In the middle of a late night rehearsal session, the Gruffs make time for a tea break and a catchup. It’s been eighteen months since ‘Drag A Hoof’, their musical foray into a dusty desert planet, was released and they’ve not been wasting any time. 

“We’re writing again, which is really exciting,” says guitarist Tim Jackson, before drummer Frank Creamer jumps in. “We’ve got the new album now. The title’s quite bizarre: we’ve called it ‘Smut Club’.” “I suppose all the songs are based on characters are going to this place, which is kind of like a seedy, diverse place,” adds bassist and lead vocalist Nick Plant. The Gruffs are laughing and joking through our chat, jumping in to finish each others’ sentences. Creamer goes on. “It’s a bit dark but also [the songs have] got happy vibes to them as well. We keep evolving into different things and we’ve gone quite a little bit trippy in [this album]but that’s okay. We’ve got rhythms…” “…and a bit of blues in there as well,” says Plant, “like a twenties to fifties club, that kind of scene.” The drummer continues:  “I suppose we pictured it like the old opium dems in the Victorian period. It’s kind of seedy and all sorts going on, and all kinds of different kind of characters. There’s different characters that the songs are about, aren’t there? Like we’ve got a song called ‘Wide-eyed Winkie’. That’s a dancer at this club. We got a theme together and we’ve worked all the songs about it and probably things from our past and stuff have come into it [as well].”

How do the Gruffs create the weird and wonderful sonic worlds which they inhabit? “It just comes,” says Plant. “It’s like one of us says ‘see?’, and then the other one will add to that and then it will flourish and then it just branches out from there.” “Yeah, with this one that we’re doing now, it’s how we did ‘Drag A Hoof’. We did a couple of songs and then we thought there’s a bit of a feel and a theme here, and we get chatting about it and that’s given us a vision for it. [Not all the songs are] about the same thing but when we’re writing and jamming and doing it we’ve always got this in the back of our minds, and I think we did that a bit with ‘Drag a Hoof’. I think it’s going to be even stronger on this.” “It’s a shared vision, if that makes sense,” Plant explains, “because we all talk about this place, and it’s almost as though we’re all going to this club and we’ve all got these little ideas about this club and we want to project it. It’s probably the projection of all our minds, I suppose. Isn’t it?” He asks Creamer, who agrees. “Yeah, and we’ve also put in a bit of that traditional Gruffs thing. There’s humour in there as well and it’s got that fun edge to it as well. A lot of the stuff has come a bit more simple but a bit more effective, so I think we’ve grown in that area as musicians as well. But I still love it, we all still love it, and the weirder the better, I say. We brought a couple [of the new songs] into the set and we’re still sort of polishing up on another two. But then we’ve got another four about all kind of in scaffolding. It’s just been built and just messed about out with. But we’ve got the formats of all eight songs. It’s come together quite quick. It’s going to be a good album if we can capture all the right vibes from the start of the songs that we’re doing.”

“We thought we’d do things a bit differently way round this time,” says Jackson. “We’d like to play all the new songs live to a few places before we go and record them, because they always change a little in that process. We’ve always done the other way round, and we thought, this time, let’s get used to playing them live first, and see what that’s like.” “When we play them live, when we go into the studio and record, we kind of carry that kind of live feel into the studio as well, and that confidence,” explains Creamer. “I think that’s what we’ve found as well. The ones that we go out and play live, and we enjoy playing, when we go into the studio, that kind of energy comes in when we start playing, and recording as well. So I think that’s one of the things we’ve learned. Because we usually be doing the opposite way around when we go in, and then we record, and then sometimes we can be a bit sort of a bit tentative.” 

The Gruffs’ sound is always evolving, and even as they look back on 2024’s ‘Drag A Hoof’, they can  already see change in their music. “For me,” says Creamer,  “it was  different from from the one before, that was ‘Cosmic Kafoodle’. ‘Cosmic Kafoodle’ took a bit longer, with a great different vibe. We got a feel and a vision[ for ‘Drag A Hoof’],  didn’t we? Like we’re doing with ‘Smut Club’, we made songs around that vision of him in the desert and put some of our own stories in there in riddles. I think it’s just another unique album because we went in a different direction.” “I think we experimented with styles more, yeah,” Plant agrees. “Yeah, I think that was it… just anything goes. We just play and if it feels right…” “We started to harmonise too…” “We were doing it with Alan [Wilson] in studio,” Jackson elaborates. “We said we want to do lots and lots of backing vocals because I think we realised that with the three piece if we did backing vocals it’s like adding another three instruments.  It gave us a lot of different accents and harmonies and things and I’m just really pleased with the way all that came out. It just worked really well and it’s going down well live. I didn’t play it for ages and ages after we got it because, you know, we’ve done it live, but then I got it out after a few months [and thought ] ‘actually, I quite like this, if I bought this I’d be pleased with it’. Nick, you did more, didn’t you, with the stories and the characters and the melody?” Before Plant can reply, Creamer jumps back in, remembering the process. “‘The magic hand’, we call it!” He does an impression of Plant waving his hand while playing bass, and the band dissolve into giggles. “When Nick gets ‘the magic hand’, he starts the rhythm and rhymes and we play to that…” “I was just thinking,  in the studio, when I was singing, wasn’t it? ‘Turn the lights off!’ [I said],  when I was singing because I could get into character and then the hands were starting to come out then and everybody was laughing at the hands…” “That appears in the new album! The hand! Yeah, it’s a song called ‘Rubber Glove…” – Creamer starts the rest of the Gruffs singing ‘yeah rubber hand, yeah rubber hand, yeah yeah’ in fits of laughter – “and so that’s an Elvis character with a rubber hand.” “It’s something going to sound like Elvis isn’t it?” Plant’s barely keeping a straight face as he sings ‘oh yeah, let me come to you with my rubber hand’… 

“We got the recording time with Alan for Christmas, didn’t we?” Jackson says, once they’ve calmed down. “And then we were in a bit of a rush to do it because we had trouble finishing them all off thinking, what’s the structure going to be? That took us quite a while, didn’t it? So it actually wasn’t all that easy to do. I’d say it was quite difficult. The most difficult one we’ve done.” “It’s like when the pressure’s on, you think, you know, we’ve got to produce it. Yeah, we had three days,” remembers Plant. “So when we knew that when we got there, we got to get it right with the changes. We wanted to do the backing vocals. We wanted to get it mixed. So that was a bit influential, I think, in the way we did it. Because, in a lot of cases, we just simplified stuff, didn’t we? We thought, ‘let’s not be clever. Let’s not be flashy. Let’s make something that works’. I think it came out well. It’s a space to listen to Nick’s rhythm and rhymes again. “We’ve got a format where we let this sort of keep a rhythm going,” continues Creamer, “but you can emphasise his character and his voice, Nick’s, with melody. And that’s come [out] more in the songs, hasn’t it?”

The drummer takes the final word, and it seems to sum up the Gruffs perfectly. “Just be happy. Maybe we’ll see you sometime this year in your area. Give us a view, new people, and see what you think. We’re out to do a few shows, and just get out there as different audiences as well, and just in trying to enjoy it at the same time!” If you’re ready to enter the weird and wonderful world of the Gruffs, there’s no better time than right now. 

Buy a copy of the Gruffs’ most recent album, ‘Drag a Hoof’, here