Chris T-T
Chris T-T is something of a Truck legend. This year will be his fifth consecutive outing in Steventon, and his sets have always been one of my personal highlights of the festival.
Chris: This is the one festival that I hope to always play. But you never know, it gets bigger and bigger and I don’t, but it always seems to still welcome me. I don’t think I’ve had a bad gig here really, I really enjoy the crowd and the organisers are really nice. So yeah, it’s a good one for me.
Maps: How has the festival changed over the course of the past five years?
Chris: I think it’s got bigger, but I don’t think it’s got a lot bigger. You can see some festivals that year on year seem to almost double in size. Truck’s still fairly similar to how it was a few years ago. The biggest change I think is the village, the market area. They didn’t have that & that’s provided a whole new focus for people, with the theatre tent as well. I might be wrong, but I’m sure when I first came there were only three or maybe four stages, so it has expanded, but if you look at it, it’s still on the same site, where the artists camp now and where the people camp now is still the same as it was, they’re controlling it really well.
Maps: What makes Truck different from other festivals that you've played?
Chris: Well here’s the thing, maybe less so now, but Truck was perhaps the very first of the small boutique festivals that really had an ethic and a point behind it. Truck was always a festival where you could see sizeable bands, and what seems to have happened is that other people seem to have caught onto that idea and a lot of the really good festivals now like Green Man or Bestival are essentially taking the Truck ethic and running with it. Like this year we had Latitude which was Mean Fiddler, a big corporation comes in and tries to mimic the spirit of Truck, and I think that’s a measure of their success. If anything, the thing over the years of Truck not getting too much bigger and not changing too much is a real boon for them, because as the other festivals can’t resist expanding, they outgrow themselves and cock up basically. As long as Truck can keep itself kind of really contained and carry on enjoying it, it’s a really good thing. But I do think that,it is less unique now – when I first came to Truck it was the only small festival around really of an indie nature. I mean you’ve got your little folk festivals and stuff, but now there’s tons of them, so I hope they manage to stave off the corporate advance.
Maps: It's great to see so many local bands playing too.
Chris: Definitely, and that’s part of their whole ethos, that they’re genuinely trying to push through local talent. Whereas I guess a lot of festivals would make a big hoo-ha about doing that without really following it through. But when you see the Truck legacy in twenty years time, that’s when we’ll be able to tell the extent to which they’ve succeeded. I’m not local, so I don’t see what it’s like day to day trying to be an Oxford based act, but I’m sure that they’re one of the main starting points for if you’re trying to get heard.
Chris' live set has undergone a transformation over the years I've seen him at Truck (this will be the forth time). The first time I saw him was with his full band, and the emphasis was more on funny uptempo songs like the anthemic 'Drink Beer'. More recently, Chris has played solo acoustic sets with a more serious political slant, though his wicked sense of humour still remains key.
Chris: I’m going to play solo this evening. I’m not really sure what I’m going to do yet, at the moment I’m tending not to write a set list until the very last minute, because the atmosphere could go either way. It could be loads of noise and loads of loud people so I need to belt out some silly things and just shout a bit, or if it’s a bit more of a sit down listening sort of vibe then I can play some quieter songs. I've definitely got to say something about Israel and Palestine. Also about Oxford and the animal testing thing, because there’s a large amount of animal testing propaganda that gets thrown at young people in Oxfordshire and in a way that propaganda’s changing the moral mainstream. At the moment, there seems to be almost a backlash against trying to care for and look after animals, and the testers seem to be almost painted as heroes compared to the protesters, which is quite disgusting. I’m not even sure yet what I’m going to say, but something about that, see if I can get some people annoyed.
Chris took the brave step of recording an album of political tracks '9 Red Songs' for his most recent release. Tracks such as 'When the Huntsman Comes A-Marchin'' and 'Preaching to the Converted' maintain the sense of fun while tackling serious issues and events from war in the Middle East to over-development and the Countryside Alliance.
Maps: Has taking a more overtly political stance had a polarising effect on your audience?
Chris: I think I’ve escaped that because the live shows, although they have their political stuff, I don’t just play '9 Red Songs', I play maybe three or four of them and then intersperse that with all of the other stuff. And I think also, even though before I wasn’t singing such overtly political material, people already knew where I stand, I was already doing anti-war stuff, so it hasn’t really changed anything. If anything, the best thing for me has been that before '9 Red Songs', I had serious material and stupid material, and what tended to happen was that at gigs people would shout for the old, silly songs like ‘Eminem Is Gay’ or ‘Drink Beer’, and that’s what they wanted to hear. And now, since this album, for the first time in my whole career, what people are shouting for is the new stuff, they want to hear ‘Huntsman’ and they want to hear ‘Preaching to the Converted’, and that’s been a massive confidence boost for me, because I spent a couple of years performing stuff where people were nice, but to a certain extent what they wanted to hear was me shouting about Eminem and it was undermining what I was trying to do really. So now, it’s given me a massive resurgence in confidence. I’m not going to do another overtly political record though, because once you’ve said it, you’ve got to live with it forever, and I’ve said enough, and it just so happens that all of the songs that I’ve got now that are waiting to be recorded aren’t like that, they’re more like what I was doing on 'London Is Sinking' I guess.
Interview and Photos by Paul Madden