Over the last few years Tigertailz  have had some really high and really low points. The successful "Thrill Pistol" album was released in 2007, but sadly their inspirational bass player Pepsi Tate passed away later that year. Kim Davies exclusively caught up with the eponymous Welsh rockers Jay Pepper and Kim Hooker to see what the future holds for Tigertailz.

Here in London, Paris in June with Y&T, and a US debut at the inaugural Rock Gone Wild festival in Iowa in August. How has this international mini tour come about?

JP: Well we get offered stuff all the time really and we just pick the shows that we want to do to be honest. The ones that seem the most appealing we go for and the ones that seem less appealing we just don’t do.

KH: We’re offered more shows than what we actually end up doing.

Kim: Because you don’t actually do many shows a year do you?

KH: The fact of the matter is we’re not actually here to take everybody’s money, like many bands do now these days, we’re here to do things we enjoy; you know we never turn anything down with Y&T coz they’re such good friends of ours. If they offer us anything then we always take it coz we talk to them all the time really, Y&T, more than any other band there is.

Things appear to be going well for the band at the moment so can the Tailz fans prepare to be bombed with any more tour dates?  

KH: We don’t look that far into the future. You know as I say, we just take gigs as they come. I mean certainly, there are one or two that we haven’t announced yet, which you know that we’ll possibly do. But it’s very early in the year to be saying this. It’s only March. I mean certainly up to this point we’ve booked more shows than we have in previous years; I mean normally we get to April/May or something and there’s no shows actually booked but it’s different this year, so there’ll probably be more than we usually do this year.

JP: It’s all about bands have different reasons for doing it and ours is just to have a crack and enjoy it you know. So if the right shows come up, like the Ace Frehley gigs last year, which we really wanted to do, then we’ll do them and if something else attractive comes up then we’ll do it.

KH: If it was with the right band then, you know, maybe we would. The Ace Frehley thing, you know, ever since I was 14, I was a major Kiss fan and to be offered that, I could have done it myself with like a bass drum on my back as a one man band. He was fantastic. It’s just such a shame that on the first night I drank a bottle of Jack Daniels and it finished me.

JP: We had to carry him back to the hotel! 

What is it I hear about a new Tailz album in the making?

JP: Well we’re writing songs at the moment, demos and stuff, and when we’re ready to record something, whether it will be a full album we don’t know yet, we’re still sitting around talking about it. We’ll get a bunch of songs that we’re happy with and we’ll see how we’ll release them. My view, with the whole way with the digital age and everybody downloading individual tracks, we don’t know whether an album is the right way to go about it; whether we release two mini albums or EP’s or something, or two or three products rather than just a traditional kinda ten song album. It’s almost had its day really. We’ll get the songs first of all, listen to some and demos and stuff and we’ll take it from there.  

KH:  I’m working on five at the moment, which we kind of do them and then step away from them for weeks and then go back to them. So you know we certainly know we’ve got enough songs to do a whole album. Something we normally find we do an album, then we may listen to it six months later and you think I wish I’d done that bit differently. We’re not going to do an album for the sake of doing an album, we’re certainly not. When the next album comes out in whatever shape it is, which will be this year, I would think, you can be sure that we will be, we have to be happy with it. It won’t just be there because we need to stick an album, it’ll never happen again. Normally we’re happy with probably with 70% of an album but there’s always something we find...we’re lucky, we thought every album we made though was great. We don’t want any fillers on the next album, I’m sure there won’t be.  

JP: I think that’s the problem when you stick out a traditional ten track album it’s hard for people to get through that. You know the bands I’m into I can’t ever say I sit there and listen to ten songs. I don’t know, we’ll write the songs and see how we’re gonna release them.  

KH: Certainly if we were to get to eight, it wouldn’t be a case of well we need another couple of songs to put on that are not very good. We’d go away and write another two songs, which we’ve got the luxury to do it ‘coz we can take as much time as we like, ‘coz there’s no-one telling us what to do. And you know back in the ‘Bezerk’ days there was record company pressure for a certain kind of record erm, there was pressure with the ‘Thrill Pistol’ album ‘coz Pepsi was ill, you know that had to be finished. Certainly the next album there’s no pressure whatsoever. So it’ll sound heavier than anything we’ve ever done, I can tell you that.     

When can we expect to see the Tailz dvd ‘Blast’ released?  

KH: That’s in development.  

JP: That’s interesting; this is hot off the press. We’ve had a complete rethink about that one. Well after thinking about it long and hard, and the actual magnitude of trying to get all those years of footage into an edited DVD, it’s huge in itself so we decided were actually going to set up a separate site, call it ‘Tailz TV’, and put all the clips on there. So A, it’s free and it isn’t a traditional DVD but it’s like a vault if you like.  

Kim: Like You Tube?  

JP: Yeah it’s exactly like that, but just our stuff. And so people, coz what happens when you buy a DVD you watch it once and then it goes in the drawer and you don’t ever look at it again, or once every blue moon you do. So this way it is there for everyone so the whole world can watch it and it’s free. So that’s what we’re gonna do. We’ve just actually signed a deal to do that with a web company who’ve set it up.  

KH: And hopefully we can put stuff up there, which is literally like an hour old, you know from shows and stuff. That’s the idea. You know the truth was Pepsi started putting this together and he just didn’t finish it and you know we were given a bag with so much in there and we started going through it. I mean A, it wasn’t very pleasant, bits of it, but there was just so much of it and we didn’t know what we were doing. He did all that.  

JP: There was absolutely tonnes and tonnes of it.  

KH: We were saying that bit’s good, that bit’s good, and there were hours and hours, and we thought well we couldn’t condense it into something small enough. So you know stick everything up there and let people flick through it.  

JP: So that’s what we’re gonna do.  

What is your strangest fan story?   

JP: I remember a girl ran away. Do you remember that?  

KH: Yeah.  

JP: That was on all the national news.  

KH: This was on the Bezerk tour in 1990. It was in the press they were looking for this girl and no-one knew where she was, and she was actually from Wales. But strangely enough we were sat in the music producer’s office one day and her father came in looking for her and we just happened to be there.  

JP: She turned up at some gigs as well!  

KH: She actually turned up. I remember we played at the Astoria on the Bezerk tour and this girl came round the back and she said “Can I have a kiss?” so of course I said “no!”  

Kim: Yeah right! (Kim and JP laugh)  

KH: Her name was Ann I think and I said, “Jesus the whole country’s looking for you”, and she was just stood there and she just disappeared into the night again.  

Kim: You never met her before then?  

KH: No, I just turned around and she was there. The strange thing, this was the freaky thing, was our producer who’s been with us forever, a guy called Tim Lewis, he rang me at my house and he said “This girl has just knocked my door.” He had a studio in Cardiff, “This girl has just knocked my door looking for you,” and I knew it was her straight away, and he said “Well the thing is she’s been to where you live and asked the postman is there a guy with long black hair lives here.” And this girl was 14 or 15, and he said she well was actually miles away from where I lived. He said “The thing is she’s got all your phone numbers; she’d said ‘I’ve got their numbers’ and he said “Well that’s wrong.” But she did actually have our phone numbers.

Kim: More of a stalker than a fan?  

KH: Well it was quite worrying at the time but I wouldn’t mind now, I’d be quite flattered by it.  

JP: I don’t know what happened in the end.  

KH: She literally showed up at the Astoria and said, “I’m so and so” and I thought well everybody’s looking for you, everybody, the police, everybody. It was in all of the papers she was missing and she just disappeared and as far as I know never to be seen again. Well she was OK in the end obviously but we certainly haven’t seen her.  

What is the best rumour you have ever heard about yourself?  

JP: That we were any good! (We all laugh)  

KH: They’re all quite boring really. That I like red wine, I hate red wine! Well I’ll drink it if it’s free of course, but I definitely prefer white. There was a rumour that I was really pissed at the Ace Frehley gig in Sheffield!  

What song makes you think, ‘Damn I Wish I Wrote That’?  

KH: Quite a few to be honest, quite a lot of the Foo Fighters stuff.  

JP: Patience by Take That; absolutely brilliant song.  

KH: A lot of the first Velvet Revolver album.  

What happens during an average day for you?  

KH: I’m a very early riser, probably 04:30am. Sometimes I’ll wake up at 3. When everyone else I know is asleep and I kind of get up, I’m quite a strange one. In actual fact ‘Miles Away’ on the Thrill Pistol album I remember writing at 2 o’clock in the morning, woke up and wrote that. So there you go.  

Do you listen to your own music on your Ipod?  

KH: I listened to ‘I Can Fight Dirty Too’ the other day and I haven’t listened to that since probably 1992 or something. And to be honest, I was quite surprised most of it is.  

JP: I struggle to listen to our own stuff to be honest, I really do. I do listen to it if I stumble across it, in my car I’ve got an Ipod player.  

KH: I listened to ‘Long Live The New Flesh’ yesterday coz I couldn’t remember the words! You know I was singing it to myself and thought I’ve got no idea what comes next. I think we’ve made good albums and I like all of it really.  

If you had one question and one question only what question have you always wanted an interviewer to ask you, but they never have?  

KH: Why was I voted most world sexiest man?  

Kim: Just in Wales?  

KH: Wales is the world!  

JP: World’s sexiest Welshman? It would be your job to ask!  

It would not be a true Tailz interview without talking about bass player Pepsi Tate. Please tell the fans one untold story about, or that sums up, ‘The Boy’.  

KH: Funnily enough we were just talking about him just before you came in.  

JP: We left him in London once and he stayed there for three days!  

KH: One of the funniest things I remember is we were on the Bezerk tour and we’d come out of Birmingham and we didn’t know where he was, and I was sat on the front of the tour bus, all just pissed, and talking to the driver and an Escort pulled up in front of the bus with a load of girls in it. And I could see someone in the back going like this (waving) and he flagged the bus down and we thought have we left him there? And he got on the bus absolutely pissed; just walked on the bus and has said, “Has anyone got a bottle opener?” Gave him the bottle opener and he got back off the bus and just jumped back in the car with the girls and disappeared!  

JP: I remember I went somewhere with him and I was following him to this multi storey car park and he used to drive this Metro. He had this terrible fucking Metro back in the day and he was going up and up and up in the multi-storey car park; and as he was going round he fucking clipped the fucking curb and whacked the whole car off the suspension and it just dropped down onto the fucking wheels and he couldn’t go anywhere. It was hilarious.  

KH: Another time as well, when he first passed his test, and he was in the Metro and we were driving through Barry, old Gavin And Stacey country, and he was in front of me on the traffic lights and I was behind in my TR7. He was always breaking down in his Metro and he broke down on this pedestrian crossing. So rather than get out and help him I just sat there beeping my horn! And he had to jump out of his car and push it out of the way. I was just leaning out of my window and shouting “Get out the way you Wanker!”… When we were really kicking, and he hadn’t passed his test, he’d jump on the train with this bass in his hand, no case, he’d just sit there. But you know, funny enough, we were just saying it’s hard to believe he’s not around anymore.  

JP: It sort of hits you now and again, you know, you get the scale of what sort of happened really. It’s hard to kinda take it in, how enormous it all is. We went out Tuesday night with his missus, Shan, but it was good as well you know, something positive.  

KH: It was his birthday on Tuesday, March 10^th.    

JP: It’s like, what do you do?  

KH: What do you do, give up or carry on?      

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