TIGER
Regular readers of this website will be aware that I consider the late nineties the worst period for popular music at any point within the history of the human race. And yet, within the inescapable dross, there was tonnes of good music to be found. Strange music. Unsettling music. Unique music. Tiger were all of these things. I wish they’d stuck around longer.
Here’s singer Daniel Laidler to explain why that was never going to be possible…
Hey Dan. Fancy telling the readers of ‘Indie Heaven’ a little bit about how Tiger came together? It felt like a lot of eyes were on you very quickly...
“So, the Sims twins' - Julie [guitar and vocals] and David - moved to Princes Risborough when we were all about 16. I was friends with Dave, who was cool and handsome. Dave quickly moved from a crap job at a commercial photographers on an industrial estate in Aylesbury, to being a star fashion photographer by the early nineties. Around that time I was doing odd jobs in Buckinghamshire and in London. I was aimless after being chucked out of art school. I’d go and see Dave and experience his glamorous lifestyle. I had borrowed a friend's electric guitar and found that it sounded great with the three remaining strings tuned to the same key and then distorted through an old Sanyo - I think - tape deck from my parents' tower hi-fi system; the same tape deck was used for the first Tiger album and many live gigs until it eventually gave out. I was then writing songs with this and the drum patterns on a Yamaha keyboard - also used by Tiger - and making tapes of these songs which I played to friends.”
How did the rest of the band come on board?
“One day, in 1993 I think, I was walking near The British Museum when I saw all of Blur sitting drinking at a table outside The Plough pub. This sight generated a strong emotional reaction in me – in fact, memories of this experience were later instrumental in developing my hagioptasia theory, but I’ll come to that later. I wasn't a fan of Blur, but because they were the same age as me and had similar backgrounds and interests, I saw them as contemporaries – only they were very successful, while I was certainly not.”
Hey, we’ve all been there.
“So around this time, Julie was living in north London with her boyfriend Louis Jones. He was in the band the Warm Jets and they were playing gigs, doing session work and making demos of their songs. Early 1995, at a club night in Camden organised by Dave and Julie - I think - Julie told me that she had heard my tapes and thought it would be a great idea to form a band together. I agreed. Louis [vocals and guitar], Ed Grimshaw [drums and keyboards] and Paul Noble [guitar and keyboards] from the Warm Jets were very helpful, and by the summer we did our first gig at a pub in Stoke Newington. I was on vocals, Julie played guitar and sang, Dido [Hallett] - not a musician, but Julie's ex-next door neighbour - played bass Moog, with Louis on keyboards and Ed playing drums.”
I’ve just remembered that I liked a Warm Jets song. Going to post that below…
Actually, I think it was this one I liked…
“The third gig we did was supporting a couple of other bands at The Bull & Gate in Kentish Town. This would be late 1995. Tina [Whitlow] - not a musician, but Julie's schoolfriend from Bedfordshire - had replaced Louis on keyboard, but Ed was still drumming for us. I still hadn't written any proper lyrics by this point, so just made it sound like I had. Jeannette Lee from Rough Trade and Mike Smith - then EMI Publishing - were there to see the other bands, but really liked Tiger. Things developed from there.”
I’m just going to get it out of the way. The haircuts. Obviously they were brilliant and as jarring to the era as the music. But did it surprise you the fuss they made?
”By the time we did our first gig I had let my hair grow quite long and it had become a bit mullet-y – a shape which Julie enhanced with some scissors. Julie and I decided we liked this as it was going against fashion. I was very anti-fashion for many reasons, but found it difficult to work out why or to articulate what all these reasons were, or whether even they were justified. We were well aware how hated mullets were at the time, but we liked being rebellious. In my view it was always about rebelling against fashion and convention, and not about being arty – this wasn't shared by all of Tiger, but I really didn't want to be 'arty'. Once I went to a hairdresser in Crystal Palace to get my mullet trimmed. The hairdresser asked me if what I meant was a sort of Nick Cave hair style. When I insisted I wanted a mullet she refused and I had to leave and go elsewhere.”
What was your experience of the music press at the time?
”I think the music press was okay with us, all things considered. I was useless at doing interviews as I didn't feel I had anything worth saying, so Julie did most of the talking. I was very easily confused and very naïve, and we did often behave like idiots. It must have been pretty frustrating for people.”
Oooh, I found a page from Select on the internet. I’ll post that below…
Can you tell me about the artwork of the debut album, We Are Puppets? I always thought that was the most amazing image. I loved all your art.
“Thanks! I remember I had done a painting for the album cover but it hadn't gone down too well with the band. After a gig in Norwich a young lad asked me to do a drawing for him. Julie saw the drawing and offered to swap it for a t-shirt and he agreed. A few days later I painted the album cover from the drawing in the dressing room of a venue in Bedford, while the rest of the band went to the cinema.”
What do you remember about signing to Island Records? I thought - and what did I know, I was a teenager - from the off that they would have no idea what to do with you…
“Well yes. I remember a meeting at Island HQ around a big table. It felt quite bizarre at the time with the type of old fashioned music industry men and the language they used. It often seemed like the Island workers who dealt with us had drawn the short straw. But really, we saw it as that we had signed with Geoff [Travis] and Jeannette, who were running Trade 2 at the time. There was a point when we had two offers to sign with Trade 2 or Alan McGee and Creation. We had met Alan. He was with a couple of heavies in leather jackets. Geoff and Jeanette seemed a better bet after that.”
So I saw Tiger twice, at V96 - my first festival! - and supporting Pulp in 1998. If you could tell me anything about those shows then that would be smashing!
“That was our first experience of playing a festival. It was a bit disappointing really as I don't think our performance was that great and the audience seemed a bit thin on the ground. It was early afternoon too, so not the glorious romantic, smoky sunset festival experience that would have been lovely. There was a great food tent though, with lovely grub.”
I’ve always wanted to ask, how did you get up that tree in the 'My Puppet Pal' video? And did you have to fill out a risk assessment form?
”That video was mainly the idea of Dave Sims. He directed it. It was just a branch in a studio bolted to a bit of scaffolding. That would still count as 'working from height' but no PPE! I think we were supposed to be like cuckoos.”
Your second album, Rosaria - released in 1999 and sadly your last record - shared production credits with Stephen Street and Donald Ross Skinner. What do you remember?
“Stephen Street was very easy to work with as he is very patient and easy going. His nature is very generous. I think he actually enjoyed working with us too. We first met Donald when he was asked to produce 'On the Rose'. Though the resulting version was rejected - I can't remember why - we worked with him on a few b-sides and demos. Eventually Donald almost became part of the band, filling in on the bits that the real band members couldn't do. Donald played with us on the Pulp tour in 1998, which were Tiger's last shows. He’s on the Peel session we did that autumn too. It was always good to have Donald around as everyone likes him and he's very funny.”
Can you walk me through the decision to split up? I thought Rosaria was such a strong record, and there was obviously gas left in the tank, creatively, at least...
“It seems to me that being in a band makes you focus on the negative aspects of things. At the end of 1998 we had just done a successful Peel Session and were supporting Pulp on their UK tour – Eels had dropped out, so for most of it we were the only support band - and the Rosaria album was ready for release. Despite all this there was a lot of doom and gloom in the band. I think Island had dropped us around this time. I was still confused about things - what we were trying to achieve with the music, what I was supposed to be - because I had this daft notion that a performer had to be 'authentic' I was restricting myself from having fun with the whole thing… and consequently was not really giving much of a performance. Plus we weren't all getting on that well.”
I feel like this is a recurring theme with the interviews on this site.
“The final show we did with Pulp was in Bournemouth and we we playing to a big crowd, for us. It was near Christmas I think, so I thought it would only be downhill for Tiger from here. Best end it. At the aftershow party I was chatting to Geoff Travis and told him I was giving up Tiger. As he didn't seem to have any problem with that idea, it seemed to me that I'd made the right choice. As I say, I was very naïve all through my Tiger experience. I actually thought that the band splitting up wouldn't affect the release of the album…”
Do you keep in touch with any of the other members?
“I probably see Dido most, but not very often. She has four girls and runs venues in Peckham. Her girls are in a band called Honey Hahs and are are signed to Rough Trade. Julie moved to Cornwall in the early 2000’s and has two boys. Tina lives in France and runs a bar with her boyfriend. I never knew what happened to Seamus [Feeney] after he left the band in 1997. Geoff Travis decided that we needed a better drummer and we felt compelled to go along with this. Gavin Skinner - Donald's brother - played drums for us after that, though was never officially a band member. Donald played drums on some demos. He's very good at it.”
Your creativity didn’t end with Tiger, though. Tell me about that…
“After the split in early 1999 I recorded around 14 new songs with Donald and Gavin Skinner, and about six with Dido and Ben Wallers from the Country Teasers as Westminster Abbey. None of these were ever released. I continued to write songs and sometimes do rough recordings at home. Then around 2007 I did a couple of live gigs with Dido, Donald and others. My The Magic Wizard songs started in 2016, and I've now done a few of them, often with Donald playing guitar or bass or both.”
Right, Dan, it’s time for you to tell us about hagioptasia…
“After many years of pondering, my thoughts and ideas about fashion and glamour, status, envy, romanticism, art, spirituality and so on, were eventually consolidated into my theory of hagioptasia. This happened after an incident with an idiot landowner gave me a flash of inspiration in 2014. My theory - in video form - was seen by a U.S. professor of psychology, who was keen to test it out. This culminated in us having a scientific paper published - John Johnson the psychologist did most of the work on that - which shows hagioptasia to exist and presents good evidence that it exists much as described in my original thesis. If I want to plug anything it's an understanding of hagioptasia, as I strongly believe that there is a huge potential in this to make a better world for everyone. Unfortunately though the theory sort of predicts its own unpopularity – so many people aren't going to like it.”