Xtuppaw: Generation Exciting

Since punk rock hit the international music scene some 30 years ago, Malta has been waiting for its own Generation X messiahs. Toni Sant believes that Xtruppaw fits the bill above any other past, present or future Maltese band.

During a brief visit to Malta last March I had one task on my “to do” list I made sure I got to above all others: meet Xtruppaw. I became a fan last summer after I discovered their website at Xtruppaw.com and heard the MP3s of their songs Ġenerazzjoni ta’ Meqrudin and Malta. I hadn’t felt this way about a Maltese rock band since the first time I heard The Rifffs or The Subverts as a teenager in the early 1980s.

Xtruppaw is the most exciting Maltese band of all times. I don’t say this lightly. They understand the unique qualities of the Maltese music scene. Unlike most other Maltese musicians in post-independence Malta, they have no ambition of taking on the world. To me, this is what makes them most special.

Over the winter months and into early spring they were recording their first CD album. I wrote them an email and asked to attend a recording session at the Hell Next Door Studio in Gudia; a modest recording environment with the perfect vibe for a quintessentially Maltese rock experience. I’ve been to a number of recording studios over the years and none I know of fit Xtruppaw better than HND. This is mostly because Steve Lombardo Attard, who owns and runs the studio, is also one of their most ardent fans. Suffice it to say that he was one of the first people outside the band to understand why they’re called Xtruppaw.

Xtruppaw started out as little more than a group of friends playing together in the spring of 2005. The five musicians in Xtruppaw are friends before anything else. They like each other’s company and have been involved in each other’s lives for many years. I sensed how important this aspect is to their ethos when instead of heading out to some seedy garage or a smoky bar I was invited to one of their homes for my first ever meeting with them.

The suburban home we went to is where Jeff Galea lives with his wife Louise. Jeff is Xtruppaw’s main songwriter and leader, even though those terms should be very loosely applied to this group. Singer Noel Cuschieri and bassist Ronald “Rex” Grech call him “the Rolls Royce engine driving the machine” known as Xtruppaw.

Dino, the drummer, was not in Malta when I met the band. He was on holiday in Thailand with Keith il-Pini who plays trumpet in The I-Skandal, Dino’s other band. The other member of Xtuppaw is guitarist Marvin Zammit who strikes me as a dark horse lost in the stars. I was not surprised to learn that he’s the one who makes sure that the band’s ideas communicate well with the general public.
Instead of swilling wine and beer, as most self-respecting rockers would do, we settled for tea and coffee. Actually, they all had coffee (it was after 9pm and they probably needed something to keep them awake) while I had tea. If you can believe it, they even asked me if I mind their cigarette smoke during our meeting. Rock `n roll! In case you’re wondering, aside from Dino, they don’t have any body piercing or tattoos either.

Our conversation started with a little Q&A about the previously buzzing rock scene at Tigne, which they see as an important part of Xtruppaw’s genealogy even though they’re all too young to have played there. Throughout most of the 1980s, Tigne hosted a most vibrant music and alternative culture scene culminating in a summer festival the likes of which Malta had never seen before or since.
Just as for John Lennon there was nothing before Elvis, for Xtruppaw it seems that there was nothing before Tigne. In spite of this, I was pleased that they didn’t know much about me before we met. Still, I wanted them to know why I was drawn to them. Oddly enough, I think I’m even able to articulate my zeal for Xtruppaw here.

I pride myself as someone who does things that can be done but no one else has bothered to do. Bringing in rock bands to play live in the TVM studio was one of these things back when I worked as a professional broadcaster in Malta, pre-liberalisation and so-called pluralism in radio and television. My podcasts in Maltese at ToniSant.com are the most recent example of this sort of thing. I see this pioneering spirit in Xtruppaw. They are unlike anything else in the Maltese islands even if it’s nothing new in the context of the history of rock. When I first played Xtruppaw’s music on my Mużika Mod Ieħor podcast last year, one listener commented on my blog that Xtruppaw sound like Joe Demicoli on acid. I think of them as Spinal Tap meets traditional Maltese għana. Best of all, they have neither sold out nor cashed in yet.

Their roots are firmly planted in the alternative Maltese rock scene of the 1990s. Rex is the one who has been active longest. He started out in a Trash Metal band called Mandra, which specialised in Metallica and Black Sabbath covers and mash-ups. Before too long he got together with three other guitar players from a youth centre in Sliema called Dino, Jeff, and Marvin to form a Doom Metal band by the name of Tenebra. Rex was the most accomplished guitar player in the band, so they relied on him to teach them new chords and complicated licks. Dino eventually switched to drums, mainly because they needed a drummer but also because they felt that no band really needs three guitarists.
This new formation took on the name Victims of Creation, playing a couple of gigs, including one at Rock Café, and recording a song called Lotions and Potions (Toke One) for one of two compilation CD released by Storm Records in the mid-1990s. Jeff is not on the recording but he is credited as one of the writers on the song. He contributed various riffs and even a section of the lyrics. Jeff quit Victims of Creation frustrated by the slow pace at which the band produced new tracks and prepared for live gigs. Rex went on to play with Norm Rejection as well as Filletti and Friends, death metal band Lithomancy and various other short-lived projects. Incidentally, Noel was always in the company of the Victims of Creation and eventually became the singer for electronic punk band Cyberia, which also has other musicians involved in other music projects, such as Antoine Vella who is perhaps best known as half of Particle Blue. So, in many ways, Xtruppaw is a grown-up version of Victims of Creation.

If you listen closely to the one surviving studio recording by Victims of Creation you can hear the first seeds of Xtruppaw germinating. Who else would growl words like, “Moses saw the smoking bush and jisgħol, jisgħol, jisgħol.” Rex was the lead singer back then and demonstrated incredible versatility on a number of singing styles ranging from black metal growling to a clean falsetto. Although they’re the first to recognise that extreme metal has limited appeal in Malta, this is not anything that inhibits them in any way. Their trademark sound was based on the idea of embracing different musical styles within the each of their songs. They bring some of this to Xtuppaw but they do it in a more systematic way. Along punky rockers, Xtuppaw’s debut album features a country song, traditional għana, and a festa march.

Most of their songs started out as beachside sing-a-longs during friendly barbeques. Drunken lowbrow ditties peppered with vulgarities; one of their most popular songs is called Żejża. This song does not appear on the CD, because they think that certain things don’t need to be preserved for posterity. Nonetheless, some of their jagged-edged songs, which they popularised at their gigs in 2005, are now brought together with five new songs that they’ve never played live in front of an audience.

Most Xtruppaw songs are not played on the radio. They’re just too real. When Joe Demicoli played Malta on his radio shows a few months ago, a couple of words deemed unsuitable for mainstream radio were beeped out without so much as a by-your-leave. It’s amazing that worse words are regularly broadcast on local radio and TV in English or Italian but the same expressions or their equivalent in Maltese are still considered taboo. This has prompted the band to write a song called Diska Cool għar-Radio, which they’ve released as a single to promote their debut album. This is not so much in hopes that radio stations add it to their playlist (they should, if they haven’t already done so) as much as to highlight the ridiculous environment they have to operate in. It helps in understanding why elsewhere they sing sublime lines like: Malta demokrazija. Malta? Tgħidx ereżija.

The use of quotidian vernacular is simply an attempt to capture everyday speak in song rather than for shock value. Xtruppaw have turned down gigs because of this since they don’t want to be misunderstood or mistaken for something they’re not. They are very aware that Maltese society swims in hypocrisy, so they see themselves as tightrope walkers above the jellyfish and shark-infested seas. Their day jobs give them constant reality checks. Marvin is a research and development engineer, Rex is schoolteacher, Jeff is a self-employed commercial graphic designer, while Noel works as a solutions architect at MITTS.

They first thought to bring their fun songs to the public during Festaħwid in 2004, but it wasn’t until last year’s Festaħwid that they performed in public as Xtruppaw for the first time. Five more gigs followed, featuring a number of original songs as well as remarkable covers of songs like Xemx by Gozo legends The Tramps and Green Day’s American Idiot. Theatrical, tight and natural are three of the words I’ve heard from people I’ve asked about what they thought about these first half dozen Xtruppaw gigs. They’ve managed to capture much of that on their CD album but Xtruppaw is first and foremost a live gig band.

Now that you know so much about this exciting new bands, do you still want to know why they’re called Xtruppaw? I feel privileged to be among those who get it. Get their CD album at one of their upcoming gigs this summer and you’ll be one of us.

Is-CD tal-iXtruppaw was officially launched at the Luxol Sports Bar in St Andrews on Friday 2nd June 2006. See Xtruppaw.com for details.

Toni Sant is the Founding Director of the MaltaMedia Online Network and lecturer in Performance & Creative Technologies at the University of Hull’s Scarborough Campus in the UK. He blogs and podcasts at ToniSant.com

Original text for Manic magazine feature
issued with The Malta Independent on Sunday
11 June 2006