“I lived and breathed every word”: Billy Sullivan on The Spitfires and what’s next – interview

Louder Than War’s Jon Garland catches up with Billy Sullivan, driving force behind The Spitfires, to reflect on the band’s career at the time of the release of the posthumous Live At The Electric Ballroom album from their farewell show earlier this year

With a final flourish of feedback The Spitfires departed the stage at the Camden Electric Ballroom one Saturday last February, splitting up as they did so. From that moment on, the band were no more, having given everything over a decade but finally running out of road. To mark the release of the blistering live album from that gig, Live At The Electric Ballroom (Catch 22 Records), it seems fitting to look back on the band’s career. With that aim in mind, I caught up with Spitfires’ main man Billy Sullivan, now embarking on a solo career, finding him in reflective but upbeat mood.

Louder Than War: so what did Billy make of the final show?

Billy Sullivan: “I initially didn’t want to do it”, he confesses. “I had really mixed feelings about it: the fact we’d sell a lot of tickets and it would be some big event seemed a bit cheap to me at first. The Spitfires never did anything we didn’t want to, regardless of money or sentiment. At the time I also thought there was nothing to celebrate, what was done was done. I didn’t need or want the pat on the back. However, I was convinced otherwise and it was nice to play a gig in a big-size venue to people from all over the country and even abroad. And to see that the band really meant something to people”.

Sullivan’s decision to do the gig proved right. From the opener Disciples onwards, Live at The Electric Ballroom vividly captures not just that night but what The Spitfires were all about as a live act. Soulful, tight, sometimes light-hearted but also a bit rough around the edges, the Spitfires could generate enough electricity to solve any energy crisis. What strikes me about Live At The Electric Ballroom, though, is the diverse range of musical styles that made up the career-spanning set which highlight Sullivan’s development as a songwriter. As a memento to the band’s final show it serves its purpose very well, but as a live album in itself it’s outstanding.

Was Billy himself pleased with the live record that came from it?

“We were all pleasantly surprised I think. We didn’t plan to record it for any reason other than personal documentation. It’s straight through the desk, the mix that was done on the night with no overdubs whatsoever. But it just sounded great and we thought it deserved to be heard, exactly as it happened and sounded to be in the room that night”.

Over the course of their career the band achieved a lot, developing a sizeable fanbase across the UK and beyond. Their 2015 debut album, Response, was an edgy and gritty affair, a hybrid of punk, ska and mod that created a unique sound that the band developed and expanded on as they grew. It garnered them an audience that supported them vociferously, attracted by the band’s political stance, tunes, incendiary gigs and mod/skin-influenced style.

This, in some ways though, proved to be both a strength and a weakness for The Spitfires. The audience they attracted was a loyal one but mainly an older one, drawn by obvious parallels between the band and that mighty behemoth The Jam, out of whose shadow the band struggled to escape early in their career. Comparisons between the two were obvious, but it was always unfair to suggest The Spitfires were merely in thrall to The Jam: there was so much more to them than that.

Frustrations continued when their second album, 2016’s A Thousand Times didn’t pitch them forward in the way they were hoping, despite it signalling considerable development for Sullivan as a songwriter. While certain sections of the music press were very sympathetic to what the band were trying to achieve, radio support proved hard to garner, and the band began to enter a sort of limbo existence – loved by their fans, rated by some critics, but never flavour of the month for radio stations such as 6Music. They didn’t seem to quite fit in, their ‘old-fashioned’ values of passion, hard graft and musicianship seemingly out of step with an industry more interested in guitar bands with high social media profiles and a kind of intellectual, arch middle class ‘cleverness’.

As Sullivan reflects: “The music industry makes no sense to me whatsoever. And it sucks all the fun and excitement out of what you do as an artist. Everything’s so calculated and what you produce as an artist is bottom of the list. No one actually cares about the song or the album, it’s getting the right plugger or PR or making sure your social media is alive at all times and content creating. Going to the right events, being friends with the right people. Projecting some false persona to make you seem interesting and relatable, when it’s all just bollocks. I’m a songwriter and I want my songs to be heard by as many people as possible – do I want to be seen as cool and quirky and some sort of big personality? No I do fucking not. But there’s no room to push against that, it’s conform or give up”.

Warming to his theme, Billy, with an admirable degree of honestly, states: “I don’t think we ever did [fit into the music biz]. The band evolved quite a lot from album to album so musically I don’t think anyone could pin us down. And if they did try to, it was always wrong. We always felt like uninvited guests at a party. When we’d do festivals, I think other bands and promoters etc didn’t know what to make of us. We were such a close unit too, we never let anyone in”.

Undaunted by their status as outsiders, The Spitfires continued to tour frequently and Sullivan produced some of his very best material for 2018’s Year Zero, a leap forwards for the band in terms of musical ambition, but failing to attract the wider attention it deserved. By the time of 2020’s brilliant Life Worth Living – perhaps the band’s musical highpoint – Covid had intervened, putting an end to gigging, the band’s major source of income, and pulling the rug from under the record’s feet, much to Sullivan’s frustration: “I think it’s such a great album and I thought the artwork was great and everything just came together. It was my first time working with Simon Dine and he just took elements of the band’s sound and pushed it to the next level. Unfortunately we then had a global pandemic but what can you do?!”

Around this time the band were having other issues, too, causing Billy a degree of disillusionment: “I think I’d just had enough really. I’d spent an awful long time making the last Spitfires record Play For Today, which I was determined would be our masterpiece. The record was meant to be where the band evolved, musically and lyrically. It was meant to crush all previous conceptions and get us taken seriously. But it seemed to baffle our record label, who I assume instantly regretted signing us for it. So the process was slowed down immensely, with all momentum and excitement taken out, basically to bring the band to breaking point”.

“Maybe I was being too clever for my own good and no one was getting the references or humour”, Sullivan suggests, “or equally it could be down to narrow mindedness. I still completely stand by the album and think it’s our strongest and most varied piece of work. Matt [drummer Matt Johnson, in the band from the start] left the summer of 2021 and afterwards I struggled to recapture the chemistry between the band as a live unit. After a couple of gigs up north at the end of 2021, I’d had enough”.

So it was no surprise when Sullivan pulled the plug on the band in December 2021 – there was no real way forward. In the face of music industry indifference, record label politics and internal band issues, The Spitfires had simply run out of steam.

Reflecting on the band’s career, Sullivan says he has few regrets, aside from the occasional album track, video and outfit choice. For him the band was all-consuming: “I lived and breathed every word, the attitude, the politics. I was the same down the pub as I was on stage. It dictated every aspect of my life and moulded me as I grew from a teenager to an adult”.

Since splitting The Spitfires Sullivan has since set out on a solo career that’s already seen some notable highlights, including the singles I Will Follow and Running Out of Time. His debut album Paper Dreams is scheduled for release on 10th March 2023 with a UK tour the same month. “Musically”, Billy says of his album, it’s “a bit more what I’m into – it has a 60s garage edge to some of it – and lyrically it’s a bit more personal than what I’ve done before. I was able to open up lyrically and write in a way I’d always struggled with. Must be an age thing!”

It can’t, though, have been an easy decision to knock The Spitfires on the head after all the blood, sweat and tears that were invested into the band over the years. There was sweat and indeed a few tears the night of that farewell gig at the Electric Ballroom last February, too. As the band left the stage I couldn’t help but feel that while they hadn’t got the music biz breaks they deserved, they’d still left a whole host of great tunes and memories. Their legacy includes a litany of gigs whose fire and intensity are captured so well by Live At The Electric Ballroom, as well as a quintet of fine studio albums, and a canon of songs – check out the extraordinary 4am and Return To Me for tasters – that are testament to Sullivan’s genuine songwriting abilities. But somehow this wasn’t enough for a band out of sync with contemporary music biz tastes and, in the end, out of road too.

Buy Live At The Electric Ballroom: Stream here

Pre-order Paper Dreams by Billy Sullivan

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Words by Jon Garland, you can find his author’s archive here

Photos 1 & 3 by Tony Briggs:  2 by Simon Tang

Source: louderthanwar.com