Bognor date - 3 Daft Monkeys bigger and better post-pandemic

They play this year’s Southdowns Music Festival in Bognor Regis on September 22 on the back of their new release 21 Years Wild... Live!

“We love Bognor!” Tim says. “It's just a lovely seaside town. We live in Cornwall and we just love the coast. I've been in Cornwall since I was 14 and I’m a lot older than 14 now! But it's such a great place to be. We love it and it gives us a lot of inspiration. There are a lot of creative types in Cornwall and we get a lot of inspiration from the coastline and just being here.”

Sadly the band mistimed their 20th anniversary, a landmark which coincided with the pandemic: “We had a huge tour sorted out but we just went online and we did a gig every Sunday. We started off at the beginning when we had loads of gigs that were obviously cancelled and we just decided that we would cyber busk instead. We did Facebook Live at 3.30 every week and we ended up doing that for over a year. It was a great way to connect with people. We love performing and we love connecting and this was the only way we knew how. We put a little PayPal link on there and said that if anyone wanted to donate they could but they didn't have to, and we really did feel that we managed to bring people together and we also moved over to YouTube.

“It was great. We connected to people and we really found that our fan base grew. Obviously not everyone can come to a gig. Not everyone has the opportunity to do so but with the lockdown gigs online we ended up getting fans in Australia and America tuning in... though obviously they complained about the time it was on!

“Promoters said to us that we shouldn't do it because people would not want to go back to going out to gigs again afterwards but we just took the view that it was a different situation and I do think we've come back now bigger and better. People are turning up to every show that we do now saying thank you for what you did during the lockdowns. I found online we created a family and there was that great sense of connection. We did T-shirts as well and it was just like a real cottage industry but now things are back and we've even been back in Europe which we didn't think would happen. We went to France this year which was great.”

And now there is the album too: “We had done eight or nine albums before lockdown and lots of people wrote a lot during the lockdowns but we didn't, but what we did do during lockdown was these gigs and we went back in time and started learning all our old songs again. It was a really interesting experience to be doing them again.

“Our ethos as a band is to be slightly political and slightly socially aware but our main aim is for people to have a good time and have an hour and a half of not worrying about anything else, all delivered with that slightly socially aware edge. And our 20-year live album was supposed to be at the beginning of lockdown but in the end we recorded it at the end of last year.

"And the fan base made the choices on the setlist for the album. We put out a questionnaire asking people what songs they wanted on it, and that's what we did. And it sounds really good. And really lovely is that as it was one of our first gigs coming out of lockdown, it's really tangible on there the excitement and the relief of just getting back out together again.

"You can feel it from the band and you can feed it from the audience.”