‘We’re like a frat house’: meet Gob Nation, south London’s oddball music collective
“Benefit fraud,” someone jokes when I ask what it takes to sustain a music career in 2023. I am huddled in a flat overlooking south-east London’s Surrey Quays docks with a small crosssection of Gob Nation – the collective name for a universe of bands based mostly in these parts. If it weren’t for the fact that they’re made up of rotating combinations of the same dozen or so musicians, the 10 acts within
Gob Nation would seem totally disparate. The omnivorous jangle palette of the Tubs’ recently acclaimed album Dead Meat is a far cry from Sniffany & the Nits’s maniacal punk debut The Unscratchable Itch, which is the tonal inverse of Garden Centre’s guileless artpop on Searching for a Stream. What they do share is a leftfield sensibility, lacerating wit and snotty attitude. Ask any of them to identify the force that holds it all together and the answer is unanimous: “banter”.
“On a social level, it’s hard to be in bands with people you don’t get on with,” says Owen Williams, who fronts the Tubs and plays various instruments in at least five other bands. “Even though we probably find each other quite annoying sometimes, because we’re such a close group of friends we always end up picking each other.”
“We have quite a specific sense of humour. Most of us are from south Wales and grew up in Cardiff,” adds George Nicholls, who leads the “yacht rock-infused” GN Band, plays guitar in the Tubs and retro oddballs Suep, and formerly Joanna Gruesome – the beloved noise-pop outfit that first brought Nicholls and Williams together with bassist Max Warren and singer-guitarist Lan McArdle. They were bound by their differences even then: a bunch of 80s jangle enthusiasts making music that didn’t slot into the duelling guitar scenes of the early 2010s; they were too abrasive to be twee and too poppy to be hardcore. “We wanted to be part of that DIY indie pop scene but we were also obsessed with being like, ‘But we’re punks as well,’” Williams laughs. “There was this weird tension where we were obviously into pop music but trying to ruin it all the time.”
The designated “head honcho”, Warren established Gob Nation in 2017 to release records and put on shows while living in Brighton – something he’d previously done in Cardiff under the moniker Reeks of Effort. A revolving door of auteurs, the bands are distinguished less by genre than by whoever’s creative voice is to the
fore. The Tubs make for easy listening, but Williams’s neurotic lyricism steers them away from genre homage, picking at a range of misfortunes from romantic manipulation to groin rash. Josie Edwards whips up Sniffany & the Nits’ already caustic sound into a frenzy of toxic femininity, while pub-rockers the TSG are boosted by the larger-thanlife charisma of Taylor Stewart, who’s like a Glaswegian Liam Gallagher. As well as sharing members, the bands are occasionally linked by overlapping motifs: a hardcore punk gesture in an Ex-Vöid song, a jangly riff by Sniffany & the Nits alluding to the Tubs. “It’s like our personalities are merging,” Williams says. “Which maybe is unhealthy, I don’t know.”
“A lot of us are just quite singular, critical people. And I think that level of harshness upon ourselves unfortunately translates into not really making friends with others,” suggests Edwards, whose illustration work provides much of Gob Nation’s visual identity through album art, gig posters and merch. “It sounds horrible, but we can’t deal with being bored or with people that we don’t find interesting. Someone said recently that we seem like a fucked-up family, and it’s true.”
When everyone moved to London in the late-2010s, Gob Nation became a way of organising projects that were already in motion. A one-stop label, promoter and digital TV channel, it developed into an autonomous machine powered by individual strengths. Edwards provides the design; Stewart directs music videos; Will Deacon (Garden Centre/Suep/ PC World) hosts Gob Nation TV; Matt Green (the Tubs/Sniffany & the Nits) records many of their albums at his studio Head Cold; and Williams is launching a small press called Perfect Angel as an outlet for the collective’s literature, poetry and lyrics. Then there’s Warren, whose administrative chops and “normal” personality keep things operational.
“For someone who’s left his suitcase in America and forgotten his passport when we’re supposed to play a festival in Spain the next day, Max is actually very organised,” says Nicholls.
“When any of us go on tour we huddle behind Max,” Edwards adds. “He has a much more natural way of connecting with the outside world, whereas the rest of us are too caught up in ourselves. Max can chill the fuck out. He can take his shirt off, listen to football on the radio, have a beer and go to bed.”
Gob Nation straddles DIY and mainstream ecosystems. Some bands, such as the Tubs and Suep, are touring heavily with their eyes on signing to bigger labels. Sniffany & the Nits have developed cult appeal, catching the ears of Steve Lamacq and sharing bills with Screaming Females and Deerhoof, while the industrial electronic duo PC World and new wavers Lash move in firmly underground punk circles.
“There’s a funny period where you’re leaving the top of DIY to being at the lower levels of the music industry,” says Warren. “In theory it’s a step up, but in reality you earn a lot less money because suddenly other people’s hands are reaching in. Ultimately we’re treading water constantly, so if someone offers us money: yes please.”
That balance is particularly acute for Suep’s Georgie Stott, who has the steadiest footing in the industry as the keyboardist in Mercury prize-nominated Porridge Radio. “I was on tour pretty much the whole of last year, and I was making enough money to pay rent,” she says. But with Suep starting to climb the same ladder, and figuring out whose floor to sleep on each night becoming less charming with age, the pros and cons are starker. “Obviously I want to keep making music as Suep because that’s my main creative outlet, but am I going to be touring for the next two years to try to build the name of the band? It’s awesome to be able to make money doing something you love. That’s the simple nature of it. But I feel old!”
Financial instability becomes an existential issue as well as a material one. With most members now in their 30s, there’s an “unspoken worry” of becoming increasingly insular the more they lean on each other, and “lifers” through perseverance. The collective’s social structure keeps everyone in orbit, but the London rental market also forces them to live on top of one another in flatshares and guardianships. This makes it incredibly easy to start new projects (Sniffany & the Nits’ debut album was written when its members were living in an abandoned care home in Sydenham, southeast London, during the pandemic; the Tubs’s in a disused police station), but also encourages them to pull rank when things get tough.
Cities change rapidly. Venues shut, scenes fracture and people “drop out” to prioritise careers or families. “Which maybe is why we’re still doing everything with each other – we can rely on that,” McArdle offers. “Occasionally we’ll lose someone to getting an actual job, but mostly everyone still wants to hang out and the best way to do that is to keep making music together.”
As Conservative austerity and cuts to arts funding deplete opportunities for those who don’t have financial support, the UK music landscape has become a binary of major label homogeny and dogged independence. Although not without its struggles, Gob Nation represents a self-sufficient alternative. “My vision for the future is I’d like people to have more ownership over the things they produce, and be able to facilitate culture,” says Nicholls. “But we’re not in that position yet.”
For now, Gob Nation has found an equilibrium that keeps everyone afloat. “I feel so proud of it but I also feel as if we’re getting away with something, like we’re kids playing shop,” says Edwards, citing a “frat house” bond that steels them against the outside world and traditional metrics of success.
“I think a lot of people just say: ‘That’s it, hype’s gone, I’m not going to be a musician any more,’ because they don’t have that community to fall back on,” Williams adds. “That’s the nice thing about this group. We can stray a bit, but we always have something to come back to.”
It sounds horrible, but we can’t deal with being bored or with people that we don’t find interesting
Josie Edwards
In court, the prosecution called two witnesses who had placed Hallam at the scene in statements given to the police. One of the girls who had confronted him in the street said she had seen him walking away from the fight, but under cross-examination she admitted that she couldn’t be sure it was Hallam. A friend of the victim, she said that somebody had mentioned Hallam’s name and she “just wanted someone to blame”. In 2012, a play was made about Hallam’s case called Someone to Blame.
The second witness was also a friend of the victim. In his first police statement he described a white boy on a silver BMX who pulled out a baseball bat with a protruding screw. Hallam did not even own a bike at the time. This witness later gave a second statement also naming Hallam. But in court he repeatedly said he had not seen the attacker’s face because he was wearing a hoodie or top wrapped tight around his face, and all he knew was that he had blondish hair. (Hallam’s hair is brown.) When asked why he had named Hallam, he said he was upset because his friend had just died and he’d been given Hallam’s name by the first witness.
Harrington, called as a witness for the prosecution, told the court he had made a mistake and now thought he actually had been with Hallam on the night of the murder. The prosecution then treated him as a hostile witness, cross-examining him and exposing his inconsistencies. Hallam still believed he couldn’t be found guilty – the case against him was nonsense. But after seven weeks he was convicted of murder, conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm and violent disorder and sentenced to a minimum of 12 years in prison. Twenty-year-old Bullabek Ringbiong was also convicted of murder. “My legs collapsed after the first verdict,” Hallam says. “I can’t remember anything else that was said. That night I started to process it in Feltham. I was thinking: I’m going to be here for a long time.”
Eighteen years later, we meet at the offices of Appeal, a charity and law practice that fights miscarriages of justice. He is accompanied by his lawyer Matt Foot, a co-director of Appeal. Hallam is wearing a smart jacket, has a sharp haircut and at 36 could pass for a man in his mid-20s. He admits he is young for his age – he never got the opportunity to grow up as he should have done.
As a 17-year-old in jail, he was small and naive, the perfect target for bullying. “I was a kid, just out of school. No life experience at all. People saw my vulnerability when I got there. That made it worse for me because they preyed on the vulnerable. People take advantage of that, try to get stuff out of you – for example in the canteen. I got beaten up a lot.”
How did he cope? He didn’t initially, he says. For the first time in his life, he experienced depression, though he didn’t know what it was back then. “I wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t get of my bed, wouldn’t wash.” Then he started to fight back – literally. That was the only way. “I got jumped in the first two months I was there, and that’s when people said: ‘You need to say sorry,’ and I was like: ‘I’m not going to say sorry for being jumped!’ Once I stood my ground nothing happened to me after that. If you give in to them, they’ve got you where they want you.”
Hallam had another advantage – his fellow prisoners believed he was innocent. Some of those who had been at the fight that ended in Kassahun’s murder were now in jail alongside him. They knew Hallam hadn’t been present and spread the word. Over time, he made friends. Initially he had assumed his fellow inmates were “the worst of the worst” but his opinion changed. “Many of them committed bad crimes but were good people. You can’t judge them for the crime they committed otherwise you wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. If I hadn’t had other people around me when I was in there, I wouldn’t have been able to survive. I got through because of the friends I made in there.”
It’s not surprising that people looked out for him. Hallam is likable, ebullient, polite and funny. Whenever he gets the chance to laugh (telling me how his nine-year-old son Thierry, named after the Arsenal legend Thierry Henry, has just become a Manchester City fan; or explaining that his cat Jéff’s name is pronounced with a soft J and has an acute accent because he looks French) he explodes into a joyous cackle.
Away from prison, family and friends fought for him, led by the miscarriage of justice campaigner Paul May, whose investigations helped get the convictions of the Birmingham Six and Bridgewater Four overturned. They did all they could to keep the case in the news. When Hallam was moved to Aylesbury prison in Buckinghamshire, they turned up outside the prison in an open-top bus to celebrate his birthday. “That didn’t go down well at the prison. It rained that day, too!”
The actor Ray Winstone, an uncle of his best friend, fronted an episode of ITV’s Tonight programme in 2007, insisting Hallam was innocent. He interviewed witness after witness who confirmed Hallam wasn’t at the scene and explained how easy it is to get your alibi wrong.
The thing is, Foot says, Hallam didn’t even say he was definitely playing football with his friend. “Sam said in the statement: ‘I believe I was playing football with my friend Timmy.’ I don’t think it was a bad statement, but then he’s portrayed as a liar by the prosecution.”
Did Hallam think the campaign to free him would be successful? “By now I was not fully confident I was going to go home. I couldn’t be after everything that happened to me. I’d already been arrested, charged, convicted and lost an appeal.” His first appeal, a year after conviction, was on the grounds of lack of evidence and witnesses changing their story at trial. The appeal court judges believed that the witnesses had been telling the truth initially despite what they said in court.
At the age of 21, Hallam was moved to Bullingdon prison in Oxfordshire. He says the environment was less violent than at previous jails. “People took me under their wing. Older men in their 40s and 50s such as my friend Bez, who’s 55 now. Me and him did everything together – we got a job together and went to the gym together.” He got an NVQ Level 3 in printing and worked as a lithographic printer for three years in prison. The routine – food, work, gym – helped him get through the days.
But it was a struggle. While he was in prison both his grandmothers died. In October 2010, Hallam hit rock bottom when his father, Terry, took his own life aged 56. For Hallam, the timing made the tragedy even worse. The previous day, the Independent had reported that Hallam was likely to be cleared at a second appeal; his father was found with the newspaper cutting in his pocket. Sam’s mother, Wendy Cohen, has said that the suicide was a result of the pressures of dealing with their son’s wrongful imprisonment. Hallam was told of his father’s death by the prison chaplain and he attended the funeral. “He was breaking his heart and couldn’t even wipe his eyes or nose, because he was handcuffed both sides,” Wendy told me in 2013.
Hallam can’t find the words when I ask him about his father’s suicide today. “Just confusing … confusing … Yeah.” He comes to an anguished stop. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to talk about this. Sorry.”
A month after his father’s death, astonishing information was uncovered. Although the police had taken Hallam’s phone for evidence, they had not bothered to search through it. The new investigation by Thames Valley police did the basic work that the Metropolitan police failed to do in the first place.
The phone contained photos that Hallam had taken at his grandmother’s house on the afternoon of the murder and photos of him with his father at the local pub in the evening. Neither Hallam’s father nor his grandmother had remembered this, making Winstone’s point about alibis all the more pertinent. His phone also revealed that he and Harrington had been playing football that week – but one night later. Finally, the phone showed that while his co-defendants had been in touch with each other multiple times just before the incident, Hallam had spoken to only one of them over a three-month period. The campaign to free him uncovered nine witnesses who said he was not at the scene.
On 16 May 2012, the case finally returned to the court of appeal for a second time. In the morning Hallam’s team, led by Foot and barrister Henry Blaxland QC, argued that the convictions were unsafe. Immediately after lunch, at 2pm, the prosecution announced it would not contest the appeal.
“It was a very dramatic moment,” Foot says. “The whole of the public gallery just went ‘Yeeeeaaaaaaaah!’,like some football roar. I’ve never heard anything like it in court – a mix of anger and relief – and it went on for ages.” He smiles at the memory and looks at Hallam. “Do you remember?”
“Yeah. Just by his body language, I knew what the prosecution barrister was going to say,” Hallam says. “The judge asked if I knew what was going on. I was aware, but I was just in bewilderment really.”
His convictions were overturned. Within a week he had found himself a job and seemed to be coping well. But gradually the enormity of what had happened began to sink in. He had spent seven years imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit; his father had killed himself while he was in prison; he no longer knew how to function in the free world. Often, he wished he was back in prison where life was less complicated and everybody appeared to be on his side. “This is the weird thing. When I talk to friends who I was inside with, often we’re laughing: ‘Do you remember this, do you remember that?’” There was a camaraderie? “Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He asks if there is something wrong with a person who misses prison.
Then he was hit with another injustice. By 2014 he still hadn’t been paid compensation for his wrongful conviction. Although the CPS had thrown in the towel at the appeal, justice secretary Chris Grayling had refused any payment under a new test that required proof of innocence “beyond all reasonable doubt” – an impossibly high bar for almost anyone in Hallam’s situation to clear. His legal team is challenging the test on the basis that it breaches the presumption of innocence.
Despite having his conviction quashed, he has come to feel that the establishment does not really believe he was innocent. The money would be useful, he says – he lost seven years of income in prison, he’s not in a fit state to work now, he needs money for therapy and he has to support Thierry. But, he says, the compensation is about so much more than money. “For me it’s more an acceptance of the wrongdoing and what they need to put right.”
After his release, Hallam’s mental health deteriorated. His post-traumatic stress disorder intensified, he suffered from depression again, became withdrawn, struggled with relationships and was unable to work. “I’ve got really low,” he says. “I have never tried to take my life but I’ve had suicidal thoughts.” Sometimes he only feels understood by people who have also suffered a miscarriage of justice. He mentions Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six and Patrick Maguire, who was jailed at 14 as part of the Maguire Seven – both had their convictions overturned in 1991. “I can speak to them because I know they’ve been through it.” Last year he went to Scotland to meet members of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (Mojo), a support group. “We had a group therapy session and you just feel a connection with everyone there.”
But back home, he says, he has become dysfunctional in ways that he didn’t even realise until it was pointed out to him. “You’ve painted your room grey, like a cell, haven’t you?” Foot says.
“Yes, and I sleep in my living room. I never go to bed. My friend said to me: ‘You’ve recreated that environment to put yourself at peace because that’s become a part of you.’”
But it’s more complicated than that. He has created a cell that he’s desperate to escape from. “I didn’t lock my front door for six months. I took my doors off, too. I did it without noticing.”
Hallam says he will only feel free once the government accepts that he deserves compensation. He has now been to the court of appeal twice, and to the supreme court. In July he went to the European court of human rights, supported by Foot and the eminent civil rights lawyer Marcia Willis Stewart; they expect the judgment next year. “This happened to me in 2004. I’m still going to court for the same case 19 years later.”
To go through what Hallam has been through and to retain your humanity takes some doing. I could imagine him going around the country educating people about miscarriages of justice, I tell him. He smiles. “In the long run that’s what I want to do. If I can possibly make something positive out of what I’ve been through, talking and stuff.” But first of all, he says, he’s got a fight to win. “Until this whole court thing is over I can’t move on.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com