“There’s nothing worse than po-face musicians telling you how to feel”: In Conversation with Larry Love
- Celine Heath
- Apr 8
- 4 min read
The Alabama 3 singer talks about the power of music and looks back to their Brixton roots
Alabama 3. The Brixton band with a cult-like following, bursting onto the techno scene some 30 years ago with their groovy beats and country-western approach to house music.
The band received success with their 1997 debut album, ‘Exile on Coldharbour Lane’, which featured the theme song of the hit HBO show ‘The Sopranos’. Since its release, Alabama 3 have continued to capture the hearts of many, with their fanbase spanning generations, genres, and continents.
Alabama 3 began their journey as two friends who shared a love for funk. Singer and founding member Larry Love – also known as Rob Spragg – explained how he and the Very Reverend D. Wayne Love first began finding their sound: “I’m the son of a Mormon Priest, so I used to listen to Gospel music.”
“I got into the early Blues, and it just made sense to start messing around with Blues samples and Techno music back in 1991 with D. Wayne”, he explained. “We moved to Brixton around the same time, and that was really the catalyst.
“Brixton was mainly Irish bars intertwined with Jamaican culture back then, and being exposed to that level of multiculturalism encouraged us to do something as stupid as country-western-acid-house music.”
Spragg continued: “I think we’re very much the products of our environment, in that we’re stimulated and energised by what a mix of different cultures can do, but it took about 5 years for us to get a record deal because of people telling us we can’t do that.”
Spragg founded Alabama 3 with his friend - the late Jake Black, or the Very Reverand D. Wayne Love. The two had met through their love for house parties and the music that came with them. They fast became close friends as well as bandmates.
“He was a fucking nightmare, a bit like me”, said Spragg. “We both came from a similar background. He left school at the age of 16 to work in some Whiskey distillery or something, but he was a self-taught Polymath. He was very well read, an intelligent man, not that you’d know that because he’d act like a stupid dickhead like me.”
Black died in 2019, shortly after a performance at the Highpoint Festival in Lancashire, England. Since his passing, the band has been vocal about the impact Black still has on their music.
“What’s actually quite interesting at the moment is this whole ‘Second Coming’ vibe we’ve got going”, Spragg said. “We used to – well, still do – maintain this church called the First Presbyterian Church of Elvis the Divine, where we make out like we worship Elvis and all that. With Jake’s passing and with, God bless it, though some cursed, the AI that we have, we are now in the process of reanimating him.”
He continued: “It was very touch and go losing him, and I could never replace someone that significant, as he’s my best friend. However, at the same time, we’re a Blues band, a gospel band. A lot of the subjects we touch upon involve something that’s not quite religious, but spiritual, so it’s not been too strange a process for us to reanimate him through the AI.
"It’s like I’ve literally got him in the studio with me now and I can write songs using his lyrics and tone of voice, and it’s phenomenal. It fits within our shtick.”
Sticking to their roots as a band, Alabama 3 often feature lyrics touching on their anti-establishment views and their “left-leaning approach to music” in their songs. Spragg was keen to mention how he likes to draw inspiration from the world around him: “I’ve had some of the most ridiculous situations where I’ve had all of these fascists telling me they really love this one song, and they totally had the wrong end of the stick.
“I quite enjoy doing that though – when you get a racist person dancing to a Blues sample in a song that’s all about multiculturalism then you know you’ve got it.”
Yet it is his ability to place the music above the politics that makes Larry Love such a stellar artist. Whilst explaining the band’s stance on using music for activism, he cracked a smile and threw out a joke or two to lighten the atmosphere.
“At the same time,” he said, “there’s nothing worse than po-face musicians telling you how to feel, so hopefully we’ve always been quite clever in not patronising people and made it quite funky. You have to bring people to your politics, not bring politics to them.
“A lot of people with power don’t like music. A lot of them are scared of it and its ability to get people together. It has the ability to transcend fucking war zones and emergency departments, so we’re blessed to be able to do that. If you can get people all dancing together in one room, that’s a good start to spreading some peace and love.”
Alabama 3 is currently on tour across the United Kingdom celebrating hits from their first two studio albums, ‘Exile on Coldharbour Lane’ and ‘La Peste’.
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