It’s three years since I last sat down for a chin wag with Cock Sparrer singer Colin McFaull and guitarist Daryl Smith. In that time they’ve been around the world celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the band, in the process visiting and playing in many countries for the first time, they also released a career retrospective spanning their years together rather conveniently entitled ’40 Years’ but still there’s been no new material, and hence no follow up to their last studio album 2007’s ‘Here We Stand’. So we felt it was about time we found out what is about to happen next for the band as they enter year 41, and who better to ask than Colin, Daryl and this time also along for a chat drummer Steve Bruce.

 

To set the scene you find us back at the band’s hotel a stone’s throw away from Blackpool’s Winter Gardens and I’m regaling the trio of Sparrer members with my experience of watching the Cockney Rejects live at this year’s Hellfest in France. Suddenly I’m off doing my best Stinky Turner impression in my high pitched faux cockney accent telling them about Jeff’s “line of gear” gag that went out live on French TV, something that is still being streamed on Arte’s website right now. I’m suddenly gripped with fear as the realisation hits me that these guys could think I’m taking the piss hits home. I’m not of course, I love the Cockney Rejects I always have, I just hope they get the gag….thankfully as I deliver the gag payload the room erupts in laughter and I’m suddenly in interview heaven as for the next 45 minutes, Cock Sparrer belonged to me, and this was what they had to say.

 

Daryl Smith (DS) : What you’d have had if Cock Sparrer had done that is “I’ve spent 41 years playing with these guys and I’m lucky I’ve got a bunch of musicians around me like this…Now I’m going to leave you in their capable hands for a short while as I’m off now for a lie down” (laughing)

 

Colin McFaul (CM) l: I have to admit that wasn’t a bad Cockney accent that John (laughing)

 

Well thanks for taking the time to talk with me again today guys…

 

DS: That’s alright John your times up now, (laughing) you had the 1 till 1:15 slot and you just fucking blew it (even more laughing) you ain’t in Hellfest now you know.

 

Okay, okay I’ll be quick (laughing), it’s been three years since we last say hear talking about all things Cock Sparrer, tell us what you’ve been up to in that time.

 

CM: Well, we’ve been out and played a whole lot of new places, ticked a few boxes in terms of things we wanted to do personally, played a few places we wanted to play personally, like the Full Force Festival in Germany, that was something we’d never done before and wanted to do. As I said to you before John we’re fortunate now that we’re in the position that we can, not “pick and choose” because that sounds arrogant, but we are getting offered stuff now that we perhaps wouldn’t have been offered a decade ago. So since we last spoke we’d tried to do as much of that as possible really.

 

And of course you had your 40^th birthday as a band which you celebrated in fine style with Rancid, which must have been a highlight for you guys?

 

DS: Yeah definitely, as you’ve just pointed out the 40^th anniversary was probably the most significant thing we did with a year packed full of gigs, both on our own and with Rancid, and I think the whole thing for us has been striking that balance where it’s so easy to just stay safe and play the same festivals, and of course we do do the Rebellions and Puck & Disorderlys because that is what we consider to be our family, it’s our scene it’s what we do, but we’re still not frightened to challenge ourselves, and we could have got a lot of flack for.

 

Steve Bruce (SB): Well we did get flack for it, it was the sort of thing we have done when we was kids playing in front of people we’d never seen before, and mixing with different types of genres of music you know, and it was really good to play those types of festivals like Full Force as it was exciting for us…and most of all it worked well.

 

DS: It did work well, especially with the Rancid side of things. I mean they’re good friends of ours, we know their history, we know they are genuine fans of this music, you do get your internet warriors who complain because, “you’re playing with a famous American band”, but the simple fact of the matter was I think we won a hell of lot of people over doing those shows. I think you had their crowd who hadn’t heard of us and some of our old crowd who probably had a prejudice regarding what Rancid stood for which when they actually saw them made them realise “hold on a minute these guys are actually alright”, especially when most nights the guys in the band were our front meeting the fans as fans. I think that actually benefited both bands, we weren’t trying to piggyback off each other, it was just two bands who are mates doing some stuff together and it went very well indeed. And like as Steve says with the Full Force Festival, that’s taken us out of our comfort zone, we didn’t know what to expect, and it’s great to still get that buzz at this stage.

 

SB: Plus it was good to still have to work an audience, because when we started we had about the first 5 rows of people who’d come to see us, then as the evening progressed you could see more and more people getting into it, the applause getting louder and louder after each song. And for me at least I felt like for the first time in a long time we had earned the encore you know. We weren’t going to do one, but we was called back so we was delighted to oblige. (Laughing) and it was very enjoyable.

 

So were you playing a dedicated punk stage at Full Force?

 

SB: Well there’s two stages but no genre specific stuff.

 

DS: They’ve got a main stage and then there’s a tent, the tent’s not got any sides though so it spreads right out and you can I guess get around 10,000 people in there. Fortunately we had a full house because it was pissing with rain. (laughing)

 

CM: What was really funny was, we were asked to do one of these meet and greet things, now we’ve never done that before, you want to meet us we’ll go and have a beer together, we don’t need to sit behind a desk to sign things, you know what we are like. So we get this message saying “Can you go over to the Metal Hammer stand to do a meet and greet?”, so we thought, “sure what not.” So we had this allocated timeslot to be there of 2pm, so three of us are there at five to two and there’s this huge queue of about 500 to 600 people. We thought “fuck me we’ve cracked this lot”, so we sit down and after the first 5 or 6 people we suddenly realise the rest of the queue is there for the band after us (laughing) our introduction to the world of meet and greet lasted a grand total of about 5 minutes.

 

You could never do that here though could you, imagine the line, it would be from here to Lytham.

 

SB: I couldn’t do it again full stop, it was very unnatural and uncomfortable.

 

DS: It’s not the meeting people though, it was the fact that it was like a production line, and very impersonal. As you know we’d much rather have a chat and find out people’s stories.

 

SB: Truth is we’re in the bar before and after a gig anyway so just come up and say “hello”. We’ll have our picture taken with you no problem.

 

Changing the subject back to the Rancid shows, I was at the Rebellion Xmas Party in Birmingham and I must admit I did wonder how you would follow Rancid….?

 

DS: We did. (laughing)

 

But you did follow them, and in some style, was it like that every night with you both trying to outdo or outplay one another?

 

DS: Nah we don’t really. I mean the first time we played with them, was out in San Francisco, and we opened both nights as it was their home town, and we were well up for a challenge, and went on and played our hearts out. They went on and just did their normal set, and afterwards it got around that the reaction may have been a bit lukewarm for them. The next night they were just superb, perhaps it was a sudden realisation that they were playing with a band with so many sing-along songs they couldn’t just do their normal set. I mean when you’ve got so many sing-along songs like the ‘Take ‘Em Alls’, the ‘What’s It Like to Be Olds’, and of course ‘England Belongs To Me’ and you find in your set half a dozen pints where the crowd just take over, suddenly you realise you have to up your game to follow that. So when they play with us they are always superb, I mean they’re great anyway but, and I don’t think they do it consciously, they just up their game.

 

There’s none of this rivalry, of “we want to blow you off stage”, it’s just a situation that brings the best out of both bands, I mean they do it for a living, they are a pro band you know, and at the end of the day the only people that benefit are the punters.

 

On that tour in particular it was great to see Tim Armstrong back to his normal self.

 

SB: Well after a few shows I think he got to understand we didn’t have any hidden agenda, and he could enjoy himself doing what he normally would do.

 

CM: I think the way we got the invitation to do those shows via Daryl’s relationship with Lars maybe could have made Tim a bit suspicious of us, and maybe question what the benefit of doing those shows was for Rancid. But once we met and played those first couple of shows it was never in question. And of course then there was the Birmingham and London shows over here.

 

Dom was at the London shows, and he wanted to rather sheepishly ask if you had any T shirts that weren’t in the Aston Villa colours?

 

CM: (laughing) Being Welsh you shouldn’t say that…sheepish…(This then cues the room to burst into hysterics).

 

Okay, now you’ve all had a laugh at our expense I’m going to ask you the question everyone wants to know the answer to, which is, when can we expect the next Cock Sparrer album?

 

CM: Again we talk about it John. There’s no definite plan at this stage though, but we are still keen on doing something, but it’s got to be right and everyone has got to want to do it. I think we all realise though that if we want to carry on as a band we have to have some new product out there.

 

SB: And the thing is we want to release a good album you know, I think we will record, whether it would be enough for an album, I don’t know.

 

DS: Things have changed though, the whole industry has changed, the days of a record company paying for you to go into a studio to then distribute the album and put it into the shops are gone, and right now it’s like “what shops?” There’s no Our Price, or Virgin, HMV’s on its arse, and if you’re a teenager everything is download, so it would be a bit foolhardy to try and do things how we would have done them in the past, but that actually works to our favour. We still have to have the quality control, and as Steve says “better no album than one under par,” and we don’t want to go in with half a dozen songs and then make the rest up with fillers. So if we have an idea and we jam it out and we’re happy with it, then we might just go in and do something that will be an EP, and then over the course of the next couple of years we gather enough stuff like that then maybe that could become and album, you know. The thing is, there is no pressure on us that says “you have got to write and album,” and again one of the beauties of the band in the her and now is we can do things on our terms, so I agree with what Steve and Col have said so far I think we would all like to record, and have fresh product out there, because that keeps you relevant as a band, but you still have to fit that in between drinking and gigging (laughing) which is quite difficult.

 

You mentioned the industry has changed, what do you all think of PledgeMusic?

 

DS: Me, I’m mixed, it’s fifty fifty. I think it’s great in one respect that people can have a community that can fund something, so I don’t disagree with it in principle, but having a foot in the other camp I’d actually feel uncomfortable going out begging to fund something I wanted to do, and also if you are a touring band and you work hard and you don’t spend all your money behind the bar, you can fund it yourself anyway. You don’t need big money from labels anymore. Plus if you’re a punter and you do it, what do you get back? Some people are really happy pledging money and getting a signed T shirt or whatever, but you have got to be creative. I know someone who did it and you had the chance to attend the recording session, and that’s really cool, but if we tried to do that I suppose we’d have to set up a special day, because you wouldn’t want someone there when you are actually recording, because you’re there to do a job, so you have to be creative.

 

I think in our scene it could kind of backfire a bit too, because you get a lot of people who snipe on the internet, and it does cost money to go into a good recording studio, and if your Pledge has suddenly hit £15K, you’re going to get people going “don’t they get paid enough?” and from that angle it could be as much a negative as a positive. On the other hand I think for young bands that have got a little following who are breaking out it is a great idea, however for established bands it can look like the begging bowl is out, you know.

 

I then go on to talk about Universal Music running Pledges to get albums repressed on vinyl, which the guys all tut at, before Daryl chips back in again.

 

DS: The problem is though the music industry has changed, but the industry itself hasn’t worked out how to make money from it, and they had a good run, because people signed these, and I’ve been looking at some of the paperwork these guys signed form back in the day, horrendous contracts back in the ‘70s. The pittance that trickled down to the band was next to nothing, so the industry had a good run, now they are losing money hand over fist. So what I try and remind people is that we haven’t all suddenly stopped liking music. We’re just consuming it in a different way, so you watch stuff on YouTube now, you download stuff, and a lot of people aren’t paying for the downloads, it doesn’t mean they stopped liking music. In fact it’s more punk rock right now than it ever has been, because if you’re a band you don’t need the industry anymore. Go out and do your gigs, sell your merch, and it’s now almost like in the old days a band would tour to sell and album, forget about the album now, your music is just the advert for your gig, so it’s kind of put the power back in the hands of the musician. If you’re a gigging band all the power to ya!

 

SB: And you’ve got to be good, it’s too easy to sound good in a studio, but the secret is being as good as that live, which is the way it’s always been for us, and we’ve seen only very little money out of record sales. That never really made a lot of difference to us.

 

So from records to books, Steve can we expect a ‘Best Seat In The House 2’?

 

SB: Never again (laughing), never again. Nah, one was enough, it started off as a bit of fun, and me being the collector of the band when we started playing again people started asking me for various bits and pieces, and I was losing it all. So all I really wanted to do was knock it all together in some sort of timeline and photocopy six copies for the lads and give them to them at Christmas, you know. Then thanks to Daryl finding out about this and thinking it would look good as a book, I’m suddenly writing a book.

 

CM: Then you had to write a book (laughing) which was never the plan.

 

SB: So then I sit there trying to write this thing and all I can think is “nah you can’t put this in, can’t that in” it would have been a mighty tome if I’d put everything in, and probably would have ended up in five divorces and ….

 

CM: You wouldn’t have any mates (laughing)

 

DS: Yeah the book that wasn’t written is the one you really want to read.

 

SB: So maybe in another 10 or 15 years when we really do say “that’s it” maybe….

 

And it’s been pressed up now in German, I noticed Randale Records have it for sale here right now.

 

DS: When we were approached by Randale for the licence for the translation, I just had this thing in the back of my mind of knowing Steve’s turn of phrase, (Steve is cracking up with laughter at this point in the background) how the hell is any of that going to get translated into German? And more importantly that they then understand it.

 

SB: Going back to your original question, you know when I first drafted it I gave it to the wife to read, and she came back with “I know a lot more about what went on than is in here” so then I knew we’d not have a problem with it, then I gave it to Col and none of the others, because if I gave it to Burge I’d end up with about six pages. And fair play there was very little that Col wanted to take out…

 

CM: Probably only one thing.

 

DS: Col so here’s your chance why don’t you tell everyone about that now. (The room once again explodes with laughter at this point)

 

So what about the mullet pictures from the Stick Of Rock Steve, weren’t you tempted to Photoshop those? (laughing)

 

SB: You know I’m more than happy with them, I’ve always been the same way. If someone gives me an embarrassing picture of me, I’ll always say “you think that’s embarrassing? Take a look at this one.” Because I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done in my past…..or very little. I just think it’s all funny. Okay so we had long hair and ridiculous clothes and….

 

DS: (quick as a flash) ridiculous bands like The Roosters (laughing)

 

SB: Yeah and yet we’re still doing it. Yeah

 

So the story regarding the Stick Of Rock and how you guys got back together thanks to one punter looking to cause a little aggro one night in the pub, is that all true?

 

DS: John none of it is true (laughing) all of the dates are wrong everything. (Steve is cracking up again at this point).

 

SB: Shut up….that is an absolute true story, a fella I’m still in touch with to this day in fact, just an old school skinhead who came into the bar, on a night I was putting metal bands on dressed in spandex and stuff like that, and this guy came into the pub late, the bands had finished but I welcomed him in for a drink as I would, and he’s started to perform a bit. So I’m thinking “I’ve let him in for free, and he’s taking the piss”, so I approach this guy and ask him to calm it down and he comes back with “ahhh you don’t like us because we’re skinheads”, to which I replied “don’t give me that I played in a band a lot of skinheads loved back a few years ago, a band called Cock Sparrer.” He turns to his mate and says “drink up”, then turns to me and asks “you open tomorrow?”,, it was a Sunday afternoon so yeah we’d be open, so he finishes with “okay let’s leave it for now, I’ll come down and see you then. So I’m like “fuck, this guys is going to do me”..so the…

 

CM and DS together: Spandex trousers started to fill out a bit at the back…(as once again the room erupts in laughter)

 

SB: Yeah the brown cords came out (laughing), but when he did return he just came straight in and said “Steve I want to shake your hand mate, your album ‘Shock Troops’ has been the soundtrack to my life, you probably will not understand how much that album means to me. ” And that was it by the next time he came back to see me I’d started putting on punk gigs, and then as he kept in touch things like the Astoria show had started to be offered to us, and the rest is how we are sat here today I guess.

 

DS: I had the pleasure of playing at the Stick Of Rock with my band at the time, and no one knew who Steve was, but we played a couple of times and then suddenly whispers go around about it being the pub owned by the drummer from Cock Sparrer, and we were like “really that geezer in spandex?” (laughing)

 

SB: Look I’ve never worn spandex, I’ll put my hands up to a lot of things but I’ve never worn spandex.

 

Daryl, didn’t your dad sign the band though originally?

 

DS: Yeah he did, yeah, but the thing is when we were playing down there and we finally got it confirmed Steve was in fact Steve from Cock Sparrer we were all like “fucking hell” because that was a band that had like mythical status, because no one we had ever known had seen them live back in the day. We all knew them from the Link Records reissues, and their weren’t a lot of pictures of the band, apart from like the stuff from ’77 because there was no internet, you couldn’t go online and as a result they always had this mythical status with us. Plus we always used to do a couple of Sparrer songs in the set, and once we realised it was Steve’s pub, he used to get dragged up, and I actually have a VHS video of him with his mullet singing ‘England Belongs To Me’ with my band and everything.

 

CM: Steve you need to get that off him mate…(laughing)

 

DS: Nah, YouTube that is where it going, so when the offer came through for me to do the gig with the band when they reformed to do the Astoria, Steve came up to me and asked “Cock Sparrer are reforming would you like to play with us?” now I thought he meant did my band want to support them, so I was like “Oh that would be great Steve, thanks mate”, and just wandered off. Now my mate at the time Mark who was the drummer in the band said “you’re a bit cool aren’t you? He’s just asked you to join Cock Sparrer and you’re like, alright mate whatever…” Suddenly I was like “balls”, I couldn’t just rush back and say like “Steve you know when you said…” (laughing)

 

SB: But you know it all came from watching him in his band, I just watched him and thinking “this kid would have been just right for Cock Sparrer” so it was really as simple as that. But it all came together during a period of transition, my mate Perry had moved in with me and he was into punk rock, and the pub wasn’t doing that well, so we started doing theme nights other than it just being a pub for long haired rockers. So we tried out a few reggae bands, and a few psychobilly bands, and as a result got friendly with the guys from Demented Are Go, who then started coming in just to have a beer, and from that came a few mini festivals, and when the Astoria gigs started happening I approached the promoter saying “if these guys want a Friday night warm up, my boozer would be more than welcome to have them”, leaving them my number. So that way we got a few in like 999, The Adicts and faces like that, and then the guy approached me about Sparrer doing a show, and I was genuinely shocked, wondering “who was gonna want to see us?” We’d never played our own shows, never mind play to more than a couple of hundred people you know. But again from what was what we thought could be a one off thankfully we are still doing this to this day.

 

I must have said this the last time we talked, but to me Cocks Sparrer’s music connects with the ordinary people on the street, and lo and behold here you are this year raffling your backdrop from your Saturday night headline show to help support a local charity that is helping the homeless of Blackpool. Streetlife is it? How did you become involved with that?

 

CM: Well, we’re always keen to do something for charity, and looking for good ideas about how we can help. To say “giving something back” might sound a bit twee, because we don’t think of it like that. Basically we see it that if you are in a position to help people that’s something you should do. We didn’t want to do just another gig, because we’d do that before, so Daryl came up with the idea of getting a special backdrop made, just a one off for this occasion, and we asked my daughter Hannah who is into all things charity related to find us a suitable and reputable cause for the money. She came back with Streetlife and came back to us explaining what they do, and who they help, so we got joined up and they gratefully accepted. But, you know, we particularly wanted to do something for Blackpool because we’ve had so many good times here it just seemed appropriate that we do something here. Plus we’ve got friends who live here, and they tell us Blackpool’s on its arse at the moment, so we’re happy to do this.

 

It seems tremendously popular so far. (It actually went on to raise almost £2,000 for the charity)

 

SB: Well we’ve been stunned so far by people’s kindness, we thought we’d end up having to have a whip round to make it up but we’re already on our way to £1,500. I did a stint on the stall yesterday and I was half prepared to get myself a book of tickets and start to go round the boys in the bands you know but in just a couple of hours we realise we didn’t have to sell them, they were selling themselves.

 

CM: In all honesty our concern was we might not raise any money, given everyone’s watching what they are spending on right now, but everybody’s responded and supported this fantastically so if you are reading this after the event and you donated we’d like to say “Thank You”.

 

DS: I tried to buy a tenner’s worth with every intention of if I won it I’d put it back online to raise more money, but Colin’s like “you can’t enter your own raffle, coz if you did win it you’d look like you rigged it,” but I was only going to….So I end up getting a bollocking trying to give ten pound to charity, (laughing) now that must be a first even for Cock Sparrer. So there’ll be someone on the street tonight cold and hungry and it’s all Colin McFaull’s fault.

 

 

Previously you told me one of the objectives you had for Cock Sparrer was to travel the world and play places you’d never been to, which you’ve obviously done. So who’s next to be conquered by the Sparrer invasion?

 

DS: Starts again next Saturday, when we are in Poland, somewhere we’ve never been before, although I’d just like to make it clear we’re not invading Poland okay, (laughing) so in the forty first year of Cock Sparrer we’re once again in a country we’ve never been to before, and the same for Finland in September. We’re also going back to Norway, and we’ve only been there once before. So still achieving things, and with the internet now the fan base has spread, and we know they can’t always afford a ticket to Rebellion or Punk & Disorderly, so we have got to go to them. You know if it’s 400 people in a club in Norway, those people are just as important as the good few thousand we will see us at Rebellion or whatever, so we’re getting off our arses and going to see them wherever we can…so.

 

SB: And the point now is we’re really enjoying it now too, we’re not worried so much about balancing a job, and family commitments, because let’s face it the clocks ticking and we’ve got to do as much now as we can, and that’s our plan.

 

CM: John As I’ve said to you before we’ve been very lucky because we’ve surrounded ourselves with people who have our best interests at heart, from the record companies we work with through to the concert promoters they are all looking out for us, even the guys who do our merch who obviously are in it to make a pound or two, that’s what they do, but they look out for us too, and when you’re in that position you don’t have to worry about other things and that allows you to just go out and focus on what you do.

 

SB: The merch guys just now came over to the raffle and said “we don’t want any tickets, here’s £100 from us”, and that is what Colin is on about you know.

 

DS: In this industry the worst thing to be doing is to keep flogging a dead horse, to keep playing when it’s obvious you’re on the way out, and recently I’ve seen a fair few bands that were childhood heroes of mine where I think “oh you should have knocked it on the head”, and we’ve always been really conscious that we don’t want to be that band where you are left thinking “that’s five tired old men up on stage there, knock it on the head guys,” and we’ve always said if that did start to happen we’d just quit you know, it’s not about us milking this, we do it because we enjoy it and the crowd enjoys it, as soon as the crowd stops enjoying it we will stop, but what seems to be happening right now is each gig is better than the last one, and suddenly we’ve kind of realised that this isn’t going to be stopped by people not enjoying this anymore the thing that will stop this is us. It’ll get to a point that for whatever reason, health or something we will not be able to do this anymore. I mean we’re not going to be 80 and playing this stuff are we! (laughing)

 

CM: What’s really great too is that the crowd is getting younger and there’s far more girls involved with this scene now than there’s ever been which is fantastic, but I do wonder what girls are doing coming to see five fat bald blokes wheezing about the stage (laughing)

 

DS: And that’s what’s great about Rebellion now, when it started out as Holidays in The Sun it was very much a heritage festival, ’77 punk and whatever, and of course that core thing has remained but look at the things like the New Bands Stage where seven of those that played last year are now on the main festival, plus they’ve branched out to bring in more American bands like Pennywise, Social Distortion and of course Rancid. So when you look at eth audience now, alright you still have the two thousand who used to go to Morecambe, but now you’ve also got a couple of thousand in the 18 to 25 age bracket, and that’s really healthy because they’ve discovered the likes of us you know, and that is what is keeping this going, otherwise it might just fizzle out, and it’s not it’s just getting better and better each year. You know everything else seems to be on its arse in this country right now, but punk rock really does seem to be doing alright thank you very much. There’s some great new bands, great new labels, with more vinyl being pressed than ever before I’m felling quite positive (laughing) I’m going to go stick that tenner on a horse rather than the raffle, I might have to go and have a lie down after that.

 

 

Guys just to finish this mammoth discussion off, as I know you want to get back to the Winter Gardens to catch a band you’ve promised to watch, I just wanted to say thank you for printing my question in the Rebellion programme, and harking back to something you mentioned earlier I’d like to ask a question that Norman Samson asked on your Official Facebook page about if you suddenly found out you couldn’t play in Cock Sparrer anymore, God forbid that ever happening of course, who would you want to replace you?

 

CM: That really is a great question that, but do you know the question we also didn’t put in I also liked was “during an interview what is the question you’ve never been asked that you’ve always wanted to be asked?” Now that one really got us thinking, what about “How do you keep your hair looking so good Colin?” Now that would have been nice.

 

DS: On a serious note no one would replace anyone, so that’s the end of the interview. (laughing)

 

Things didn’t really end there though because as we walked back to the Winter Gardens Daryl then went on to tell me who he’d like to play him in a film of Cock Sparrer, Colin explained why the band works with the six guys that remain at its core, and Steve…well we just talked about how awesome Walter Lure had been the previous night and then rather bizarrely of all things David Lee Roth.

 

I’ve said this before, but it really is a privilege to talk with Cock Sparrer, it’s not so much an interview in the truest sense of the form, it’s more like a chat down the pub with a few blokes who love the music they play and respect there fans 100%. Long may Col, Burge, Mickey, Steve and Daryl continue, and never mind England belonging to them, the way these guys are going by the end of 2014 the world will belong to Cock Sparrer. Now what a great place that would be eh!

 

https://www.facebook.com/cocksparreruk

 

Live photography courtesy of Dod Morrison

Band header and banner winner photos by Sam Bruce