The Sheffield Scenester

We had arranged to meet ex Little Man Tate frontman Jon Windle (musical royalty in our eyes!) at The Lescar, so on a boiling hot day we arrived at the arranged time only to find it full. Jon came through the bar and immediately recognised us from the many gigs that we’d been to. Realising that we couldn’t get enough privacy Jon suggested that we head down to The Porter Brook as it was quieter, so we set off casually chatting on the way. By the time we reached The Porter Brook, the interview 'was out the window' and instead had deteriorated into a friendly chinwag. We walked through the bar to sit outside while the majority of punters seemed to be content to watch the World Cup, so armed with a round of drinks we kicked off the chat.

Scenester; You’ve played two back to back gigs as the final farewell for Little Man Tate, what have you been up to since?

Jon Windle; Originally the plan was that I’d write songs for other people and try and get some sort of publishing deal, but when we went into the studio and initially recorded four songs, I started thinking that I enjoyed writing songs...then slowly but surely the bug started coming back because everybody I saw kept saying “Are you gonna be doing something?” I told them no...because I had no intention of doing anything, towards the end of Little Man Tate I kinda fell out of love with it all just a little bit because I’ve never really liked the music industry anyway. Obviously you know the reason why we broke up...we’d taken it as far as we thought it could go, but hearing messages of support I thought I’ll give it a bash, and the next time I went in I thought I’d try and write these songs for myself really. Eventually I started to realise that I wanted to write and record the album, so about six or seven months after LMT split up I thought now I’m up for giving this a right go, now I’m right excited and can’t wait for people to hear the songs and do some gigs.

Scenester; Do you still look on the old LMT website, because someone wrote a poem once about how much she missed the band and everything…..

Jon; Was it a girl?

Scenester; Yeah!

Jon; Probably Maz then! But I haven’t been on LMT stuff, it was strange when LMT stopped because no-one used the MySpace or Facebook; I’m probably the one who used it the least cos I’m a bit of a technophobe. My mate who plays bass for me, when we announced the gigs went on just to see if anyone had been saying anything and said it seemed a good response, people didn’t go mad or anything...but they were saying it could be interesting.
I was in the studio Thursday and it was such a good day, the songs that we did were good but we thought the album was lacking some anthemic tunes, so we decided to go in and do two new tracks. The thought behind it was, it can’t be too far removed from LMT, because some of the songs are so different from LMT I thought it was lacking a raucous tune for the live shows. It’s been really hard cos with LMT we had about thirty songs, we’d demo twenty then we’d knock it down to about ten, knowing we had a few B-sides and stuff. Now I’ve had to write fourteen songs, record fourteen songs, then pick ten songs just because money and things aren’t there like in the LMT days! It’s been nice to work under that kind of pressure, we recorded these two tracks and it felt really buzzing, I heard really good feedback and that made me excited again...and that’s something I hadn’t been in a while. Don’t get me wrong, I’d got really excited at the last two gigs, I loved those two gigs, but I suppose you take it for granted when you’re there, maybe in some cases we felt we let people and ourselves down a bit because it had become about more than writing songs, playing and having a good time. It had become “gotta get radio, gotta get good reviews, gotta get this, gotta get that”, and the pressure just got too manic, we didn’t deal with it the way we should have dealt with it….

Scenester; That might have been cos you were quite young as well……?

Jon; But now, it doesn’t matter, if we get good reviews, if we get bad reviews…well there are some people who aren’t gonna like us…..imagine that! There’s gonna be some people who like the live gigs and some that don’t, we might get some radio we might not...but let’s see what happens and that’s what’s great about doing it again. It’s brought the passion back, now I can’t wait to play again, October seems so far away now.
I had a phone call from a friend of mine who had a charity event at the Cobden View in Crooke’s, they had this headline act who’d pulled out, so because they were a band short, he asked me if I could find anyone. I rang around a few people but no luck, so I rang him back to say that me and Liam would do this acoustic set to open the show, but because I’m not supposed to do any shows before October, we’d do it unannounced! We did it but didn’t say who we were, still a load of people came in to see us, afterwards though people were coming up and saying “You were great” and stuff like that, it was right exciting and that’s what I love about that initial thing with LMT, it was even put up on Wikipedia which was right nice!

Scenester; How does this new material compare to LMT?

Jon; In some ways there’s similarities, in other ways there’s differences, what I liked was some of the B sides and I thought some of the songs on this album could do with being a bit more B sidier, that raucous kind of feel. I mean there’s this song which I really liked...but it was about eight minutes long and it told this story about this couple getting together and not getting together, I was really quite pleased with it, but then I looked at it and thought ‘this is like eight minutes long’. So we chopped it all about, changed the lyrics around...but it had completely lost the feel of the song, we realised that can’t go on the album now, possibly we might play it live, provided we got time in the set, but I was pleased with that...I suppose I could write it up as a poem and put it on the forum…!

Scenester; So will you be re-working any of the old LMT songs?

Jon; It’s complicated because at the minute, I’m not ruling anything out, but at the minute it would be weird to go on and play ‘House Party’ and not have Ben or Maz either side of me. Also because the guys that I’m playing with are mates with us as well, I don’t know how weird it would be for them. It might be weird for the band…..

Scenester; Yeah cos they’re supposed to be coming down to watch you aren’t they?

Jon; Yeah cos Ben was like “Can you not do a gig on a Friday or Saturday night” cos he’s DJing, but there’s Maz who has listened to all the album, he’s done sessions for me on a couple of the songs – I don’t know if they’re gonna be on the album now...but he’s given me his thoughts on the album and the mixes. I’m meeting up with Ben next week to go through the album, we’ve got to drop a few tracks just to make sure I’ve got it right so we’re still rather close, so yeah LMT songs, it would have to be clever as to how we did it. Maybe ‘Sexy In Latin’ or ‘Boothy’s’ might be too obvious, but a couple of the B sides to fill the set out, I’m not ruling anything out, and they all know the songs so….

Scenester; You’ll have everybody comparing the new songs though won’t you?

Jon; Yeah...so it’s not fair on them, they’re brilliant musicians and brilliant mates, but you can’t get better than Maz and Ben in terms of being LMT...so it would always fall short, so I don’t want to say to people there’s going to be LMT songs in that set. I’m hoping LMT fans are gonna like it, I’m really happy with what I’ve written, and I was really happy with what I wrote with LMT. This mate said to me the other day “that’s the best song you’ve ever written!” about one of the tracks so I’m quietly confident!