Tony Cummings undertook a marathon interview with Sammy Horner, the frontman of Celtic rock pioneers THE ELECTRICS

The Electrics were at last getting noticed by the American Christian music marketplace and in 1996 the group signed with Five Minute Walk/Sara Bellum Records, a Christian music company distributed by Warner Bros (later EMI CMG). The album 'The Electrics' was targeted very much at the American marketplace, was engineered and produced by Masaki Liu and featured re-recordings of many of The Electrics' well known songs including "The Whole Shebang", "Mercy Mercy", "Disciples Of Disaster" and "Irish Rover" as well as a wince-inducing sleeve design of a tartan-clad cartoon figure clubbing a crotchet.

After the disappointing predictability of 'The Electrics' the next album on Sara Bellum, 'Livin' It Up When I Die', was a vast improvement. It was produced by the highly regarded session musician Phil Madeira and engineered by Jordan Richter. Remembers Sammy, "They came over from Nashville. We had been using these little digital things and an old E16 analogue in my home. But as soon as we got the budget for the album we bought Pro Tools and set it up. You would know Jordan from a band called This Train. Jordan was a guitar player and he was a great engineer. He's mainly an engineer. He was a Pro Tools genius so we recorded, tracked it all at my place and they took the hard disks off to Nashville and mixed it."

The Electrics c 1997 (l-r top: Sammy Horner, David Lyon, Davie McArthur; bottom: Robin Callander, Paul Baird, Kenny McNichol)

After its release it was back to touring to promote 'Livin' It Up When I Die'. Sammy recalls, "We'd go to the US and do these insane tours. The Electrics had already played in America under our own steam off the back of the German albums. We'd played Cornerstone festival. But America is really like a different world and it is possible to play there consistently because it's so huge and densely populated. So we'd turn up and go to New York then we'd go to Connecticut then we'd go to Pennsylvania then fly to the Mid-West and do Chicago, Ohio and Iowa, Wisconsin. Then we'd fly to the West Coast and do California. You need to make geographical sense of it. It's not like the UK. It's massive. We've played a gig in Alaska. We were in Alaska for seven hours. It took us almost a day and a half to get there. We played a show then we flew overnight to San Francisco. We played in the morning then we played at night then we flew to Denver, Colorado; played a gig and then we played three gigs in Florida and after Florida we were in Illinois which is a 22 hour drive through the night - no hotels, it was insane. It was like that all the time. There was no sense to the touring. The tours were put together by the record company and they were a killer. You were eating awful food because you couldn't stop for a meal; you weren't getting sleep so you would end up getting sick. People always got sick."

Just how dreadful the American CCM touring system could get was personified by an American punk band The Smiley Kids who in 1999 had an album out in the US on 5 Minute Walk. Remembers Sammy, "We'd go on these label tours. You might have seen it in movies like That Thing You Do and Walk The Line. We'd go on these tours with all the artists so there'd be 40 of you. So you'd take over a floor of a motel or just crash in a room - four people in a room, as cheap as you could do it. The Smiley Kids were travelling with us and nobody really knew who they were. We were all selling records and getting some money and getting per diems to eat and stuff. One morning Davie and I came out of our hotel room and saw the guys from The Smiley Kids getting out of their van at seven in the morning. We asked them what they were doing and they said they'd just woken up. I asked them why they hadn't slept in one of the rooms - a floor is better than a van, a shower is good too! They said that on that tour, because it was their first tour, the record company were keeping half of their album sales, they weren't getting petrol money, they weren't getting rooms, they weren't getting money for food - nothing. And they were only selling maybe one album a night. So they got half of it which was five US dollars a day. I went to the president of the record company and asked why weren't these guys getting a place to sleep and something to eat - that's minimum: you cannot expect people to do well and survive if they're not eating and sleeping. You've got to give them that. He went on about 'we treat our bands so much better than others'. So I had a chat with my bandmates about it and we just said to him that every night from stage we would tell the audience what he was doing and let the audience decide if he was treating them well or not. That we would pay for their food and they could stay in our room. So that was the end of that record deal. At the end of that tour we just said goodbye, which suited us fine."

Considering their exuberantly uninhibited live concerts it wasn't rocket science that The Electrics' next album was a live one. Comments Sammy, "Christmas Rock Night (the annual Christian rock celebration held in Ennepetal, Germany) became a regular event for us every year for 13 years. They were doing a Christmas Rock Night album of two songs of all the bands playing that year. ICC were doing the recording. They said, 'We'll just leave it running, record you live and see what we get'. The album 'Danger Live' came out before I'd even heard it. I got a copy sent to me in the post when it was released. It was all right, though they failed to mic up the audience which was a slight drawback, especially as the festival was absolutely packed. The whole atmosphere was electric. Yet on the album it sounds like we were playing in a cupboard to four people."

As the years moved on The Electrics played fewer and fewer gigs in the UK but their German fanbase remained resolute. In 2001 the group signed with another German company, Pleitegeier Records. "It means bankrupt vulture, apparently," observes Sammy before adding, after an appropriate pause, "That should have been a clue. Phil Madeira produced the album 'Reel, Folk 'n' Rock 'n' Roll' with Jordan engineering. It was recorded at Jamestown and mixed in Nashville. There was a lineup change in the band. Tim Cottrell, from England, was now playing fiddle for us so a lot of it was fiddle driven. We'd always used accordion and mandolin a lot but the fiddle really added another dimension, it got us real fiddle driven rock. Which was cool. It was a good album. Again, we were touring Germany and America all the time."

The last Electrics album was 2005's 'Old, New, Borrowed & Green'. Produced by the band themselves and with more fine fiddle from Cottrell and featuring the Cross Rhythms turntable hit "Wild Rover", the powerfully prophetic "The Fury Of The Lord" and a fine cover of The Hooters' "Satellite" it was well up to par though its release was decidedly problematic. Explains Sammy, "It was meant to be with Pleitegeier Records, who had given us a three-album contract then when we were half way into recording it they told us they just wanted to distribute it. As it turned out, they didn't distribute it either. So they just completely reneged on us. I have a little independent record label in the States called Tameyourtongue and that largely serves to help me tour out there, more than anything else. Because it means there's product there, they shop stuff for me, so I don't have to carry it all when I'm travelling. It just makes life easier. So 'Old, New, Borrowed & Green' came out independently but I think hardly anyone knows about it."

And so, save for the occasional get-together like the one I'd witnessed at the Oran More, The Electrics went into a lengthy state of suspended animation. Says Sammy, "It couldn't be helped. I got really busy as a solo artist. My schedule became stupid. I was going from studio to touring all year and my tours last anything from six to 12 weeks at a time. I'm just never around. And one of the things I've learned about recording is this, certainly with us anyway, I think continuity helps. If you start something in January and don't get back to it again until December you feel like you need to start again because you listen to it and you think aah! So it's almost better to go in for three or four weeks and just do it. The Electrics can function pretty much with any line-up; the one piece of continuity in The Electrics is that I have to be in it because I'm the singer and to be fair I also did a lot of the booking so if I don't do it no one does it."

And so we'll leave it there. In Part 2 of this mammoth interview we'll take a closer look at the ever growing solo output of this highly talented Celtic troubadour.