Van Tramp

Welcome to Spirit River, where the plains stretch forever and the Northern Lights fill the sky. Here in the wide open spaces of Northern Alberta in Canada, the native tribes made peace many moons ago. This is the epitome of the great North American outdoors in all its epic, chest-filling grandeur.

Welcome to Craven Cottage, home of Fulham FC, where the pitch runs to 110 yards and floodlights light up most of SW6. Here in the urban hurly-burly of southwest London, warring teams go at it once a fortnight. This is a cauldron of passion, excitement and raucous singing.Innit?

And welcome to the music of Van Tramp: a stadium-sized band with classic timeless tunes. A London-based five-piece with a Canadian-born singer who bristle with lung-bursting, heart-swelling, sky-scraping songs. Who recorded their debut album – on the hush hush – in the home ground of Fulham FC. A fist of hungry musicians who’ve been mentored by a Grammy-winning producer, Rod Stewart and Jeff Buckley. Who want to do what Paul McGuinness said U2 do: ‘write great songs that move people’. As simple – and as brilliant – as that.

Says gravel-throated soul-belter singer Tim Howar: ‘Van Tramp are about connecting with people and giving a voice to rock that’s been lost.’

Says guitarist and songwriter Patrick Mascall: ‘We’re about classic songs – that’s what always got us places. We want to write classic songs that will endure.’

Welcome to Van Tramp by Van Tramp: a debut album of (literally) transatlantic rock. A record that reboots the classic soul-flavoured stomp of The Faces and The Stones for the 21st century. That will set your ears on fire. In a good way.

Tim Howar grew up in Spirit River, Canada dreaming of Britain. Sure, his older brother Jess is a Juno Award-winning country and western singer. ‘What I got from Jess was his ethos that it’s all about the songwriting,’ the frontman recalls. ‘He’s totally traditional country – not New Country. It was Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash and Lefty Frizell and Hank Williams Sr and Jimmy Rodgers and Merle Haggard. The cornerstones of country.’

But Howar was also hearing things from further away: like the scene from Almost Famous he inherited his big sister’s record collection. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks and T-Rex walloped into his life when he was six. An enduring fascination with British music was up and running. Soon young Tim would be persuading his hairdresser mum to give him a punk haircut just like he’d seen The Clash wearing. He was also in a boys’ choir but hey, we’ve all got dodgy pasts, right?

Into adulthood, Howar moved to Toronto to chase his musical dreams. A man for whom the stage – whether in pub, club or theatre – holds no fear began to act in musicals. He played the lead in a production of The Who’s Tommy, meeting Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend in the process.

When he wasn’t wowing audiences out front, he was hanging with the crew out back and playing his own bar gigs. One night he went to see Jeff Buckley and ended up sharing a beer with the ill-fated genius. ‘I just thought, this guy is the new Hendrix, with Robert Plant and Edith Piaf thrown in too. He was just such a cool person, really down to earth, too.’

Howar kept rolling, kept gathering experiences. He visited every state in America (except Alaska) in a production of Les Miserables. While the cast and crew stayed in hotels he and his guitar would go off camping, reading Ginsberg and Kerouac and listening to Dylan and Guthrie (Woody and Arlo). ‘They were all talking about what it was to be a seeker. The whole myth of America came alive to me when I was doing that…’

But for all that, this young Canadian Anglophile couldn’t get British sounds, whether Sixties or punk or Britpop, out of his ears. He had to get himself over to London, immerse himself in the roots of that scene, that culture. That music.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, Patrick Mascall was trying to conjure the American dream while writing songs in a humdrum London flat.Just as Howar was busy looking one way across the Atlantic, Mascall was looking the other: he made his own pilgrimage to the heartland of American music, taking a road trip through Memphis, Nashviille and New Orleans. He loved Cash, Gram Parsons, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and he had the self-written songs to prove it. What he didn’t have was a singer with a voice as big and resonant and gusty as the tunes pouring from his fingertips. He’d written an achingly heartfelt ballad called Something, about a former girlfriend whom he’d left in Australia – he’d come back to the UK to try make it with the band, but the hurt bit deep. For that special song alone he needed a special singer.

He and his musician mates – Mike Potter (bass), Guy Snellgar (drums), Andy Tinning (keyboards) – had auditioned tonnes of wannabes. But that’s all they were: wannabes. Where was the real deal, the sure thing, the dude with the right stuff? Potter and Mascall had co-written a song called Hope & Pray. It sounded like it was written in Memphis in ’73 and recorded ten minutes later in the Stones Mobile in the South of France. How could they hope to find a singer in post-millennium London who could evoke all that?

‘It’s meant to be a magical combination, isn’t it?’ reflects Mascall, an obsessive student of musical lore. ‘A spark suddenly happens. We thought, wouldn’t it be great if fate played its hand and we met this singer who we envisage in our head?’

Then, via mutual friends, they gave one more guy a try. This Canadian guy who’d come to London because he liked the British music scene so much. Who, they’d heard, had met Rod Stewart while performing in the West End ‘jukebox musical’ Tonight’s The Night – and who an impressed Rod The Mod had gone to see perform in the same Putney pub in which Rod had performed many Keith Moons ago.

‘So Tim walks into the audition – and I tell you, as soon as I saw him, I just knew it….’ says a grinning Mascall. ‘We sat him down. Couple of songs on acoustic guitar. First two or three words coming out of his mouth – it was staggering. When we look back now we think It was the work of the great producer in the sky in bringing us together…’ he laughs.

They had found their man. Inspired, Mascall immediately wrote a song, the quietly rousing and life-affirming Help Me Make It. Please read the entire bio at vantramp.com