A Chat With Larry Foley of The Punters
By Darryl Dinn
Back Home Magazine

Darryl Dinn [D]: Hi everybody. I'm here with Larry Foley, lead singer of the Punters. Larry, are you enjoying Carbonear?

Larry Foley [L]: Carbonear? But we're in Ottawa.

D: Oh it is! OK! I'm misplaced, lost my sense of where we are. Larry, you're in town for the Tulip Festival. How are things going with you guys?

L: Great, we've been on tour since the first of April. This is actually the last show in the coast to coast tour, which has gone really, really well. I just got back from Boston yesterday. I took a little hiatus from the tour, and went down there with our manager doing some business stuff down there for the band. Well, it's a nice way to cap off the tour, here at the Tulip Festival. Played it 2 years ago?

L: Yeah, we really loved it and were looking forward to coming back.

D: Now last month you launched, or officially launched, your CD. How's that been going?

L: It's going really great. The sales are stupendous - way above anything we expected, especially in Atlantic Canada. It's been the Number 1 seller in stores in St. John's since it came out, or the top 3 in all the music stores. That's really good. We're getting tons of airplay with the new song. The latest single was released this week, which is "Wonder What it's Like", which is a song that Chris wrote, our bass player. And yeah, the response has been huge. We're really excited about it.

D: Now your web site [www.punters.ca] has definitely improved since the last time I spoke to you. What are some of new things you got on it?

L: There's all kinds of cool gadgetry on it. A site is way more important even than it used to be a couple of years ago. Everyone's got a Web site at some point or another. But we're going to the States and we're going to Ireland in August. You know, it's sort of an international marketing tool, as hokey as that sounds. The cool thing about it, you can get a Punters screen saver now. Which is kind of neat, you can download from the Web site.

D: So when you have your new video up that will be on it, so we can keep an eye out for that.

L: Absolutely, absolutely.

D: Now, you've been travelling across the country, have you run into many fellow Newfoundlanders and Labradorians?

L: Man, they are everywhere. Like there are people from Newfoundland in every province in the droves. It's really great because it gives us a ready-made market in places that are far away from home. But we wish they'd all come home. But it's super. When you're on the road for 6 or 8 weeks, one would think you would get a bit homesick, but we don't, because everywhere we go, someone in the band has a really good friend or someone they used to go to school with, or share an apartment with, or something.right across the country. So it's really cool that way.

D: Now with your new CD, "Will You Wait", what's your favourite song from it?

L: My favourite song. I think my favourite song on it is probably "Wonder What It's Like", as I said Chris Batstone wrote. But you know, they are all kinds of special songs in some way or another, or they wouldn't be on there. It's been a couple of years since we put a record out. Over that amount of time, you can put a big stockload of songs in that are all kind of cool to you because they're new. But I think that's my favourite song- it's a good catchy tune, has a good chorus, which is what I like.

D: Now with the new CD, you're with Loggerhead Records now- a new label, and they re-released "Said She Couldn't Dance". Now this is a full one, they produced and had a hand in. How is that different than sort of, doing your own CD.

L: It's different in a way that we had greater support in a budgetary things. So we took a lot longer time to do the record. We basically spent 12 weeks recording the record. We did it in Montreal, which was something they wanted to do, the studio they chose and producer they chose. Which was really neat. It gave us the chance to sort of get outside our own headspace and sort of a much broader view, an open-minded view of the record. When you put out a record, you are putting it out for the whole world., not just for yourself. We kind of did that for the first little while. It worked out really well. It gave us a bigger sense of perspective in doing the record. It was a good experience overall.

D: Larry, thanks very much for talking to us, and best of luck.

L: No bother. Thanks very much for your interest.

D: And I'm sure we'll be seeing you soon.

L: Absolutely.