Who else sounds like a mash-up of Hüsker Dü and Richard Thompson, and writes about their mother’s death with unexpected and discomfiting candour? Only THE TUBS – Britain’s fast-rising alt-rock “primitives”. But what rewards can they dream of in music’s Age Of Austerity? “Twelve grand a year,” is all they ask of JIM WIRTH.

Robin Christian

SITTING IN THE DOWNSTAIRS BAR AT HACKNEY’S OSLO CLUB ahead of a support slot with Fucked Up, Owen ‘O’ Williams smirks slightly as he talks MOJO through his reasoning behind the stark picture that features on the cover of The Tubs’ fifiery new LP,Cotton Crown. “Part of me was like, if you have a black and white image of your mother who’s committed suicide, breastfeeding you in a graveyard, would you not use it as an album cover?”

The singer’s mother was Charlotte Greig, a music writer, broadcaster, some-time rapper and folk singer, whose much-admired 1998 debut LP Night Visiting Songs was rereleased on vinyl in 2023. Back in 1992, she released a single under the name Crow Country which featured the same image that is now on the cover of Cotton Crown. “It was sort of my first press shot,” says Williams. “My kind of Nirvana baby moment.”

The Tubs’ album was named after the Sonic Youth song that Greig covered on her 2003 album Winter Woods partly because it was one of her son’s favourites. It was also one of the songs played at her funeral after she killed herself in June 2014, when Williams was in his early twenties. On Strange, the unsettling closing song on Cotton Crown, Williams sings about finding out about “the method” she used to end her life in an article in WalesOnline, and quotes directly from the piece’s flat journalese: “Successful music journalist, mother of two, takes her own life.”

Roll out the barrel: The Tubs (from left) George Nicholls, Owen Williams, Taylor Stewart, Max Warren, Crystal Palace, South London, October 2024; (left, top) the sleeve for Crow Country, AKA Charlotte Greig’s 1992 single; (below) The Tubs’ new album, Cotton Crown .

Photography by ROBIN CHRISTIAN