’90s indie

Return of the magnificent Samurai Seven

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The Samurai Seven

More than 25 years ago, in 1998, when I was living on the South Coast of England, working as a freelance music journalist and putting on gigs, I was blown away when I saw Oxford power-pop-indie-punk band The Samurai Seven play an anti-vivisection benefit show at my local venue, The Wedgewood Rooms, in Portsmouth.

Melding infectious melodies with buzzsaw guitars and Beach Boys harmonies, they arrived in a blur of sharp nylon suits and scissor kicks, and I liked them so much that I booked them for a return visit a few months later, and they played another blinder.

Sadly, the four-piece – Simon Williams (vocals and guitar), his brother, Matt Williams (rhythm guitar and vocals), Jimmy Martin (bass guitar and vocals), and Chris Hayward (drums) – split up in the early Noughties, never fulfilling their true potential.

‘Melding infectious melodies with buzzsaw guitars and Beach Boys harmonies, The Samurai Seven arrived in a blur of sharp nylon suits and scissor kicks’

Tipped for big things – The Samurai Seven did five sessions at Maida Vale Studios for John Peel, as well as recording the theme tune to his Channel Four TV show, Sound of the Suburbs – the band had to put their plans on hold when, in February 1999, on Valentine’s Night, Williams was shot in the eye with an air gun in a drive-by incident in Oxford.

Luckily, his sight was saved by the NHS at Oxford Eye Hospital, and he took time out to recover while the band waited patiently.

However, the music industry had moved on, and The Samurai Seven struggled to regain momentum. An album, Le Sport, was belatedly recorded and released on Rotator Records in 2002 and on Boundless Records in Japan the same year.

But, with their confidence eroded, the band had lost their sense of purpose and focus. When Hayward then decided to leave the group, the original gang was broken. The remaining members drifted on, gradually moving onto new bands, starting families and studying. The story of The Samurai Seven ended there for the moment…

But now they’re back with the original lineup – they reformed to play some shows last year – and a brand-new single, the politically-charged, killer power-pop-meets-garage-rock of ‘Punching Down’, and, in a neat twist of fate, I’m putting them on in my local venue, Vault 17 in Chesham, Buckinghamshire on June 25. I moved away from Portsmouth shortly after the band’s last gig there all those years ago.

In an exclusive interview, frontman Williams, who lives in Oxfordshire, tells Say It With Garage Flowers how and why The Samurai Seven reformed, what it’s like to be back with the band, and if they’ll be doing scissor kicks on stage now they’re middle-aged.

Q&A

Hi, Simon. The last time we spoke was in the late ‘90s…

Simon Williams: It’s been too long.

How does it feel to be back with the band?

It’s incredible. The first time around, I thought we were four little identical samurai, but we’re all different, and it’s those differences that means that we all get on well. If I was in a band with myself, it would probably be a nightmare.

‘We’re not doing it because we’re obligated to – we’re doing it because we want to. I sound like Billie Piper!’

The other thing about being back together is that we’re not doing it because we’re obligated to – we’re doing it because we want to. I sound like Billie Piper! The music I’m writing is just what I fancy doing, and the guys are enjoying playing it.

It’s even harder now to be in a band than it was before, because there’s so little money from record sales, and Spotify pays so little, and it’s harder and harder for promoters to make money putting on gigs, so they’re increasingly wanting to put on things that might pull in more people, like covers bands. We’re lucky to be in a situation where we’re having a second bite of the cherry.

‘Punching Down’ is your first new music in 25 years and it’s a big song to come back with – power pop but with a garage-rock edge…

I’m delighted to hear you say there’s a garage influence. I listen to a lot of different music, but I love garage bands, whether they’re from Detroit or Sweden, or other places. The Nomads, from Sweden, who were around in the ‘80s, had a resurgence 15 years ago, and their stuff was a real inspiration to me.

‘Punching Down’ deals with how the media narrative is controlled by a small percentage of ultra-wealthy people and the way they use it to cause divisiveness in society – it’s very topical…

Now I’m married with two kids, and I’ve got a nice life, I can’t write songs about relationship frustrations like I did before. I think there’s got to be some grit in the oyster. I don’t want to write songs about being happy and how wonderful things are.

You only have to watch a bit of the news to see how the 0.001% of people who control everything are creating a division between people who have more in common [with each other] than they do with billionaires, and it’s a dangerous business.

‘Now I’m married with two kids, and I’ve got a nice life, I can’t write songs about relationship frustrations’

I don’t want to end up sounding like I’m lecturing people, but the song is a call for unity between everyone in the country and beyond who are struggling with the same austerity, the same pressures and the same fears, but have the same hopes.

We’re being treated like puppets who are being made to dance by billionaires who just want another ivory backscratcher, or who want to take away our employment rights and our human rights. We’re all being stirred up and made to feel more divisive than we should be.

You recorded ‘Punching Down’ with Grammy-winning producer, Hugo Nicolson, who’s worked with acts including Primal Scream, Björk and Radiohead. How was that?

The thing that you notice about working with a lot of producers and engineers is that sometimes if there’s a problem in the studio, there will be quite a few hours of head scratching while they fix it. Hugo has got so much experience that he would head off a problem almost before it appeared ­– he just had a fix for it because he has that kind of experience.

‘There’s a pop sensibility to what we do. We’re not trying to be The Velvet Underground’

As the writer of the songs, I can be quite critical of what I do and what I come up with, and I think it was great that in the pre-production stage, Hugo was able to listen to the songs and say, ‘Okay – you need to get to the chorus faster…’

He got that there’s a pop sensibility to what we do. We’re not trying to be The Velvet Underground. We want something that’s going to have similar sensibilities to all the bands that we’ve loved, like The Beatles, but also The Damned and the Buzzcocks, which is still great pop music.

There’s more new music on the way from you, isn’t there?

Yes. In July, we’ll release ‘Duck and Cover.’ There’s going to be an EP and after that more recording. ‘Punching Down’ is the closest of our four new tracks to what we’ve done in the past.

When we got back together, there was a desire for people to hear the songs that they remember fondly from the past, and there’s absolutely a place for that, but, as the songwriter, I get bored if things aren’t evolving. There’s a legitimacy to playing reunion gigs after 25 years, but that loses its currency pretty quickly if you don’t start bringing out something new that’s relevant to today.

I was really pleased that the new material came together as quickly as it did. The rest of the guys in the band like it, of course, but it’s never a given. The response of people who have heard it has been so positive, so that’s been exciting. I know that the music industry has changed a lot since we’ve been away. One of the ways in which it’s got better is the studio technology. Chris hadn’t been in the studio since we did our previous recordings, and he was like a duck to water [this time around].

When he left the band back in the day, that, ultimately, led to you splitting up, didn’t it?

When he announced that he was going to leave, he stuck with us while we were honouring our commitments, so I think that emotionally he left earlier than he did physically. We tried to carry on, but there was a chemistry between the original four of us that was hard to replace, so it was difficult.

Why did you decide to get back together in 2025?

We’d all stayed in contact with each other to a degree – Matt, the other guitar player, is my brother, so we’re stuck together, and Jimmy, the bass player, lives in Oxford.

‘We tried to carry on, but there was a chemistry between the original four of us that was hard to replace, so it was difficult’

Sometime around COVID, we all went out for a drink together for the first time in ages – it was like no time had passed, and it was fun. Fast forward to last year, and when Jimmy had his birthday, his wife said, ‘What do you want?’

I’m not saying he’s the man who has everything, but he said what he really wanted was a few hours in a rehearsal room with us guys. I wonder if he’d have had the same suggestion a few years before, and whether we would have all said ‘yes.’

We’ve all had families and we’ve all been on our own journeys and in different places. My brother had a serious health issue… Fortunately, he’s okay now, but I think it made him think that one of us might not be around tomorrow, so you make the most of opportunities when they come up.

So, when Jimmy suggested it, I was pleasantly surprised that we all said ‘yes’, but the moment we were back in the rehearsal room, we had no preconceptions that it would lead to anything other than a few hours of having fun.

I knew we’d get on, but I was surprised by the speed at which everything happened. We were 90% there with the songs – it was like we’d only just put our guitars away from the previous time – so, by the end of the session, it was obvious that we were going to do it again.

It came together very naturally, because when you’ve been doing 100 gigs a year [in the ‘90s], your muscle memory tends to kick in quite quickly.

‘I didn’t want to do anything involving gigs or the public unless it was going to be good, because we have a responsibility to people – and ourselves – not to suck’

When we met up socially during COVID, Chris shared it on social media, and we were pleasantly surprised by lots of people saying, ‘Reunion!’ People remember us fondly, and, before you knew it, we were being offered gigs and festivals. Suddenly it gained a momentum of its own, but I certainly didn’t want to do anything involving gigs or the public unless it was going to be good, because we have a responsibility to people – and ourselves – not to suck. So, the music came together quite nicely, and we’ve always had a physicality to our shows. People talk about our suits and us jumping around…

It’s been nice to go back to that thing that’s so identifiable with us. I don’t think we’re a cool band (laughs), but we love what we do, and it’s always been important to look like we’re in a band, and that we look like we’re in the same band.

All the best bands look like they’re in a gang. I’m thinking of The Smiths, The Beatles, The Clash…

Exactly. I think The Smiths did it in quite a subtle way. There was a stylistic thread that went through them. The first album I ever bought was Destroyer by Kiss, so the idea of there being a visual identity…. I’m reading a book by David Hepworth about bands touring America, and he talks about how one reason why The Beatles were successful was because they were a unit – they were a gang. They might’ve taken the piss out of each other, but, if one of them wasn’t feeling 100%, the others would close ranks around him, and woe betide anyone who threw rocks at them from the outside. I’m not comparing us to The Beatles, but there’s something about the chemistry between the four of us, and people see us as being a gang or a unit, and I think they want to be a part of it.

One of our first gigs back [last year] was a festival over the summer, in the daytime, so I had the opportunity to look at the crowd in a way that I hadn’t been able to before, and it was just people who were smiling or were agog. As much as I love being in the studio, live is the true environment for us to thrive, so to play some shows has been great.

‘The thing about scissor kicks is that they have to come from a place of sincerity’

How is it doing scissor kicks these days?

We do have to warm up a bit. The thing about scissor kicks is that they have to come from a place of sincerity. We probably do less than we used to, but they come from a joie de vivre, so they’re almost irrepressible. When there’s an opportunity for a scissor kick, and you feel so inclined, it’s undeniable.

The Samurai Seven’s new single, ‘Punching Down’, is out now on digital platforms. 

The band are playing live in the UK this summer.

JUNE

25 – Vault 17, Chesham, Buckinghamshire.

26 – The Star, Guildford, Surrey.

29 – Bikefest, Cassington, Oxfordshire.

JULY

18 – Charlbury Riverside Festival, Oxfordshire (main stage).

Follow The Samurai Seven here:

https://www.facebook.com/the.samurai.seven/

https://www.instagram.com/the_samurai_seven/

‘I like to slip in a C-word that people don’t necessarily notice, but not in an aggressive way…’

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Wry, observational singer-songwriter and author, Jim Bob, one half of ‘90s ‘punk Pet Shop Boys’ and indie-rockers, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, is releasing two-brand new studio albums on the same day (August 22) – the full-band record, Automatic, and its dirtier, punkier cousin, Stick, which was made with a power three-piece.

To celebrate the release of both 11-track albums, Say It With Garage Flowers is running two interviews with Jim Bob. This one focuses on Automatic, while the second chat, which will be online later this month, just ahead of the release date, will concentrate on Stick.

“Maybe I should’ve done a double album –  it would’ve been easier,” he tells us.

Q&A

So, you wait two years for a new Jim Bob album and then two come along at once… What was the thinking behind releasing two records on the same day?

Jim Bob: You have a good idea and then as it becomes real, you realise all the reasons why it’s not such a good idea…. A double album would have made more sense…

Did you have such a big batch of songs that you needed to make two albums?

Jim Bob: I’ve never got a batch of songs – I don’t have a single song that isn’t out… It’s always been a nightmare – it was the same with Carter.

When a label would say: ‘We want to put out some bonus tracks,’ we would say: ‘Well, we haven’t got any…’  We didn’t even make demos with Carter – apart from in the very beginning before we had a record deal.

So, how did the idea for the two new albums come about?

Jim Bob: I wrote the songs for Automatic first – quite quickly, as I got on a roll. They existed as simple home demos, and then I went for a drink with my manager, Marc [Ollington] and we were talking about how you could make a physical album more attractive to people to buy it, when they’re just listening to music on subscription.

We thought about all the usual stuff, like adding extras, and we were going to do a live DVD of a gig, but that didn’t happen.

So, I was thinking about when Bright Eyes released two albums on the same day [I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn] and they were kind of different, so I said it would be great if we could do that. I was drunk by that point, and I didn’t really think it through. I thought I could do an acoustic one and an electronic one, but I didn’t really want to do an acoustic thing, and electronics are not something I know about.

‘At one point, the idea was that the songs on Stick are the B-sides of the songs on Automatic’

So, I thought I’d just do a kind of simple, punk-type thing, and write about anything that came to my mind – and then I woke up in the morning and thought, ‘Shit – I’ve got to write another set of songs quite quickly…’

At one point, the idea was that the songs on Stick are the B-sides of the songs on Automatic, but that was before any of them existed. The only rule that came out of all that was that there should be the same number of songs on each album, so that’s why there’s 11.

At the last minute, I thought, ‘Maybe we should do a double album – it’ll be easier…’ As soon as both albums went on sale in advance in a couple of shops, both shops only sold one of them – it was like the computers couldn’t cope with two albums… 

So, let’s talk about Automatic. It opens with Victoria Knits The Wars, which was also the first single – it’s a big song that turns into a sing-a-long. What was the inspiration behind it?

Jim Bob: Initially it came from the idea of those post box toppers – I kept on seeing a lot of those, and they were normally The Wombles or snowmen at Christmas, and then I got the idea of somebody who was knitting more sinister versions of them, like re-creations of battles. I’ve since found out that people have actually done that – not necessarily wars, but they’d do soldiers for Remembrance Day or whatever, so it is a thing.

I had the chorus – the ‘Victoria’ bit, which I realised was very similar to Victoria by The Kinks, but different enough to get away with it. I was aware of it when I was doing it – I was listening to a lot of Kinks at the time, so that may have been directly responsible for that.

It’s a sort of story-type song – I’m aware I’m doing that more… I don’t know if I’ve always done it… Maybe I’m replacing the hole left by The Smiths – they used to do those kinds of songs.

Balloon Release For Arthur is a sad and poignant song – it’s about the death of a child, but it’s hopeful too…

Jim Bob: I’m aware that if I honed in on my last six albums or something, I do repeat myself a lot. I write a lot of songs about young kids dying in tragic circumstances – I can’t seem to stop myself.

I had the idea from two songs that both came from posters – (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais [by The Clash] and Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite! by The Beatles. I was imagining that it was supposed to me just singing the words from a poster that was advertising a celebration of a kid’s life – it’s not real but it could be.

‘I write a lot of songs about young kids dying in tragic circumstances – I can’t seem to stop myself’

You mentioned writing about recurring subjects – one of the themes that runs through both albums is tech in society, whether that’s the use of social media, privacy issues, phones and tablets… Scream If You Want To Go Slower, which is on Automatic, is a song about escaping from the chaos of the modern world – all that fake news and celebrity culture… You sing about moving away to somewhere quiet and small, and putting your phone in a box… You’re a musician who needs to use social media to promote yourself, but how do you feel about social media –  is it a necessary evil?

Jim Bob: I’ve been fine with it, but in recent years it’s got a bit dark…I’d love to be strong-willed enough to not be on it, but I know that’s kind of daft. I left Twitter – or X – but I was still on there just using it to advertise stuff.  I found myself looking at it again. That’s the worst one to look at, isn’t it?

With that in mind, on A Song By Me, which is the first track on Stick, you sing: ‘Every day I hate myself for taking the clickbait – I could chop my fingers off for raising the hit rate…’

Jim Bob: Yeah – I’ve got a TikTok channel. I hardly use it, but if I look at it it’s all fighting, shoplifting and car crashes. But it’s very hard not to look at things, isn’t it? If you see a video of two blokes about to have a fight, you find yourself looking at it, and you go, ‘that’s horrible…’

On some of the new songs there are references to drones, tablets, smartphones, and Google Maps… You write about society’s relationship with technology…

Jim Bob: I’m going to badly quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said something about novelists who don’t include modern technology in their work are the same as those in the 18th century who didn’t include sex… I think it was Jack White who said you can’t have technology in blues lyrics because it sounds wrong: ‘I picked up my iPhone the other day…’ But I think you can do it in pop and rock – it’s interesting and I quite like hearing it because they’re not traditional things…

You mentioned The Smiths earlier – a good example of mentioning tech in a song is Bigmouth Strikes Again, when Morrissey sings: ‘And now I know how Joan of Arc felt, as the flames rose to her Roman nose, and her Walkman started to melt…’

Jim Bob: Yeah – even if it’s just using words that people don’t use. A lot of songwriting is fairly route one – just finding a word that rhymes with another one.

‘I’m going to badly quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said something about novelists who don’t include modern technology in their work are the same as those in the 18th century who didn’t include sex’

There are some great lines on both of your new albums. I like the part on Baby On Board when you sing: ‘Wars don’t end, baby – like boy bands they just go on hiatus…’ That made me smile…

Jim Bob: I like that one… There are lines where I find myself going, ‘oh yeah, that’s quite good…’ and I’m quite pleased with myself.

So, from boy bands to rock bands… One of my favourite tracks on Automatic is Can You Hear Us At The Back of the Hall? which must break the world record for including the most amount of band or rock star names in a song – just for a start there’s Squeeze, T-Rex, X-Ray Spex, The Pastels, PiL, Bikini Kill, Bowie, Prince and Sneaker Pimps… It’s a song about a young woman in a band who feels that her music is misunderstood by people, including journalists, and a lot of older blokes, who constantly harp on about the golden age of music…

Jim Bob: That’s exactly what it is. I know I’m guilty of that – you hear a young band and think, that’s just the Buzzcocks… It’s somebody reacting to that. Initially, I was trying to think of lots of hip bands that people like to sound like, but then I ran out of bands… There’s a longer version of it…

I love the lines: ‘When her parents and her teachers were young they had The Cure and The Smiths, Johnny Marr’s riffs, The Cramps and the Pogues, The Teardrop Explodes, but what does he know?’  I really like it when you rhyme ‘The Smiths’ with ‘Johnny Marr’s riffs…’

Jim Bob: I ummed and ahhed over that, thinking it was too clumsy, but now I really like it.

One of the darker songs on Automatic is Buckaroo! It mentions a drone strike on an orphanage and a sword fight at a petting zoo, and you also get a nice half-rhyme in the lyric – ‘power-hungry cunts’ and ‘Kerplunks…’

Jim Bob: Yeah – I like to slip in a C-word that people don’t necessarily notice. I do it, but not in an aggressive way.

Automatic ends with Our Forever Home, which is the warmest song on the record. Unlike Scream If You Want To Go Slower, which is about moving away to escape from everything, it’s about staying put in your own house, in your local neighbourhood, with your family…

Jim Bob: I think there’s a kind of theme that runs through both albums… It could almost be conceptual… I’ve been in the same relationship for most of my life… Scream If You Want to Go Slower, Thank You Driver, Baby On Board and Our Forever Home are all the same in my head – it’s the same people… a couple with a child.

When I was writing my book about songs [Where Songs Come From – The Lyrics and Origin Stories of 150 Solo and Carter USM Songs – 2024 ], I realised how few songs there were about ‘me and you…’, so I sort of subconsciously started writing some songs about that.

I’ve got a granddaughter now – she’s three and a half – and, at this moment, she’s probably the most important thing to me… It must have an effect on me…

When you have kids and you look at the world, you’re thinking of their future, and then they grow up, and another one comes along, and you think, ‘Christ – what’s it going to be like for them?’

Look out for the second part of this interview, which will be online during the week of August 18: Jim Bob tells us about the album Stick, and we talk about songs to listen to when the world’s gone to shit, walking in the park, dictators, gigging and mixing pop and politics.

Automatic and Stick are both released on the same day – August 22, on Cherry Red Records.

To launch the albums, Jim Bob and co will be playing Stick in full at Banquet Records in Kingston (August 22) and Automatic in full at Rough Trade East (August 23).

https://jimbob3.bandcamp.com/album/automatic