In a booth in a Wetherspoons pub on the border of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire, the spirit of rock’n’roll is alive and well and three pints of Guinness in.
“All this starving artist thing, it’s a load of bollocks,” says Pete ‘Spider’ Spiby, pocket dynamo singer with Black Spiders, between mouthfuls of cheese and onion crisps as Friday afternoon drinkers sup beer around us. “You have to buy food, you have to be able to afford somewhere to live. You have to have some kind of back-up behind all the inspiration.”
Spiby knows what he talks about. Black Spiders are flag bearers for the kind of gasoline-fuelled noise The Man keeps trying and failing to squash under the heel of his expensive leather shoe. But the near-20-year career of these sons of the north has been far from easy; there have been bust-ups with labels, line-up changes, hiatuses, endless miles up and down motorways Tetrised around equipment in the back of battered vans. When they titled their last album Can’t Die, Won’t Die (2023), they weren’t joking.
Pete Spiby might be a little guy in the grand scheme of things, but he has a big and tenacious attitude. His band’s new album is the vividly titled if typographically maverick Cvrses. “It’s a great medieval swear word,” he says. It’s a record full of furious, funny songs with titles like Sorry Not Sorry, Tom Petty’s Lips (“Well, they’re very kissable,” says Spiby) and the excellent The Mofo Sauce, with a terrace-worthy chorus that runs: ‘You’ve got the mother, we’ve got the fucker’.
The latter was written on the back of a plan to launch their own real-life condiment, Black Spiders Motherfucking Hot Sauce. Sadly the idea has yet to come to fruition, although the hold-up isn’t the name, but the fact that they want a “tinge” of Dead Man’s Fingers rum. They’ve approached the company who make the rum but have yet to hear back. “We haven’t had a call back,” he says drily. “I think they’re selective.”
All of this plays into the idea that Black Spiders are a cartoon rock band, one in the great tradition of the larger-than-life groups they grew up loving: Motörhead, Cheap Trick, Kiss (the latter were even the subject of a genius-level Spiders homage in the shape of 2012’s Kiss Tried To Kill Me – ‘It was Gene not Paul’). But then they’ll pull out a song such as Dia De Muertos (or Day Of The Dead), from the new album, which was inspired by Spiby’s divorce and comes with a real emotional wrench.
“Yeah, you can say we’re a cartoon rock’n’roll band. I wouldn’t disagree with that,” he says. “But we’re fucking serious about being a cartoon.”
Pete Spiby has been in the rock’n’roll racket for more than 30 years. Through the mid-to-late 1990s he fronted Doncaster greasers Groop Dogdrill, whose musical aggro wasn’t a put-on – at one testy gig at London’s much-missed Astoria, the band’s bassist pulled out a flick knife and offered out the entire audience of “London wankers”.
During the Dogdrill days, Spiby earned something approaching a decent wage from being in a band for the first and last time. He made the most of it, drinking and smoking weed like a champion. One day the head of his label asked him when was the last time he went a day without alcohol or drugs. He couldn’t answer, because he couldn’t remember. “But that’s what young rock’n’roll bands are supposed to do,” he says, not unreasonably.
Dogdrill split in the early 2000s. Since then Spiby has had plenty of chances to get off the roundabout, but he’s clung on. Even when he hasn’t been making music, he’s still been involved in it: at various points working as entertainments manager at a club in Sheffield; helping mentor young and unemployed musicians; managing a few low-level bands, and acting as a runner for a few high-level touring ones. But the grip of actually playing in a band has never loosened. He formed the first incarnation of Black Spiders in the mid-2000s as a covers act for an old roadie friend’s birthday.
Somehow they’ve managed to spin that out into something resembling an actual career, albeit one with a four-year gap between 2016 and 2020, during which time Spiby released an excellent solo double album, Failed Magician, which scraped away some of the Spiders’ cartoon colour to reveal the grit underneath.
Things haven’t got any easier since the Black Spiders returned. Despite paying for Can’t Die, Won’t Die themselves, it was held up for the best part of 18 months due to what can politely be described as “internal politics” at their then-label (“The guy who was in charge fucking hated us”). They dug into their own pockets again to record Cvrses, but this time they’re putting it out themselves. “It means you get to control your own fate,” he says.
These days Spiby holds down a full-time job - the first he’s had since he was 18. Working nine to five and being in a band isn’t glamorous, he says, but it’s the reality of the business these days, especially when you’ve been doing it as long as he has.
“When you’re twenty and on a label, they map out your life,” he says. “When you’ve been doing it a while and you’re in the position we’re in, it gets more difficult. You have to do things yourself.”
It’s early evening and Spiby has to get home, 15 miles away. As we stand up to leave, he clocks a board on the wall above us celebrating the fact that this is the birthplace of Iron Maiden’s frontman Bruce Dickinson – Worksop itself, not this specific branch of Wetherspoons. “I don’t think he was born on this table,” says Spiby. “But you never know.”
A week later, I’m listening back to our conversation. It transpires that Spiby had been whispering into my recorder whenever I went to the toilet. Usually this is the cue for musicians to make tiresome predictable gags at the expense of journalists, but that’s not the case here. He’s sweetly taken the time to fill in his back story, answering in more detail some of the questions I did ask, and answering some that I didn’t even ask.
“You asked earlier about whether I wanted to sell a million records,” he says during one of these whispered interludes. “I’m not really sure. Money would be nice, but all the music I’ve made and things I’ve done and people I’ve played with… I’m happy, and that’s good enough for me.”
Cvrses is available now via Dark Riders/Cargo Distribution.
