Tom Hamilton’s style icons aren’t those of a typical Gen Z kid. “Lee
Brilleaux in Dr Feelgood, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters was dead sharp,
Chuck Berry’s always pretty cool...” the 22-year-old singer muses in
deadpan Northerner tones. “Steve Marriott’s cool, Marc Bolan obviously
[gestures to his own cloud of dark curls]. It’s important to look like
a band. We try to look like we’d be in the bookies in the seventies.”
More importantly, he and his compadres have the songs to back
up the style. Occupying a buzzy, sugar-pumped space between
millennial-era guitar bands (The Hives, The Struts etc) and classic
rock’n’roll (e.g. The Small Faces, The Beatles, Humble Pie...) Little
Tr ig ger s only really care about one thing: making energetic guitar
music, regardless of where it comes from. It’s old-school but “with
a modern-ish spin on it”, informed by years spent ingesting their
parents’ records, plus Nirvana, Britpop, metal and more.
“Elvis Costello was one of the big ones for my dad,” remembers
Hamilton. “Humble Pie, Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart... He showed
me Quadrophenia and that got me into the whole mods thing.”
It all comes together on their debut album, Loaded Gun,
a gloriously hooky feast of winning choruses, punchy guitars and
carefree lust for life. It’s not rewriting any rules (“It’s mainly about
girls, innit?” Hamilton says), but it’s not lazily rehashing themeither, with the likes of So Fine and Giving It Up sounding like Jet and Rival
Sons crossbred with The Who, in a sweaty club, in their twenties.
The first incarnation of Little Triggers emerged in 2015, when Hamilton
and guitarist Lowell Carragher were studying at Liverpool Music Academy.
A couple of years later the current line-up (completed by bassist Chris
Carragher and drummer Jay Radcliffe) was sealed. After an underwhelming
first gig in Liverpool, the band went on tour in France, and that’s when
things started cooking, peaking with a 4,000-strong festival crowd.
“That was the best night of my life probably,” Radcliffe says,
smiling. “There were mosh pits, stage invasions. We loved it.”
So far, so glamorous, until you hear about the living quarters on
tour: “We played in a tent full of gypsies the first night, and slept
in a caravan and got bitten to death by mosquitoes. And then the
rest of it we all shared a bedroom in some old woman’s house. She
didn’t speak English but she was really cool. And there was the
dodgy one where we stayed. I think it was a converted horse box.”
This French liaison continued when they opened last year for
Iggy Pop in Cognac – turning heads and paving the way for a busy
2019, and a second album that’s “pretty much written”. It was
a success, from what they remember anyway.
“It was sponsored by cognac companies,” Hamilton says. “Our
sound-check was at two, they started getting the cognac out at
two... I remember playing and it was great, but that’s about it.” PGLoaded Gun is out now via Suit Yourself Records.Liverpool’s hottest new export on opening for
Iggy Pop and sleeping in, erm, horse boxes.Little Triggers
“It’s a hand-me-
down from my dad,”
says Hamilton of
Performance. “He went
to see Humble Pie in
the seventies, and he
bought that record and
he’s given it to me. Steve
Marriott’s vocal stands
out for me... and the
intensity and the groove
of the live performance.
We’ve tried to capture
our live vibe on the
record in the same way.”FOR FANS OF...JOH
N^ L
ATH
AM
/PR
ESS
“It’s important to look like a band. We try to look
like we’d be in the bookies in the seventies.”
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