More than 23 years after 'At the River' reached number 19, Groove Armada's appearance on Top of the Pops still gives Andy Cato nightmares.
"It was a horror show," the 6ft 8in exGrimethorpe Colliery Band trombonist says, squirming, over Zoom from his Cotswold farm kitchen. "In a ridiculous moment of puritanism, we insisted on playing live. It was before laptops, so we had an incredibly unstable desktop jacked into the BBC sound desk. During final dress rehearsal, the camera M guy accidentally knocked the computer on the floor, wiping it completely." After a desperate rush around the dodgiest electronic shops in London's Shepherd's Bush, Cato had to reprogram the whole lot from scratch. Panicking about his trombone part, he pressed 'Enter' the moment the cameras started to roll. "We ended up doing this hopelessly nervous performance, wondering if anything would work," he tells me.
"We were smoking quite a lot of weed at the time," adds Tom Findlay as we chat the following day (he missed the designated Rolling Stone UK Zoom slot because he'd gone to watch his beloved Arsenal beat the Netherlands' PSV 1-0). "The samples came on 30 floppy disks that you had to load in exactly the right order. You can imagine how many times you'd get to 27 and then mess it all up when you're quite stoned..." Technology has progressed through Groove Armada's nine album catalogue which has scored them three UK Top 10 albums, three nominations at the Grammys and the BRITS, plus a Billboard nomination. Their latest album, 2020's Edge of the Horizon, was recorded virtually between the two during lockdown, followed by "a totally sleepless week in Tom's basement in east London, finishing it all off".
This story is from the December 2022/January 2023 edition of Rolling Stone UK.
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This story is from the December 2022/January 2023 edition of Rolling Stone UK.
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