In DEPTH: Too Many T's
The talented Too Many T’s release their new multi genre hip hop album ‘LA FAM ILL’ effortlessly showcasing their variety of styles and lyrical content. They take you through a journey of class warfare, the effects of climate change and the difficulties of maintaining friendships not forgetting some of their freakiest more comical music.
The diverse album also is also featuring a huge list of French Hiphop artists including: Atili, ASM, Chill Bump, Chinese Man, Djar One, Form, Hippocampe Fou, La Fine Equipe, MB14, Proleter, Pumpkin & VinS Da Cuero, Smokey Joe & The Kid and Yoshi Di Original.
Touring Europewide alongside Rhyme Sayers very own Grieves, this year’s collaborative ‘Secret Handshake Tour’ is one to remember. Jess caught up with Leon and Ross of ‘TMT’ to talk Tuk getaway drivers, brothels and freaky lyrics.
Ross: We’ve been rehearsing all day and then we remembered like oh shit we gotta release ‘Every Day People single!’ We’re just making a new set for the tour because there’s loads of new tunes in there. Trying to do some clever bits, mash some songs together and try and make it more interesting than just playing some tunes.
Leon: There’s a little track that we’ve just put together with Grieves too, it comes out soon. Basically, it’s just about all the shit you’ve got to deal with while you’re on tour.
Ross: There’s never enough time to do everything that’s the only annoying thing about tour really.
Leon: It’s difficult to manage the things that need to happen, stuff doesn’t stop being needed to happen.
Ross: We manage ourselves so there’s more to do than if we had an actual manager. We wrote most of the new album in Asia at the start of the year. The tours weren’t so hectic then, they were almost one gig a week. It was more travelling and a bit of chilling. We wrote quite a lot of it when we were on an Island in Vietnam, then the rest in India.
TUK TUK GETAWAY
Leon: That was our ‘Rap Year.’ The tour was jokes mate neither of us had been travelling before really.
Ross: In India in Bangalore there is no bars open after midnight, we got there really late literally at midnight and we really wanted to go for a pint. We found this really fancy hotel with an illegal after party, you basically had to pay the police off.
We went down there and thought, let’s just blag our way in. DJ Snake was playing in Bangalore that night so we put on American accents and told them we were DJ Snakes crew. It worked!
It was a really cheesy club and we were seeing what we could get away with, it was so bad haha!
Leon: We tried to put drinks on someone else’s tab and we got caught, the guy came into the crowd and found us. He was like the name doesn’t match up on this receipt, you need to give me your room key.
I told him It was behind reception and he started walking in front of us taking us there. He walked through this door and we just legged it through the side door, over this fence and out of there.
There was all of these Tuk Tuks waiting outside the front of the building, we still had beers in our hand and all the beer was frothing everywhere! We were running to the Tuk Tuk like - ‘Drive!’
Ross: ‘Drive!
Leon: ‘Fast! Drive!’ Security chasing after us.
Ross: We didn’t have much money on the tour sooo haha.
Leon: That day we’d already been stopped by the Vietnamese border control police saying we had the wrong documents. We had to pay 200 dollars bribe to get out of there. Then we got stopped entering India, THEN we realised I’d left my card in Vietnam paying the police off.
Ross: I lost my phone on the flight too.
Leon: So by the time we got there that night we were like, let’s go have a fucking drink.
Ross: We played a show in a place called Pi, that was fun.
Leon: One of the things we wanted to do a lot more was have our decks and our mics with us and just rock up. We were at a spot with no gigs so we just went round all the bars looking for the best one.
There was no one there when we started playing and out of no-where, around 100 people turned up and started going mental!
Ross: In Bangalore we played in a place where everyone was sitting down having their food. We were just at the side like a backing band, it was weird and not the type of music for it at all.
Leon: It’s not really lounge music but a few people stood up and started dancing and stuff.
Ross: The awkwardness of - are you gonna make us start the gig now?
SECRET HANDSHAKE TOUR
Ross: In terms of tour names, I think Grieves actually came up with it because we’ve never properly met him in this setting before so it’s kind of like a ‘blind date tour’ or something like that.
Somehow it came out as ‘Secret Handshake’ tour - we could make a sick handshake! Only people who actually come to the gig will know it. We’re going to try and instigate the world record amount of people to do a handshake getting the whole crowd doing the same thing at the same time.
Leon: We can’t disclose anything else Jess sorry. Hands will be involved.
Ross: Leon has met Grieves before though.
Leon: It was about three years ago probably, Andy Kettle who runs the PR linked me up, we host a radio show, So Ho Radio and Grieves was on a UK tour. Andy got in touch asking if we wanted to interview him for the radio show.
I met him there we had a chat but he was knackered, I was knackered. I think we both had a show the day before. We watched the show but left at the end so never got to hang out with him.
It’ll be good to spend time with him, it’s certainly the biggest tour we’ve done.
We’ve never done a sort of joint tour like this especially someone as hugely established on a quite big us label, so it’s a big step for us so we’re well excited about it. Slightly nervous but very excited.
LA FAM ILL
Ross: End of 2017 we went to Trans Musical Festival and our debut album ‘South City’ was released in Trans by Banzai lab, I think they saw us in Boomtown and wanted to work with us. When we released the album, they put us forward for this Trans Musicales which is big in the French industry.
The guy who runs the festival just really liked us, he’s been running it for 40 years now. He gave us a really sick slot, 2am at the height of the festival on the Saturday night to 3000 people. We did the show and it was full of industry people, festival bookers and stuff. We really fucking nailed the gig. That’s where It all started and we spent 2018 playing all over France doing 30 / 40 shows.
There’s thousands of festivals there it’s really weird, each town has its own sort of mini festival. They get like supplements from the council. Most of them are for free or some are just ten euro to see some really wicked acts. While we were doing all those festivals we met a bunch of the guys that are on the record.
Leon: The record didn’t start off as a big plan really, we just knew that we’d met some wicked people as we were travelling around. It was first just going to be an EP that we were going to do with a few French artists, then Banzai lab reached out to a list of people and everybody came back to our surprise. All of a sudden the EP was an album just through all those responses!
We had a few little other things through from artists who we haven’t actually met yet that Banzai lab suggested Hippocampe Fou for example.
The challenge was making it all sound like an album but with so many people on it, it was very difficult.
Ross: Even people like him he doesn’t do features really but he liked the vibe and like other artists on the album he has a real big following so it’s been proper humbling that everyone wants to get on it and it’s turned out like it has.
We also wanted an interlude; we both love beatboxing and we’d met MB14 at the UK beatbox champs. We reached out to him and he was just up for it we weren’t expecting him to do it really.
Leon: We were like, can you do it? Yeah. Can you do it tomorrow?
Ross: He just did this wicked little interlude so it just broke it up in the middle of the album. The outro was something I’d produced myself and I was just like yeah, this sounds like an outro. It’s just really chilled so we sent it to the label and they were like it’s perfect it’s a really nice way to end it.. okay alright let’s just put that on the end, everything just sort of happened.
Leon: We were quite lucky that everything sort of fell into place. Our studio is in London and a guy Bobby got all the stems from the producers and he kind of exec-engineered it to bring it all together and attempt to try and make it all sound like part of the same record.
FREAKY
Leon: When we got the beat for freaky on the tiny island Vietnam. In the beat there is a little sample ‘I wanna get freaky‘ which was the inspiration for writing about freaky things. Then we started writing freaky things which were quite sexually orientated.
Ross: The first draft was bad we we took it all out. We looked at the first version like ah mate we can’t put this out this is like 2000 Eminem stuff, no one needs to hear any of that. It was a fun exercise; can we write freaky lyrics which aren’t actually offensive. Just trying to write as much weird stuff as possible, trying to get as many visual things as possible that are just, weird.
Someone shared the track like, ‘this track comes with a warning, be warned.’ The whole first draft we took out no one needs to hear any of that.
Leon: I nearly took out the last line of my bit. I thought that one was almost a little bit too descriptive.
Ross: I think freaky will always be my favourite. We were first sent like 7 beats but as soon as we put that one on it was mad. It’s a completely different form, yeaaaah this is so old school and funky. It’s the sort of track that goes at the end of the set and people just get down.
We’re trying to do some choreographed bits for the set. Over the next couple of days, we’re going to try and flick a few in. It’s nice when people are just moving on stage. Freaky would be a good one because we don’t need to do much in the actual hook.
Leon: Ross as been practising his Arab Spring dance.. it’s star jumps. What you recon? That’s pretty hip hop init?
BROTHEL - QUEST
Leon: I remember writing one of the choruses, I’ll never forget - we were in Kampot in Cambodia. We went into our hotel but it turns out it wasn’t our hotel; it was a brothel. Our hotel was actually behind the brothel. After our gig we went back to our hotel and wrote the hook for ‘Quest’ sat in this seedy little hotel room behind a brothel in Cambodia.
Ross: We were both pretty drunk and had just played in a club called Euphoria, it had like silver p-leather (plastic leather) everywhere, fish tanks, the stage was the VIP section and we blew the speakers it was just mental.
The whole thing was mental, there was loads of hookers in the club with all the ex-pats. It was just really seedy and weird, the whole thing. It was quite a fun night, proper characters so we got fully steaming and wrote that track!
‘Quest’ is really convert to what the night was like. It’s a really deep track about missing our friends, sacrificing a lot for music and not seeing anyone basically. It’s also on a dub tip which isn’t something we do much either so writing that track really sticks out.
Ross: I guess there’s load of different parts to the album. Part fun part deep.
Leon: Cross genre alternative hip-hop album that blends some modern electronic with old funky guitar riffs, dub on there as well, it’s such a blend of genres.
Ross: You should have heard his brain pumping then! I guess it’s like a reflection of where we are at now. We’re politically engaged, I mean we care about what’s happening in the environment and at the same time we like to have a party and that escapism. There is a bit of all of that in the lyrics.
Leon: It’s a lot more grownup than our last album, it’s a bit more reflective. The social commentary is quite..
Ross: We’re just more boring now.
Words: Jessica Daly
Photos; Steaming Kettle PR and MGMT
These two are far from boring and will without a doubt alongside Grieves, deliver the most energetic tour hip hop has to offer. Their new album LA FAM ILL is out now and available to buy at:
https://too-many-ts.backstreetmerch.com/
Secret Handshake Tour
Thu, NOV 14 Stereolux Nantes, France
Fri, NOV 15 Salle des Fêtes du Grand Parc Bordeaux, France
Wed, NOV 20 Green Door Store Brighton, United Kingdom
Thu, NOV 21 Thekla Bristol, United Kingdom
Fri, NOV 22 The Castle & Falcon Birmingham, United Kingdom
Sat, NOV 23 Hyde Park Book Club Leeds, United Kingdom
Tue, NOV 26 The New Adelphi Club Hull, United Kingdom
Wed, NOV 27 Night People Manchester, United Kingdom
Thu, NOV 28 The Hug and Pint Glasgow, United Kingdom
Fri, NOV 29 The Cookie Leicester, United Kingdom
Sat, NOV 30 Colours (previously Hoxton Bar & Kitchen) London, United Kingdom
Sat, DEC 14 Salle des Fêtes Venelles, France
