Little Grandad just can’t stop gigging. The London alt-country band were in the middle of their first real time off since their first gig last July – a break enforced by their manager, mind you – during which they had jetted off on separate holidays, when they got a call offering them a last-minute cancellation slot at Open Air St. Gallen Festival in Switzerland. So now here they are, chatting to NME from an Airbnb in the Alpine town of Herisau.
“We said early doors we wanted to say yes to every gig ever,” says guitarist Ned Ashcroft. “That’s the ethos, yeah,” agrees Jack Lower, who plays bass and co-fronts the band with his younger brother Harry (the quartet is finished by drummer James Brennan). “Even this one – we were like, ‘We’re on holiday, but yes, we’ll all fly back for it.’” “We’ll travel far and wide just to play thirty minutes,” says Harry.
That dedication to graft has taken Little Grandad to “50 or 60” gigs so far this year, they reckon. “We’re gonna hit a hundred before September,” says Ashcroft. At the time of our conversation, they only have two songs out; a third, the sprawling ‘Babe, We’ve Run Out Of Time’ followed last night (July 7). Considering their first gig wasn’t even a year ago, there’s an unbelievable amount of buzz around them; they’ve been booked for festival after festival, played a Radio 6 live session at Maida Vale, and toured up and down the country. “We weren’t ever thinking that we’d end up in Switzerland within a year,” Jack says. “It wasn’t really supposed to be anything, and then we kinda were just like, ‘Oh, shit.’”
The genesis of Little Grandad came when Harry returned to the family home after finishing a business degree. He’d been quietly writing songs since lockdown, and no longer had any desire to do anything with his degree; the envelope containing his final certificate is still unopened somewhere in his bedroom.
“[Not opening it] was kind of a principle, ‘cause when I finished the degree I was already heading in the direction of music,” he says. “It’s like, the day that he needs it is a sad day,” adds Jack, who had also moved home around the same time after a breakup. The brothers had been pretty different growing up and weren’t particularly close, but once under the same roof again, they started going to gigs together and developed a shared music taste for the first time, worshipping the trifecta of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.
The brothers, their friend Brennan, and Ashcroft, whom they had only recently met, began messing around in a rehearsal room once a week at the beginning of last year. None of them had been in a band before. “I couldn’t even play an instrument,” Jack says. “Ned was like, ‘We’re not getting another member, you’re gonna have to learn bass.’” Nor had Ashcroft, who started in orchestral music, really played electric guitar before. “I didn’t actually own a guitar ’til like, a month ago,” he says. “I’m still paying off my bass on Klarna,” Jack adds.
And yet, as you’ll know if you’ve caught them live or watched one of the many videos circulating of their set, they’re really, really good. You can put it down to Harry and Ashcroft’s heartfelt songwriting, their powerful, passionate live performances, or the tightness they’ve honed over the hundred-and-something gigs they’ve played; whatever it is, they win people over. Early on, they immediately made a crucial fan in Radio 6 DJ Steve Lamacq.
“I think he saw us once and then he saw us four times that week,” Jack says. “He’d follow us round the country – we’d be in Brighton, and Steve would be there.” They had no music out when he asked them to do a live session for his show. “He was like, ‘No one’s ever done it without music [released] before, but I feel like you can do it.’”
“The song is the most important thing. Glamming it up with too many solos isn’t our thing” – Jack Lower
You can’t talk about Little Grandad’s success without mentioning the growing wave of British Americana bands popping up around the country. The likes of Westside Cowboy, Divorce and Brown Horse (the former two of which have graced NME’s Cover) have also broken out with sounds inspired by alt-country greats like Wilco and Silver Jews. What’s going on there, we ask?
“I’m convinced it’s escapism,” Jack says. “When [people] listen to that [they’re] not in the UK – which for much of the year can be a bit depressing.” Do they worry about getting lost in the churn? “No, I think everyone pushes each other,” says Jack. “[And] it doesn’t feel like people are copying; it feels like everyone found their own route to get there. Everyone’s doing a slightly different stamp on it.
“I think there is just a wider movement towards songs again. It’s like, we wanna tell you a story through this song, and that’s gonna be done with guitars,” he continues. “At the very start we were like, ‘We want to serve the song.’ That’s the most important thing, and glamming it up with too many solos and stuff around it, that’s not our thing.”
With a characteristic eagerness, the band are already working on their first album. “We were like, we’re gonna skip the EP – let’s go for the album,” Jack says. Yet they’re aware they’re still learning how to be a band, and really, they’re still getting to know each other. “Even me and Jack are still fairly new to being friends,” Harry points out. “It’s gonna be interesting in a couple years’ time, ‘cause it’ll be further developed and [we’ll] feel even more comfortable.”
Besides that, the long-term goal, as you might imagine, is more gigs. “I wanna be gigging this much when I’m in my forties,” says Harry. “We want like, the Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour vibe,” Jack adds. “You don’t stop; people still wanna sing the songs with you when you can barely sing them yourself. That is the ultimate aim. There is no other way.”
Little Grandad’s ‘Babe, We’ve Run Out Of Time’ is out now via Communion.
