Interview: Rich Thair talks Red Snapper, Sweatmouth, and his unreleased Mo’ Wax sessions
Rich Thair has been releasing music since the early 90s when he and Jeremy “Tuse” Tuson released two 12” singles with their group Sweatmouth. Those got the attention of James Lavelle as he was starting his record label Mo’ Wax in 1992, and a Sweatmouth 12” was planned as one of the first Mo’ Wax releases. It didn’t happen, Sweatmouth separated, and Rich has spent close to two decades as percussionist with Red Snapper. Following the release of their eighth album Everybody Is Somebody, and a quick tour of Europe, Rich and I caught up for a chat about those Mo’ Wax recordings and Red Snapper.
I was reading some old issues of Straight No Chaser and James Lavelle announced he would release a 12” by Sweatmouth. You’d already released some some singles on Rhythm & Business, who ran that?
That was our label, and we had a band called Jelly Foot and there was a single with Nina Miranda from Smoke City. She actually sang on the second EP that we did. Really, I think the idea at the time was about just getting releases out so we then started Sweatmouth and that was when we were talking to James really. We knew James because we used to go into the shop in Notting Hill Gate where he worked. That’s when he was still at school in Oxford, I think, and he used to the get the train up. I just always remember, he was just this kid with a pair of National Health glasses with one side broken and a Biro holding them together.
Was that at Honest Jon’s?
Yeah, that was Honest John’s and I guess not long after that he left to get the label going. But I think he still worked from time to time there. It’s funny actually, I’m DJing on Saturday, and I dug out a lot of old vinyl and there’s a lot of things that James used to sell me that probably at the time you couldn’t really get anywhere else, you know?
But how it actually happened that the Sweatmouth single didn’t get released, I’ve been racking my brain trying to think why didn’t it happen. And I can’t actually think of a reason to be honest.
I think James was setting up a sublabel through Island called Mo Wax Please Records, and that’s when he announced the Sweatmouth 12” called Strangers. But the Island deal fell through and then he did Mo’ Wax Records by himself instead. I thought maybe the Sweatmouth record got tied up with Island because you’d signed with them?
We didn’t ever get that far to be honest. We didn’t sign anything and it wasn’t long after that that everything fell apart with Sweatmouth anyway, and I’ve got a funny feeling that could have been partly why as well. It was a bit it’s a funny old time when a lot of things changed really for everyone I think. But you know that there was a single with Sarah Winton who ended up singing with Nightmares On Wax, and there was a track on that EP that she sang on. But that’s about all I can kind of remember really.
Do you still have those tracks?
Yeah, there’ll be on a DAT somewhere. It’s unfortunate, me and Tuse, that ran the label with me, we fell out really badly. I’d known him for years, we’d been at school together and everything, and unfortunately we fell out and the whole thing just fell apart.
After that I went on and ended up playing percussion on a lot of more house stuff, and then eventually joined The Aloof and set up Flaw Recordings with Dean Thatcher. Then I started Red Snapper a year or so after that. But I don’t know what year that would have been with Sweatmouth. Was it 90 or 91?
The first Sweatmouth records came out in 90 and 91 and then it would have been 1992 that James Lavelle was trying to release Strangers.
Yeah sure. The other thing that I did around that time was a remix of that Ronnie Jordan track [Get To Grips] that ended up being quite big. I did the remix with James, which again never got released. Then through James I met Tim Goldsworthy and he and I did some recording at his place and that was when I was kind of doing some bits on my own. Then really, I kind of lost touch with them both. Over the years I’ve bumped into James just because of this scene we were in and I remember there were a couple of times when Red Snapper did gigs and James was DJing so I saw him from time to time.
That remix you mentioned, I’ve read an interview with Tim Goldsworthy where he mentions working on that track too. He said the label rejected it because they took out Ronnie Jordan’s guitar solo. James Lavelle has also mentioned it occasionally and said it’ll never come out because it was horrible. Do you remember it being bad?
I don’t remember the remix being THAT bad, but it was a while ago!
For the other tracks you worked on with Tim, was that you and him together, or was he producing you?
This was when he was still living with his mom and when him and James were still good friends. You know, they were like this sort of weird duo. I remember getting a train up to Oxford and I took some vinyl which we sampled, and I think I had a couple of drum machines. Tim just had a really basic studio setup but he was one of those people, as soon as you walked in, straightaway you knew he knew what he was doing. He was experimental and he had a great ear.
I’d say it was kind of a co-production engineering role that he took, but we were just mates and I think he saw it as an opportunity to learn from me, because obviously, I was a slightly different generation, and vice versa. It’s something I still find really inspiring, working with people who are much younger than me. I think instead of looking over your shoulder and being paranoid you need to embrace it and learn as much from each other as you can really. With Tim, we kind of drifted apart. But you’d sort of see glimpses of him in the music press and of course he ended up working with James Murphy, which is amazing really.
So how did Red Snapper come about?
Well when I started that, which was sort of 94, really it was at a time when it was only in the back rooms of clubs that people were playing sort of downbeat stuff and instrumental hip hop. The initial idea was to do like a DJ breaks album with Ali Friend, who’s the double bass player. That was the initial idea, and we were just rehearsing and we got a friend in to play guitar and Alan Riding, who was a big vinyl dealer at the time, he played sax, and we quickly realized that there was more in it than just a DJ tools album. So we did the first EP, Snapper EP, which came out on Flaw Recordings and then we quickly followed it up. We used to go into Orinoco Studios, where Andrew Weatherall used to work and the Chemical Brothers were based, and we would literally have enough money to do the Saturday and Sunday and we’d knock three tracks out and mix them. We used to use Tim Holmes, who later on became the other part of Death In Vegas with Richard Fearless. So he engineered all the early stuff, and we ended up doing these three EPs, which we then put together on a compilation album, and it was off the back of that that Warp Records licensed it, and then they saw us play at Glastonbury and literally signed us as soon as we came offstage. So that was a real game changer for us to be honest because off the back of that we got to support people like Massive Attack, Prodigy, and Bjork. That just straightaway moves you up because there’s a lot more people seeing what you’re doing.
Has the way you record changed much now?
Well, I think not particularly. The last album we did Hyena, which was 2014, we basically rescored a Senegalese film called Touki Bouki and we got funding to tour Europe playing the soundtrack while the film showed, which was a great experience. Then we recorded that material is an album and I’d say that process was quite similar to how we’ve done it in the past.
With this new album, partly because of COVID, and partly because I’m now in Wales, Ali’s in London, and David was in Ireland, we did a lot more swapping of emails, sending parts to each other, jamming over them, and then we’d get together and develop the ideas. So partly, that’s why the album took so bloody long to get done because during the earlier years when we did those four albums for Warp we had the money to have our own studio in London where we’d literally go in like a nine to five in the studio and work on it. Eventually it kind of grinds you down, and especially with the sort of music we’re doing, which has got to be experimental. It takes a bit of the life out of it and I think that’s what happened to us in the end, and that’s why it was good to have a break and do different projects.
We had that break around 2000, and it changed the way we looked at what we did. We got Tom Challenger in on the saxophone who’s a lot younger, you know, he was listening to Red Snapper when he was still at school, and he brought in a real kind of aggressive jazz element to it, a different way of looking at things. Then with the new album, we’ve bought a lot of new guests in on it purposefully. A lot of the tracks just needed something extra and I think instead of spending loads of money in the studio, trying to develop things between the three of us, we thought we’d try and get some different guests in and that worked really well. I’d say this is the best album we’ve done in years because it felt fresh again.
What’s next for Red Snapper or for yourself? Are you going to go back into the studio?
Well, at the moment we’re looking at dates for the winter and we’ve got some ideas. I don’t know if you checked out the Number stuff that me and Ali also did? It’s an album called Binary that came out two years ago on Sunday Best. So me and Ali started writing new Number stuff, but I’ve also done an album on my own which is probably the closest to what I was doing back in the early 90s. It’s very much a kind of instrumental hip hop stuff, so that’s going to come out next year. •
Red Snapper’s new album Everybody Is Somebody is out now on Lo Recordings.
Keep up to date with the band at their website and keep an ear out for more from Rich Thair in the next year or so…
This article was originally published in The Shadow Knows Issue #3, July 2022. Buy the fanzine here or read more at our website.
