Speaking with Robb Weir backstage before their recent show at Newcastle Carling Academy  it was obvious that Robb was in a very relaxed, and talkative mood. Dressed in one of his trademark “loud” shirts and a pair of rather splendid red boots (we don’t miss a thing!) it became very apparent that the “Tygers” are experiencing a very creative period at present and Weir's confidence with the band is at an all time high. With an EP due out shortly featuring brand new songs, followed by an album in early 2008 one would imagine that this didn’t leave much time for anything else. But you’d be wrong as the band are also preparing to head over to Greece to headline a major rock festival in Athens. 

Robb Weir

Robb, so you back in your old stomping grounds tonight. 

RW - Yes! I’m a very local lad. Originally from Whitley Bay and now Shiremoor. 

And at Newcastle’s Carling Academy, a relatively new venue for the city? 

RW - Yes, It’s a great venue that reminds me very much of The Mayfair in the good old days. That place was tremendous. Unless you’re a big, big band that has to play the City Hall why not play here as this place holds 2000 people and has a great atmosphere. You can also have a beer and enjoy a bit of crack with your friends while you watch the bands. There’s something about seated halls that stops people really enjoying themselves. You walk on stage in front of 2000 people and they all stand up. It doesn’t make much sense. Why not just dispense with the seats altogether and just get on with it. They’ve even taken the seats out of the Hammersmith Odeon.

I didn’t know that! 

RW - Yeah. It’s called Hammersmith Apollo now. Watch the new Whitesnake DVD and in the extras David Coverdale even comments on it. I suppose it gives them the chance to make a few more quid. 

I was a teenager when the New Wave Of Heavy Metal was really happening and the Tygers were a big part of that movement. The bands name always sounded both exotic and mysterious all at the same time. How did you come up with the name? 

RW - As I remember it was Rocky’s doing. We were playing our guitars one day trying to come up with new riffs and it was at a time when we were un-named. I had the name “Achilles Heel” which I thought was great. I thought long and hard for five minutes to come up with that one (laughs). Well Rocky used to read a lot of science fiction and fantasy books. That was his big thing. One of the authors he was very fond of was Michael Moorcock. In this book called “Stormbringer”, where Deep Purple got their album title from, there was a storyline featuring the Cliffs Of Pan Tang, which were guarded by the emperors tigers. We just put the two together and it sounded great. It had an ambience about it. It was well planned and lent itself to the Far East and the Orient. In fact when we went to Japan we had no problem in selling out gigs, it was always silly billy crazy! 

Looking back to before you formed the Tygers what made you first pick up a guitar or had you thinking, “I want to do that”? 

RW - Well I started out playing drums with a couple of schoolmates. I remember playing in the bandleaders grandfathers house in the back room and when I got up I knocked the snare drum over and it fell through the French windows (laughter) As a result I wasn’t very popular so I decided to leave drums and become a singer. That wasn’t for me and I left things for a while. Remember we were only very young, possibly thirteen or fourteen. Then one night my father brought in a nylon strung guitar painted in kamikaze colours and I remember thinking “that looks interesting”. He just got it from a junk shop. I started to strum around with it until I put on the first Status Quo album. That must have been possibly 1968.I found everything used three chords and was pretty straightforward to play. In fact I wish I could have been as successful with only three chords (laughter). 

Have you seen the title of the new Quo album? 

RW - Yes!” In search Of the Fourth Chord”! Brilliant (laughs). There was an OK magazine out recently, which featured Rick Parfitt at home with his wife in his Spanish villa. It was almost mansion sized with an Olympic size swimming pool. He even had manicured toenails The Tw*t! 

Nice if you can get it. 

RW - I just thought he got all that with just three chords. Imagine what he’ll get when he finally uses a fourth (laughs). Enough of that…I decided to have a go at playing this guitar and so I lowered the action and painted it silver and then painted the word “boogie” on it. My mothers still got it to this day! 

Moving forward to 1999 you did a Tygers re-union at Wacken (German rock festival) with Jess Cox. 

RW - That’s right. 

You didn’t get any of the other members at that time as they were all committed to other things. 

RW - Everyone was phoned! Brian thought he could do it but things got in the way. John Devrill was in Blood Brothers, I believe in the West End. For him to do it would have cost him a lot of money which is fair enough as lets face it we’ve all got to pay our mortgages and feed the dog. 

So who completed the line-up behind yourself and Jess?

RW - Three guys from Blitzkrieg, I believe. 

What was the reception like at Wacken? 

RW - Well, we were headlining and the timing could have been better as it was 2a.m when we finally went on stage. To be honest with you by that time sometimes people have had enough. They’ve had one beer or hot dog too many and they end up searching for a toilet for both ends (laughs). Saying that there were still about 18,000 people there from an attendance of about 24,500. 

Did Wacken make you re-assess the Tygers and make you think, “I want to look at getting out there again”? 

RW - Well I’d done Sergeant with Brian and Tony and also a project called Tyger Tyger with Jess. None of them came to fruition and for a while I was considering finally hanging up my g-string for good. I did take a break and got stuck into family life but made a point of keeping in touch with people. Lets face it once music is in your blood it’s the most contagious disease possible. 

It’s a good addiction though. 

RW - Absolutely. When Jess rang me and said “look we’ve been asked to play Wacken as its twenty years since the band began would you be interested?” I immediately said yes! Let’s do it. It was only on the plane going over, on the way to Hamburg, that he said, “we’re headlining”. At that point I wish I’d packed my bicycle clips (laughs). I looked at the bill and saw who we were on with. Hammerfall, Saxon and Dokken to name just a few. I just thought “god here we go” and me mouth came over all dry. I remember walking out on stage with a funny smell wafting from my clothes (laughs). Afterwards I thought” well we did alright” but have to say I wasn’t match fit or in the best of shape as I hadn’t played in front of anybody for nearly fifteen years. 

A great thing to do though. 

RW - Well you march on and I have to say I go the taste for it all over again. I just thought,” I want to do this again”. I know I can’t do it full time, as there aren’t the gates out there that were around in the eighties. In those days rock was at the fore above funk and pop music. I mean rock bands even appeared on Top Of the Pops! You could see Saxon and Def Leppard on the TV, which had never normally been the case. It was usually run of the mill pop acts. 

You played the British Steel Festival at Milton Keynes in April this year. I gather the reception was fantastic? 

RW - Yes. The atmosphere was excellent. We made sure we went on in the middle, we were the sandwich filler. For me looking out into the audience I felt we had hit the timing bang on. People began to drift away for some of the acts that came later on in the day. I believe the whole bill is going out to Greece in March .The Greeks want us to headline in Athens. 

Was The British Steel festival line-up of the band the guys who are playing tonight? 

RW - Oh yes! This line-up has been together a long while now. I have a little bit of a bone of contention when people go you’re the only original member. There are lots of bands going round, sometimes with no original members! I just don’t know how it works but what I do know is that some of them are better than the originals were. You know bands change. Deep Purple recently played at The Arena with a different guitar player to the original days and yet the guitar shaped the whole sound of the band. Yes you’ve got the Blackmore sound but you’ve also got the Steve Morse sound and they both work. 

It’s funny how Steve Morse has been in Deep Purple longer than Blackmore was and yet is till seen as the new boy! 

RW - Yeah! Look at Thin Lizzy now. There are no original members left if your being totally politically correct about it, but John (Sykes) is still leading the way. This line-up of the Tygers has been together for seven years now. The original band was only together for three and a half years. I don’t know how people want to look at it. I do know we are older, wiser and more mature and have no egos anymore. Things work a whole lot better now and we laugh a lot more. I used to room with John Sykes and we’d do stupid things like hang people upside down out of windows when we were pissed, really stupid things when I think about it. We do daft things now but not as extreme as that. 

I don’t know if you have had a chance to read Biff Byford's (Saxon) autobiography yet? 

RW - No not yet. 

In the book Biff says Saxon have been trying for the last seven or eight years to capture the spirit of the eighties specifically the “Wheels Of Steel “era. Is it the intention, currently, for the Tygers to try and capture the spirit of say the first three albums? 

RW - Yeah! Very much so. The new songs, two of which we’re playing tonight go some way to doing just that. We played a gig last night and people kept saying the new songs sound new but yet old all at the same time and that’s exactly our intention. With the ”Cathouse” album Dean and I wrote songs which maybe …(pauses). Lets say they were good songs but maybe they sounded too modern or even maybe too heavy. I really believe now we are right on the button. In fact we have just put down another three backing tracks, which Jacks going to sing over next week, and they are even better than the two we already have. Things are really shaping up. The light at the end of the tunnel and the exciting part is that there are another five or six songs to write which one doesn’t know how they’ll turn out. I mean we do the backing tracks then send them to Jack in Florence and the stuff he’s been adding has been just fantastic. I’ve been sitting at night listening to some of the new stuff and just going “Fuc*ing hell” this is excellent. He has the feel for the late seventies and early eighties hard rock and he nails the melodies and lyrics every time. 

Biff also mentioned that when “Wheels Of Steel” took off they went out on tour and took the Tygers with them. Can you remember much of that tour? 

RW - Oh yeah. It was a tremendous tour. Biff and I really gelled; he kind of took me under his wing. As we used to set the stage up each night he would often put his arm round my shoulders and say “Eh lad we’ve had it hard. You’ve never had it as hard as us. We had to load our own vans and put our own petrol in and sometimes bring the petrol pump with us. We had to live out of a shoebox whilst you lads were living in houses with central heating. (Laughs). I used to turn to Biff and say ”Fu*k off, buy me a beer, we’re poor and you’re the headliner”. He used to have a Polaroid camera and one day down at, I think Brighton he took my photo and signed it on the back. I’ve still got the photograph. Shame you can’t see my face as it’s so blurred (laughs). 

Biff does go on to say that a lot of bands from the eighties should have gone on to be massive. One of them being the Tygers. 

RW - Lets just say there were some very curious and ultimately bad decisions made. 

Talking of which. your new manager, who is new to this sort of business, is excellent. Very on the level. How did you find him? 

RW - It was a complete fluke. I was selling a guitar on e-bay and the auction had ended. The next day an e-mail arrived asking me if I still wanted to sell the guitar. I said yes and found he lived in Grantham so I took the guitar down to him. When I finally met him we hit it off really well. We ended up keeping in touch. A while later he got in touch saying he was coming up to Newcastle and would like to meet up as there was something he wanted to discuss with me. It wasn’t about the Tygers; he wanted to talk about a music management company. We got round to the subject of the Tygers and I explained what I felt was going right and what could be done better. He listened and finally said “maybe I can help you there”. He’s now come into the music business blind but within two months he has million watt bulbs in each eye. He has applied his business acumen that he uses in the city to the music industry. I don’t think he ‘s impressed with how slow things work but when he asks you to do something you do it. 

He seems very focused. 

RW - Oh he’s got real vision. The next twelve months are all mapped out for us. Our old manager, Callum, booked last night and tonight’s gigs, but he just had too much on his plate. He wanted us to be successful but he couldn’t put the time into it. Originally Simon and Callum were going to work together but eventually Callum said “look if you can look after the boys I’ll step down”. It was a huge weight off his shoulders. Simon just stepped up and took on the Tyger and he’s really starting to sort things out. Simon has the philosophy of letting us get on with what we do and letting us do it well, then he can do what he does well. It works best that way.

Moving on I believe that you're busy recording new material at the minute. Things must be more technical nowadays than when you first started making records. Is it easier or harder in the studio to make an album these days? 

RW - Oh it’s a lot easier. Some would say years ago when things were done with analogue tape that the finished sound was warmer. Saying that many desks in studios are now valve driven. I know at the BBC all the desks are valve run along with coal and steam powered ones (laughs). However with Pro Tools and computer technology you only have to play a verse and chorus once to build up a song. Parts can be taken out or dropped in within no time. Some say this takes all the fun out of it, but lets face it time is money. In the old days if you wanted to take a guitar solo out or drop in a reverse snare drum sound you had to physically cut the tape or take it out and then turn it over so things are much quicker now. We’ve recorded the backing tracks at Soundstation in Wakefield where the “Noises” album was recorded. We did think long and hard about whether we should go back there. What Soundstation does have is a great engineer called Mark who has a good ear for things. We produce it so he hasn’t got that responsibility on his shoulders. He can take time doing the engineering to the highest possible standard. What we’ve been doing is sending the basic recordings down to Ben (Mathews of Thunder). He puts it into his studio and uses his Pro Tools to mix it along with Brian or myself. 

Did you ever consider using Fred Pursers studio? 

RW - Yes. Fred's a great producer and has a great studio but it comes at a price and we get just as good if not better results following the recording process we’re using now. Fred does the whole package, producing and mastering whereas now we are currently just recording. I couldn’t tell you what albums are out there produced by Fred at the moment but I can name quite a few Thunder albums that Ben's produced which are superb quality and which people are buying. 

How did you get Ben (Matthews - Thunder) involved? 

Well Bens a great friend of Brian's. They’ve known each other a long while. In fact when Brian’s not doing stuff he goes out and works with Thunder, organising them on the road. Remember when Ben isn’t working with Thunder he is a professional studio engineer; he is up on digital technology and works really quick. 

So next year sees the release of the new album? 

RW - Yes. Hopefully about March/April with the title “Animal Instinct”. Recording wise we have got five songs done. Then there is another five or six to do, so it will end up either ten or eleven tracks. There might be a cover song as a bonus track, you’ll have to wait and see.  

You’ve had some record label problems in the past so what’s your plan for this release? 

RW - This time we’re doing it all ourselves and we’re going to license it. We’re getting help from Danny (Bowes of Thunder) who is great at marketing He is in fact Thunders manager and he does a bloody good job of it. Nowadays writing wise we are all putting our two penneth into the new songs. It’s the best way to get a good result. At the moment Dean and I are having a “hot flush of creative juices”. It’s that time of our lives (laughs). This time we have financed everything ourselves. Sometimes I can’t understand how we ended up with nothing, at one time I ended up owing people money even after tours!

With all of the new songs on the go what sort of balance of material can someone expect at a Tygers show these days? 

RW - Well we have two new songs, which bring things right into “the now”. We’ve been playing Europe a lot and they ask for a lot of stuff off the first two albums, saying that we’ve just added “Raised On Rock” from the “Crazy Nights” album .In the next two or three months we’re going to add more to the set from that album. 

Which songs do the band look forward to playing the most in the set? 

RW - To be honest all of them.” Suzie Smiled” is going down really well. Dean and I have written a twin harmony guitar solo in the middle, which wasn’t there before, and it really works well. As long as I play the right notes we’ll be fine (laughs). 

How do you see your audience these days? 

RW - There are still the fans from the eighties and also a lot of new young fans are coming along. I’ve just bought tickets to see Y & T here at the Academy in October and I’m sure it’ll be the same for them. 

I think a lot of people will come along, as there is a certain heritage to a lot of rock bands these days. They will want to see where it all started. It really feels like classic rock is coming back. 

RW - I really think so but it won’t be as prolific as it was in the early eighties. It really reached a pinnacle in 84-85.You had programmes like The Power Hour on TV which was a cracking show, shame it was on at 3 am in the morning (laughs).  

Finally have you a message for the readers of HardRockHouse. 

RW - Well you guys are doing a great job and the readers know it’s a great place to be. What I’d say is if you see us playing in your area come down and say hello, we’re not shy. We make a point of coming out after the show as quickly as possible to meet as many people as we can. Let’s face it that’s what it’s all about.

Many thanks to Robb for taking the time to speak with HRH. You can read the review of the Newcastle gig via this link and to find out more about what the Tygers are up to you can visit their MySpace site via www.myspace.com/tygersofpantanguk