the artists that will not show proper respect to where the stuff they’re drawing from comes from. There’s a tonne of people who treat it as a gimmick o are it’s kind of like, look at the fiddle. Isn’t that cool? It’s playing this song from 150 years ago, but it’s just the way they do it or the way that it’s done, it’s just so it’s not like, the way that traditional artists would be doing it. And it’s actually kind of hard to see that. So yeah, I want it to be as respectful as it can be. But I guess we fuck with things. Twankidilo doesn’t sound super traditional.
T: Like you always managed to stop it sounding like a joke. It always sounds like you’re trying seriously.
N: That’s the idea. It’s not supposed to be the tough thing is a tough thing to walk because that line to walk because there’s a lot of temptation in that direction. So we got in trouble. Like 12, 13 years ago for making fun of some of the Irish punk bands. We had this video on Facebook that was called Drinking and Fighting. And we just made up this song called Drinking and Fighting on the spot and recorded it and we all played the wrong instruments. Just to show how easy it was like I was playing the violin and I can’t play the violin but I could do like a little stupid riff. And we did it was is just the lyrics, whiskey, and drinking and stuff like that. And like some bands, I won’t mention, we got a little bit of blowback. We’ve long thought about making a parody album where you’re like, you know, let’s like really set this stuff up. But then you realise you’d be going after people who they’re not famous, you know, they’re just trying to do their thing and they’re having fun with it and it’s fine. It’s probably not going to happen. It has occurred to us a couple of times. Sixteen versions of Tell Me Ma, something like that.
T: You seem to be making a lot more music at the moment, like an album a year.
N: Yes, that is true. Um, we’ll see it might slow down again. The touring again really destroyed our energy. A lot of bands play a lot of shows, but I think we played 112 shows in a year or something and I think that’s just absurd. No one should do that unless they have obsessive-compulsive disorder about touring. And it kind of like, that’s why it took so long to make foreign Sky, there’s like a five-year gap, there’s something. But it’s fun. Again, we get to tour and see your friends again and go to fun festivals and you get inspired and wanting more. Yeah, it’s just cool. It’s just a fun thing to do again. So it’s a nice thing to have to be able to keep creating when you can.
T: It seems like you’re you’re at the level where you could be on tour forever, and have it be your job. But somehow I feel like that’s not what you want to do.
N: I thought about it. My other job is as a philosophy professor at Fordham University here. And sometimes my wife and I look at each other. And we’re like, when the jobs really stressing you out. And they’re like, you know, we could just move to a farm somewhere and you could go on tour 60 days a year. Just live a nice, simple life. But people who just tour for their whole lives, they often don’t end up very well. It’s not a good long term plan. You know, drugs, alcohol, a bunch of stuff, just really, really not good.
T: I mean, in the UK, we’ve got this dude, Frank Turner, who’s played something like 2500 shows in the last, what, 1010 years, 15 years?
N: I mean, if he loves it, and he can stay healthy and happy doing it, that’s amazing. But that’s a very rare person. And a lot of guys, and a lot of people, in general, think they will love it, and when they actually get out on the road to those drives and they have to sing every night and their voices are shredded and they use alcohol to keep them from being bored out of their minds and that stuff, and then multiply that by 15 years, and at the end, you have a shell of the original person. So we always wanted to avoid that. Like, let’s not do that.
T: So after this summer, do you have any plans for the band?
N: Yeah, we’re going to play a few more things. Oh, yeah. What’s the big festival in the Netherlands? That’s really low. (His wife reminds him) Lowland, which is going to be amazing, I’ve never been there. To hear like famous stories about that one. We’re opening for the Ataris and Goldfinger somehow in Quebeck. ] I don’t know how that happens. That’s weird, but it’s happening. And yeah, we just take the opportunities as they come. So these are like fun things to do. We do them. Everybody gets to play the songs make a little bit of money.
I do have a back-of-the-burner Polka album, like all original Polka album. It really is the hardest, it’s a super hard genre to write because it’s so simple. You can’t like, use tricks to make it better. You have to keep it very simple. And that’s actually really, really hard to write, believe it or not. So that’s in the future. I want to get it done. But it could take a year at least to get the songs ready.
T: Would this be a Dreadnaughts? Release? Or would you do it with Polka Time?
N: Polka Time is, unfortunately, no more. But I mean, it’s half the same crew and yeah, we would do a Dreadnoughts release. But the idea is no electric guitars, and organ and violin and stuff like that. And just like make it as quick as you can without electric guitars is kind of the idea. But we’ll see. That could happen. It’s really hard to do. So we might just default back to yar yar I’m on a boat.
T: Yeah, speaking of yah, yah, I’m on a boat, the name Dreadnaughts, does it come from the battleship?
N: Yeah, it just occurred to me years ago, and I thought what a cool name for a band like I’ll snag that one. And as I got more into nautical-themed music, and it’s like, it just seems like a much much better name. I didn’t know the history at the time but it is quite interesting, of course, the history of how they got designed and made and why all that. And then this is why it makes sense for us to make a first world war album. Because, like, you know, you start off and you just think, Oh, we’re like in our our band name means like, indomitable. You know, no one can touch you on the high seas. When you realise it’s part of an arms race which leads to tens of millions of people dying over 30 years. So that means it’s actually more complicated than we thought. And that was part of why he wanted to show a little more of what actually happened.
T: Actually, that explains foreign skies really well.
N: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s not the only reason but it’s just you pick the name because you think it sounds badass, and it is a badass name, its always served us extremely well. Then you start to learn and you go “Ah gosh, there’s more to this story isn’t there”.
T: So now I’ve got one particularly nerdy thing in the song Avalon. It’s referring to Glastonbury, right?
N: Yes, the Tor. Yes. And there’s a plateau. It’s Stonne actually, in France, where the guy’s dead. He’s the guy singing to this little girl. Yeah. She’s grown up in her own Glastonbury. That’s the whole idea of the song, I think. Something like that. You know who’s right? I don’t know, the past version of me knew what was going on there. But I think it’s something like that.
T: No, I visited for the first time a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it a lot. And it was nice to put place to name.
N: Right. Yeah, you climbed up the hill and everything. It’s really cool.
T: So you were saying you were putting together an American Dreadnoughts, do you have like multiple line-ups that you use?
N: Unfortunately we resisted that for years but it’s just not possible anymore to have one group of people. We actually have three lineups, our Vancouver-based line-up, our New York line-up and our London line-up. Two of the guys joining us for this one will be from Smokey Bastard that wonderful band. So yeah, you can’t do it otherwise. Travel is kind of crazy, organising getting six people from Vancouver to London is incredibly sensitive. So it’s better to have people where are you going to be rather than bring them with, but it’s the same songs, the same heart.
T: Thanks so much for talking to me, it’s been an absolute pleasure.
N: This is the honeymoon phase, if you know me three years from now you’d be like all “that fucking prick right, ditched me and did this thing” and yeah so well that’s what’s coming
T: I hope it does come because to be ditched by you would be an honour.
N: Just get me out on that boat one day!
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