Tony Wright (Terrorvision)

Tony Wright was quite literally ‘between a rock and a hard place’ when we spoke recently - he’d just finished building a wall and was about to head off to his karate lesson. “I became the National Champion last year for my belt. I’m only a blue belt at the moment but I were a green belt when I won it. And me lad, he won the under 10s National Championships for the same belt as well.”

Nine years ago ‘Tequila’ made the ex-Terrorvision frontman happy. These days martial arts, dry stone walling and his new musical project, Laikadog, are more likely to make him feel fine. By becoming a professional waller after Terrorvision split up, Wright not only found a fulfilling way to earn a crust but also discovered a fresh musical direction. “We’ve done two albums now with Laikadog and I’m always inspired by the stuff around me. I must admit when I were in London I was aware of the fact that I was uninspired. If you only ever get up at two in the afternoon and hit the bottle sometimes you miss a lot of it so it were good to get up on tut moor. It were good to meet real people that didn’t have egos and get some hard work done, start grafting so you were tired at the end of the day.”

The moor in question was in Yorkshire and whilst working atop those blustery hills Wright chanced upon Paddy, a bass guitarist with a similar affinity for music. Within weeks they had created Laikadog, a “very bluesy” collective that was “less straight forward rock and slightly more rock & roll”.

The name derives from the famously doomed space-hound and Wright likens the band to the unfortunate canine. “We were about as clued up as a dog in a rocket. The dog didn’t know what any of the buttons were doing and it were floating around in outer space, not knowing which direction, not knowing what were gunna happen next. That’s pretty much us still to this day”. Despite this connection Wright displays nothing but admiration for his Laikadog bandmates. “Six months before I met Paddy I was sat at the Q Awards with a Spice Girl. There were more talent on top of moor that day I were building dry stone wall than there was sat at me table at the Q Awards, and I just thought ‘this is not what I’m about’. I’m not really about celebrating something that just celebrates itself. I’d rather go out and celebrate what it is all about and play it. And so we formed a band and we got like a load of gigs.”

Known for his caustic sense of humour (he was a regular guest on Nevermind The Buzzcocks), Wright confesses to being bewildered by the industry’s love affair with “up-your-own-bum, miserable piano-based dirges – your Snowplays, your Cold Patrols, your James Blunt. We’re dropping bombs on Afghanistan and Iraq and then coming home to listen to some sqeaky mouse singing sixth form lyrics about being beautiful. I just do not get that whatsoever.”

Indeed, it seems that this disenchantment with the industry could have ultimately caused the death of Terrorvison in 2001. “We’d sort of done what we had to do, as far as making records was concerned. We’d said everything that we were going to say as four people because we’d been together for 14 years. That’s two seven year itches, that’s quite good. We weren’t the same people as we were when we started and you grow in different directions, don’t ya? We all had different things we wanted to do and we sorta said that’s Terrorvision run its course recording wise. To tell you the truth, I think a lot of bands should split up. There’s no point becoming a parady of yourself. Like flogging a dead horse. I mean, Terrorvision were never a dead horse but I think if we’d carried on then that might’ve been the case. We did our own thing, we always did. It slightly started to stain me views on things. It were like when we first started everybody around us had enthusiam. 95% of the people that we worked with and alongside had the same enthusiasm as we did. At the end we didn’t have that enthusiasm. I prefered working with the people who like rock and roll, they weren’t bothered by that side of things.”

Regardless of how Terrorvision were fated to split, Wright still rejoices the times spent with the band and also looks forward to the gigs they are set to play in the future. “Everything were brilliant because we got told all the time that we were wrong. Rock magazines at the start would say ‘You cant dance to heavy metal, you’ve got to just wear your leathers and shake your head’. The indie magazines would just say ‘You’re not indie, you are corporate rock whores’. There were all these people saying this and then one day we walked out on tut stage at Reading and there were 30,000 people singing along. They had no interest in making money out of Terrorvision, there was nothing but the fact that they liked what we did and we liked what they did, and that’s why we did it really. We often get together and do the odd gig, in fact we’re doing three this year. Now, it’s just going out and getting all them people that keep going ‘Ahh, do another gig, do another gig’. So it’s often like ‘Yeh, alright then’, but we have a right good party and there’s no pressure on us.”