The Gig Cartel - Gig guide: Alabama 3 Cardiff Gate

Alabama 3 Cardiff Gate

(featuring Alabama 3 - Outlaw Hymns)

Venue: Cardiff The Gate

It has been a long, occasionally rocky, consistently thrilling highway the musical and spiritual collective known as Alabama 3 have navigated these past three decades.

With roots set across the British Isles, the band initially bonded in Brixton, South London, over a communal love of country, acid house and techno, their fervour fuelled by strong drugs, potent liquor and an anarchic, outlaw lifestyle. Co-frontmen Larry Love and The Very Reverend D. Wayne Love – aka Merthyr Tydfil-born Rob Spragg and Glasgow-raised Jake Black – first crossed paths at a Peckham squat party, with D. Wayne on the decks and a chemically enhanced Larry Love rocking up and singing Hank Williams’ ‘Wait For The Light To Shine’ over those electro beats. And if that twisted mash-up suddenly made sense to the pair, surely there were other free-thinkers they could get onboard...

This was all kicking off during the earliest years of the nineties, whilst the nation was beginning to fall to the Britpop phenomenon. Always regarded by Larry as ‘the bastard love-children of Britpop and a bit suspicious of all that flag-waving’, Alabama 3 began to coalesce as a musical force.

Though Larry Love plays down those initial musical ventures as ‘basically a fucking novelty act’, the cast of nefarious visionaries that began to hop aboard the rapidly accelerating bandwagon were genuine believers. The son of a Mormon preacher from South Wales and a man with a potent Glaswegian accent pretending to be American across a soundtrack of old-time blues and country with thumping techno beats: what wasn’t to like?

Over three decades on, nothing and everything has changed for Alabama 3. They’ve survived seismic shifts in the very bones of the music industry, illness, death, plague – or at least the ‘Rona pandemic – and pestilence, but that same core mission to have a good time, all the time remains. The Grim Reaper may have taken half a dozen of their kin, yet, as bodily entities come and go, the spirit remains.

The ascension to the great above of co-founder The Very Reverend D. Wayne Love back in 2019 was undoubtedly the toughest blow the band have been dealt, but deal with it they did. With the blessing of D. Wayne’s sister, Alabama 3 just ploughed straight ahead, though, to this day, Larry Love confesses to missing his compadre every single night on stage. ‘The pain of him going has very much fed into my singing. He was my dearest friend,’ the frontman also admits, ‘and I’ll always miss that dynamic. We’ll never get that back.’

‘A major philosophical grandee of the band’ is how Larry described D. Wayne to The Guardian newspaper at the time of his passing, yet everyone knows their connection ran way deeper.

A visual document of the first, tumultuous post-D. Wayne tour is currently in the pipeline. Shot by director Richard Parry, ‘Resurrection Tour’ will recall how the band attempted to reanimate the recently departed sinister Minister through AI, and the trials and tribulations that endeavour brought. Charged with triggering the spectral D. Wayne via his samplers and keyboard, band member The Spirit of Love was brought, at times, close to a crisis of identity and complete mental collapse by the undertaking, almost becoming a Colonel Kurtz for the 21st century. The documentary is set for release during 2027.

Brother D. Wayne may, sadly, be no longer of this earthly plane, yet Alabama 3 are collectively as productive as ever. Recent times have witnessed a ratcheting-up of touring and recording, with ‘Cold War Classics Vol. 2’ the band’s latest full-length release. A heavy tour schedule is, as ever, planned for the near future, as both the stripped-back, four-piece acoustic unit and fully blown, complete-band extravaganza continue to get tighter, looser, louder and increasingly more entertaining with every passing year.

January will see the band releasing ‘Outlaw Hymns’, a six-track EP of acoustic songs, all originals and mostly ballads, each produced by their own Devlin Love and recorded across three days in a haunted Kent mansion. The supporting tour should be a real treat for A3 fans old and new, with the band’s four-piece format heading on the road armed with these new tunes, a clutch of old favourites and hymn sheets for all in attendance. ‘The world that fucking sings together, stays together,’ according to their totemic frontman, a mantra about to be qualified by these live appearances.

A six-track country covers EP also looms on the horizon, featuring a clutch of stone-cold classics blending the genuine melancholia of outlaw country music with the band’s trademark techno throb. One can only marvel at quite how Alabama 3 will reinterpret, deconstruct and reconfigure the likes of ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and ‘Pancho and Lefty’, though Larry Love promises each reinterpretation has been handled ‘quite reverentially’.

And later in 2027, to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-raving electric band will be playing that debut ‘Exile on Coldharbour Lane’ collection in full to what is expected to be an equally electric congregation.

A multitude of figures – several extremely shadowy and some sadly deceased – have manned the ranks of Alabama 3 across the decades. At the time of writing, though, the current full-band line-up consists of:

Larry Love aka Rob Spragg – vocals, dance moves, Stetson and sunglasses.

Devlin Love aka Zoe Devlin – vocalist, full-time channeler of Janis Joplin and genuine ball of dynamite.

The Spirit of Love aka Charles Orlando Harrison – works in a bookshop, reads tarot and handles keyboard duties.

Rock Freebase aka Mark Sams – a Jimmy Page superfan guitarist who listens to nothing but Zeppelin but plays impeccable Delta Blues on cue.

Harpo Strangelove aka Nick Reynolds – harmonica player who, as son of the late Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, brings the gangster gravitas.

James Gulliver – on drums, the new kid, Ginger Bakeoff from Hastings.

The Wizard aka Greg Fleming – on sequencer, effects and bringing that acid house vibe.

The more things change, the more things stay the same with Alabama 3. Always concerned with bringing the party rather than surfing the zeitgeist, they’ve consistently operated right on the ragged edge of the mainstream, effortlessly swerving fashion whilst creating sweet, country, acid house music all night long.

Kids of the original rave generation are now coalescing around the collective, many possibly conceived while A3 played on mama and papa’s sound system. It’s a beautiful thing, and o