I arrive at The Forum in Tunbridge Wells at around 3pm on a glorious Saturday afternoon, and immediately it’s clear that this is very much a family affair. ’s partner carries their baby around the venue, while ’s little one excitedly darts about the place, ear defenders and car booster seat at the ready for the band’s soundcheck. Standing alone on its hillside, the former public toilet turned grassroots venue has been the beating heart of the area’s music scene since 1993, hosting a mighty roster of talent that includes , and , though one long-time staff member describes his experience of hosting the latter as unpleasant.
Today, however, it’s a homecoming show in every sense of the word. Without The Forum, there would be no , the punk duo as , of which Laurie is one half, and Laurie and Sam may never have crossed paths as teenagers. Now family men themselves, they’ve returned to their old stomping ground with their latest venture.
complete the picture alongside guitarist and keyboardist , bringing four wildly different musical backgrounds under one roof, with the contrasts between them central to the project’s identity. In the lull between soundcheck and showtime, Laurie and Sam join me outside the venue to reflect on the paths that brought them back here, and to talk about their debut album, ‘Midday At The Middleway’, now out in the world via .
Naturally, our conversation begins with The Forum itself, a place woven into both Laurie and Sam’s personal and creative histories. “The first time I ever locked eyes with Sam was in the Tunbridge Wells Forum. He was playing in a band. I reckon I must have been about twelve,” says Laurie. “I don’t know if we were supporting them, or if I was just here to watch a gig, but the Forum has a really good reputation for booking unsigned, brand-new bands. There was none of that bullshit of paying to play or having to fill a ticket quota. Usually it would be three young bands on the bill, and everyone would bring their mates along. It was that kind of vibe.”
He continues, “Sam’s a few years older than me, and I saw him play here and I was like, ‘WHOA. These guys have it cracked. They’re up there making real music. I wanna do that!’”
Sam’s introduction to the venue proved similarly formative, albeit with slightly more illicit beginnings. “The first time I came here, my mate from down the road brought me along to see a band from the States called . I was fourteen and I told my mum I was going to a mate’s house. I came down to the show having never really been out in my life. Before you know it, I’m down here having a few drinks and crowdsurfing at this gig. The guy at the merch stand took a liking to me and gave me a free T-shirt. I was completely addicted from that point onwards. My parents found out and I did get grounded, but it was worth it.”
Though he’s been stationed here for some time now, Laurie originally hails from Maidstone. “For a kid, a 50-minute car journey is leagues away. I was deep in envy of what Tunbridge Wells had. Maidstone didn’t have a scene anywhere near as open or inviting. Coming here was like making the pilgrimage to Mecca. There were no direct rail links and the buses stopped running after a certain point.”
If Big Truck’s roots stretch back to those formative years at The Forum, the circumstances that brought the band together are decidedly more recent. With Soft Play between album and touring cycles, Laurie suddenly found himself with room to explore. His bandmate Isaac Holman was dealing with matters in his personal life while also pursuing his bedroom-rap project , giving Laurie the impetus to follow a creative thread of his own.
It wasn’t entirely unfamiliar territory. Prior to Soft Play’s 2024 comeback, Laurie had stepped outside the confines of the duo with , an experimental project formed alongside producer . The experience had given him a taste for placing his own voice at the forefront, and Big Truck presented an opportunity to push that instinct somewhere new.
Sam, meanwhile, brought his own varied musical history to the fold. A jazz-trained drummer, he previously played with as well as , the pre-Soft Play outfit that also featured Laurie and Isaac. His involvement in Big Truck therefore represents more than a reunion of two old faces from the same local scene.
If Sam offered a reassuring link to the past, Asa Thallon and Justin Myles brought something different altogether. A decade separates the younger pair from their bandmates, a generational gap that Laurie believes has become fundamental to the chemistry of the group.
“Me and Sam are in our mid-30s, and they’re in their mid-20s, so I think having that 10-year gap has been really insightful. They have certain references that we’re not privy to, and likewise when me and Sam are chopping it up about old times they don’t know what we’re going on about. It adds a certain balance of familiarity and freshness.”
The younger half of Big Truck bring plenty of life experience of their own. Asa comes from a background in metal guitar and currently plays bass in alternative rock outfit , but his life outside music is equally demanding. He works in a nursing home caring for people living with dementia and recovering from strokes, while studying for a master’s at UCL in the Clinical Neuroscience of Dementia.
It’s a schedule that leaves Laurie wondering how he finds the hours in the day. “Asa is the most booked-up man on the planet,” he laughs. “He’s got a lot of fingers in a lot of pies.”
Then there’s keyboard player Justin, perhaps the most immediately magnetic presence in a Big Truck live show. Looking as though he’s been lifted straight out of the ’70s, he’s an R&B man with an infectious smile who also makes music under the moniker, releasing his , in 2024. Born in New York City on, of all dates, September 11th, 2001, Justin also grew up in Maidstone, where his relationship with music began under very different circumstances. Diagnosed with autism as a child, he attended a special needs school and found a refuge in music, though performing initially presented its own challenges. At his earliest school concerts, the noise of applause was too overstimulating, so Justin wore ear defenders and audiences were asked to raise their thumbs in appreciation rather than clap.
Watching him perform today, that story feels almost impossible to reconcile with the musician in front of you. “It’s a miracle really when you hear how far he’s come,” says Sam, “and now when you see him on stage he rocks out harder than all of us.”
Laurie laughs: “He properly mashes up his keyboard. Sometimes we have to tell him to calm down cos we can’t afford to replace it.”
That push and pull between competing forces runs through ‘Midday At The Middleway’. Its title takes inspiration from the Buddhist concept of the Middle Way, broadly a path that rejects opposing extremes in favour of navigating the space between them. Laurie was introduced to Nichiren Buddhism by Sam, who gave him a book to read while on tour, and the philosophy soon began seeping into his own thinking.
“I take it as: we have to make mistakes in order to learn and to go forward,” Laurie explains. “There’s no such thing as losing, just learning.”
It’s an outlook reflected across the record, where pleasure and consequence, responsibility and abandon are rarely far apart. “It’s all about the dark and the light, the yin and the yang,” he says.
That duality extends to the album’s artwork, which features one of Laurie’s own paintings and offers a visual expression of that same interplay between light and dark. It’s another reminder that his creative life has never halted at music. A painter and visual artist in his own right, Laurie was responsible for much of Slaves’ early visual identity, creating gig posters and record artwork himself, a DIY instinct that has remained with him as his work has expanded into exhibitions and tattooing.
Those contradictions were present from Big Truck’s very first release. Debut single ‘Central Reservation Blues’ finds Laurie reckoning with the less romantic realities of life on the road, and the moments when a commitment to music comes into conflict with the responsibilities waiting at home.
“I was on tour and I missed my partner Oons’ birthday, and then I missed my three-year-old son’s birthday as well,” he explains. “She could take me missing her birthday, but the fact that I missed our son’s… I could tell she thought I was taking the piss. She didn’t even have to say it, I could just feel it. There was also this immense disappointment in myself that I wasn’t able to rearrange it somehow.
“It wasn’t my finest hour. I wrote that when I was away and in the depths of feeling that pain and missing it.”
It’s a conflict Sam understands well. “In this industry you constantly find yourself fighting really hard to make sure that you’re not dropping any of the plates that you’re spinning, the most precious of which is that which is based around your family.”
That unease can also be felt in the song itself. Rather than allowing its melancholic chord progression to reach the resolution the listener expects, the band deliberately leave it hanging, using shifts in dynamics to carry the track instead. It’s a subtle musical reflection of a situation for which there was no particularly neat resolution in real life either.
If ‘Central Reservation Blues’ finds Laurie sitting with discomfort, ‘Rebounder’ unlocked an altogether different approach to getting those thoughts out. It’s self-reflection without the self-seriousness: a diary-like stream of consciousness that somehow references two different varieties of animal faeces before bursting into a hard-hitting chorus that’s as wholesome as it is catchy.
Laurie describes the track as a turning point in his approach to songwriting. “It’s called automatic writing, where you don’t edit yourself, you just write down an unfiltered stream of thought. It’s spoken word, but there are actually melodies within the lilt of the delivery, it’s not just straight-up talking.”
The song’s playful streak extends into its visuals, with Laurie also designing the masks that feature in the ‘Rebounder’ video, introducing a cast of strange characters that begin to expand Big Truck’s visual universe beyond the music itself. Asked whether that’s a route he’d like to explore further, and eventually bleed into the band’s live shows, he says with a decisive grin:
“There’s a fearlessness to this project. I wanna get on stage in capes and shit.”
Sam agrees that the possibilities are only beginning to reveal themselves. “We’ve talked about bringing the characters from the masks into the fold, and I think that will hopefully happen naturally as time goes by. The more the team grows for touring and stuff, the more we’ll be able to build in the visual references in the production of the live shows.”
Before Big Truck take to the stage, there’s another familiar face to contend with. Performing as , is another product of the Tunbridge Wells scene that shaped Laurie and Sam, as well as a close friend and long-time collaborator of Soft Play’s Isaac Holman. These days, he also works alongside Laurie as an apprentice at the same tattoo shop, just down the road from the venue. Tonight marks his first live appearance in over a year, and there’s little ceremony to the set-up. Armed with an acoustic guitar and loop pedals, Mackey stands alone on The Forum stage.
Earlier, Sam described him to me as “one of the most apologetic musicians I’ve ever worked with”, something that makes considerably more sense when a friend in the crowd jokingly instructs him to “stop being self-deprecating” mid-set. Yet there’s little for Mackey to apologise
for. His short set contains some of the most affecting songwriting I’ve encountered from a lone acoustic performer in some time, with ‘We All Fall In Love Sometimes’ proving particularly moving.
There’s something about CUB’s presence tonight that feels integral to the story of the place. Beneath the tattoos and accumulated trappings of a small-town rock scene, this is ultimately a community of old friends who have become remarkably articulate at expressing male vulnerability through creative work. Sam has known Mackey long enough to have witnessed that journey first-hand. “He’s been a key player in the scene that made all of us,” he says. “He’s been making music since he was like 13. Really fucking good music, he’s one of the greatest songwriters we know.”
Come showtime, that sense of familiarity is everywhere. Justin’s family are out in force, while Sam’s wife Tilly watches from the crowd, later receiving a dedication from Laurie before he heads down from the stage to dance alongside her. Laurie’s eldest son, Bart, is here too. Once the child pictured on the artwork for Slaves’ ‘Acts of Fear and Love’, he’s now old enough to hang out with his dad in the green room, soaking up the buzz and banter on either side of the show with an excitement he makes little attempt to conceal.
Perhaps most touching of all is the presence of Laurie’s mum. She was unable to attend many of those early Soft Play shows while caring for Laurie’s father, but tonight she’s here to witness this latest chapter unfold in the same venue where so much of it began. Laurie dedicates ‘Heavensent’ to her, providing one of the evening’s most tender moments.
For all the talk of Big Truck representing a new beginning, tonight doesn’t feel like anybody wiping the slate clean. Instead, there’s a sense of old relationships being carried forward into something new. The venue is the same, many of the faces are the same, but the people occupying it have grown up. The teenagers who once relied on parents and older siblings to ferry them to gigs at The Forum are now arriving with partners and children of their own.
‘Midday At The Middleway’ is out now.