Interview with Topper from Issue 8 of Welsh Bands Weekly, spring 2000


In May 1997, when we last interviewed Topper, they were a young and cute threesome from Penygroes who, we said – not that we were trying to be insulting – sounded vaguely like a drug-addled Chas ‘n’ Dave.

Over two years on we find that they and their music have matured greatly; they now have an unmistakable style musically, a fantastically professional live show, and two extra band members – Gwion on keyboards and Siôn on guitar.

It was at this year’s Miri Madog that we finally managed to nab a slightly drunken Iwan Evans, the band’s bassist and brother of singer Dyfrig, for a follow-up interview to find out what’s happening in Koo-Koo Land.

The interview takes place in Iwan’s beaten-up old car, and is punctuated with interruptions from drummer Pete Richardson, Iwan’s girlfriend Lois, and our very own Mad Pixie.

Iwan has for the past two years-odd called me Granny, a reminder of the first night we met. We were at a Topper gig in London, just after the launch of WBW, and Emma and I were sitting in the dressing room chatting to the band. They were teasing us about our light hearted comment in issue one’s Topper interview: ‘I want to shag all three of them, preferably at the same time.‘ Iwan couldn’t believe I was 28 – he was only 20 at the time – and from that night on persisted in calling me Granny. A close friendship followed, against all odds….

So it’s because he’s one of my dearest friends that Iwan’s most-repeated phrase of this night in Miri Madog is: “But you can’t put this in the interview, right? This is just between you and me.”

We start by talking about the two new band members. According to Iwan, they’re incredibly valuable to the overall sound of the band.

“Yeah, they’re very valuable,” he tells me, “live especially. That was the most important thing about Topper; the live sound. Getting the tape sound to sound like the live sound which we couldn’t do with three of us. But now we’ve got Gwion and Siôn it does sound more like it does on tape, especially now that we record… what we record is what we do live really, but with a couple more vocal tracks or whatever. So it’s really really cool because everybody puts their own input into the music. I can’t wait until the new album comes out, y’know?”

The album, he tells me, will be out at the end of the year, consists of 16 tracks and is being released on their own label, Bedlam. How did it come about that they started their own record company?

“It came about because we were really fucking bored shitless of waiting for someone else to put it out, so we thought we might as well get the money together and put it out ourselves,” Iwan says. “So it’s much better for us to do it ourselves ‘cos we invest our own money into it and it costs a bit, but you get it back.”

But you all have to work though, to fund it?

“Well, we’re sort of working!” Iwan laughs. “So Bedlam came because we were fed up of… we were for a couple of months going ‘okay, we’re going to do the music for one reason, which is to get signed’. Which was wrong, because when we went into the studio we were doing everything wrong because we were doing it because we wanted to get signed. At the time it was really important to us to get signed, but now we’re like, ‘why should we bother?’ We’re really enjoying doing the music we do. We can do what we do and… it’s just brilliant because there’s no fucking stress, there’s no deadline. Whatever we do, we want to do it because we’re doing it, and if we want to release it we’ll release it and it’ll be released by the date we want it to be released now. And I think that’s really important to us because deadlines are fucking bad!”

The band are still managed by Angst, those great stalwarts of the Welsh music scene who put Super Furry Animals, Catatonia and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci on the map. Who deals with the distribution?

“Shellshock are doing our distribution. Everything like that is sorted out. All we’ve got to do is pay for the recording, mixing, whatever, and at the moment we’re fucking doing it.”

The first interruption of the night occurs when drummer Pete decides to enter the car and add his two bob’s worth. He’s in high spirits, yet at the same time wary. He doesn’t appear to trust me, or Welsh Bands Weekly, but knowing Pete from old I’m unfazed by this. Pete’s voice (he’s actually English) is remarkably like that of Danny, the stoned hippy from the film Withnail & I – ‘If I medicined you, you’d think a brain tumour was a birthday present…’ However he’s quite sharp, though he doesn’t really know it.
“Oy mate!” he shouts, “This is a fucking boring interview!”

Iwan: “I was just telling Debbie that Pete is a fuck of a hunk!”

He wants you up the arse, Pete!

Pete: “I run too fast!”

Iwan: “What do you want, Pete?”

Pete: “I was gonna join in with the interview like a….” He climbs over us.

Iwan: “I never lie, you know….”

You do!

Iwan: “Well, I do lie, but…”

Yeah? ‘I’m going to come down and stay with you Deb!’ ‘I’ll come down next week for a holiday!’ - how many times have I heard that?

A long conversation ensues about the time when Iwan and Dyfrig moved to Cardiff for a spell. It’s a time that Iwan remembers with mixed feelings.

“I never want to do that again,” he sighs. “I think the worst mistake I ever did was to move to Cardiff. We all thought that moving to Cardiff would be better for the band, then I moved and I lived there fore ages, then Dyfrig moved and he was never there, and then it was like, ‘oh, Pete isn’t coming down so we’ve got to go to North Wales to rehearse’, so Topper came to a stop.

“When we lived in Cardiff it was like, ‘oh, I don’t like this at all’. Now I’ve moved back home to Penygroes I’m a happier person, and Topper are doing well. Well, not exactly well, but…”

But you are doing well. You got good reviews for Non Compos Mentis… okay, one was dire, but the other one was good.

Iwan: “Melody Maker was brilliant! And that’s the only thing that’s really important, if you get a good review. It’s like, if they appreciate it then I’m not doing wrong. Because I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t appreciate it.”

And you got a good review from Welsh Bands Weekly, of course…

Iwan: “Fucking hell, yeah!”

But you’re obviously doing alright, because just look at the crowds you get in – look at the Eisteddfod last week – there were huge crowds!

“We were really shocked with the ‘Steddfod,” Iwan says. “We’ve never shite ourselves so much! It was like, ‘you’ve got to play all in Welsh’, and we were like, fuck, we haven’t got the songs! For a week we were like, what shall we do? So we did two new songs, one which was instrumental and one which was Hide Your Head In The Sand without the lyrics. It worked out really well and I came off stage really buzzing. You should have seen me shaking before the gig!”

I tell Iwan that at the Eisteddfod I’d had a similar experience. I’d been roped in as a backing vocalist for Nâr during their Maes B spot, and had been so nervous that as I went on stage I couldn’t stop farting!

Iwan: “I slept for two hours – I was so fucking nervous!”

But you went on tour with Catatonia and weren’t half as nervous…

“That was different,” Iwan insists. “At the Eisteddfod we were headlining so we had to be good to headline. I was thinking, ‘fucking hell, we’ve got to put on a good show to please these people ‘cos they’ve paid seven quid’. I would never pay seven quid to go in and see Topper! Never! I wouldn’t! I barely would pay £7 to see anyone! Seven quid’s a bit expensive, especially when it’s the Eisteddfod and they’re saying ‘Popeth I’r Gymraeg’… they’re charging £7 a ticket and I thought that was ridiculous, especially on a Saturday night where people couldn’t even get in. I was like, come on, this is all wrong – you’re in it for the money, but we’re not.”

Pete: “They [the organisers, The Welsh Language Society] were making five grand a fucking night!”

Iwan: We were a bit pissed off because they fucked us a bit that night.”

Iwan’s girlfriend Lois appears. In the ensuing kerfuffle as she tries to get her tongue down Iwan’s throat, I turn my attentions to Pete. So, when are you going to start bullshitting?

“I’m trying,” he deadpans. “It’s going on in my head but it’s not coming out of my fucking mouth…”

What goes on in your head?

Pete: “You don’t want to know!”

I ask Pete about the house that he’s been building ever since we met him. Is it nearly finished yet?

“I’ve nearly finished tiling my kitchen floor,” he says proudly. “I’ve got to finish off the worktops, and then I’ll be able to live in it. It’s not far away. I was supposed to go to college, study to be an architect, but I decided to take it into my own hands.”

The snogging session appears to have ended, albeit temporarily. I turn back to Iwan and continue with the interview proper.

These two new guys – do they have an input into the songwriting as well?

“Yeah, everybody does,” Iwan tells me. “Before, Dyfrig used to write all the songs, then Pete and me used to put our input into each song. But now it’s more like – we get into the studio, we’re a little bit messy – and we’re supposed to do the next song but we’re all going, ‘can we finish the first song?!’ So we finish the songs in the studio and we write the songs in the studio as well. And I think it’s much better because you get the feel of the mood.”

Another interruption from Lois… Iwan, in his exulted state after the gig, tells me he wants me to say hello to Lois in the interview.

Hello Lois!

Lois: “Hello!”

Iwan: “Put that in the interview – Iwan wants to say hello to Lois. I’ve had a really good night tonight!”

Glad to hear it. Any other good experiences you want to share with us?

“Last night was really funny,” Iwan giggles. “We were supposed to record the lyric in one song but we decided to leave it ‘til last, ‘til we were really fucked so we could get the mood in our voices, get it really ‘grrr’. They asked us to do that for some reason. ‘Yeah, no problem, we’ll stay up ‘til 5.’ About 2 we were all completely wrecked and it was only Dyfrig and Ges downstairs. And Ges was listening to the songs. And Dyfrig was like, ‘I want to listen to those two songs and we’ll record the third song after that.’ So during the two songs, Ges looks at Dyfrig: ‘Does this sound fine to you, this?’ Dyfrig was like this: [Iwan puts on a ‘fucked’ expression]. And when Ges puts it on Dyfrig’s like, ‘yeah, sounded good Ges, sounded good – but can I hear the two songs?’!”

Iwan and Lois fall back to their snogging. In the meantime, Pete decides to tell me of his adventure earlier in the evening.

“I was having a smoke earlier,” he says. “I keep my key on a bit of rope. I put my string back over my head, and when I’d done that I brought my hand forward and the hot end of the spliff scraped across my neck and fell off into my crotch! I was sitting in Dyfrig’s car and didn’t want to burn his seat so I had to just sit there with it burning me… I was just sitting there wondering what to do and I eventually managed to get out – just because I didn’t want to let his car burn…”

Iwan stops his tongue wrestling session long enough to comment:

“I would have! I do always man!”

Pete’s had enough. He climbs over me to get out of the car. I turn back to the now not-snogging Iwan, and ask him what the band’s plans are for the future.

“Getting the album out, and doing as many gigs as we can.”

Are you going to play London again?

“I don’t know,” he muses. “We wasted loadsof our time playing London last year. It’s not like London is nice to play, ‘cos it’s really hard in London. The audience are really… they don’t give you any fucking leeway. It’s really hard to get there, driving from Penygroes. So if somebody will pay us enough in London we’ll go back there.”

It’s a catch 22 situation, right? You have to guarantee an audience to get the gigs…

“I didn’t really like playing London because it made me so insecure. Wales is very hard to play, we get really nervous – we don’t really think we’re that good. It’s really hard.”

Iwan and Lois start snogging again, and the Mad Pixie arrives. She wants to ask a question. She wants to know Iwan’s favourite fairy tale.

“I haven’t got a favourite fairy tale, but I’ve got something that scared the shit out of me when I was younger. Dyfs and me slept in the same room until about six months ago. So every story my mum told me, both of us were like, ‘Arrrgggh!’ The one about the Sandman – if you don’t go to sleep the Sandman will come to the window and if you’re awake you’ll be in trouble… and we were like, ‘fucking hell! Fuck! It’s the Sandman! Sleep! Sleep!’”

And that reminds me of the old song that goes: Mr Sandman, bring me a dream… Well, I’ve had some dreams in my time, but few have been nicer than the dream that is Topper.

For up to the minute information about Topper, visit their website: http://website.lineone.net/~hapus/