TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS

May 2025

When the members of Trans-Siberian Express first get to set in St. Pauls, they take to their roles like they were born for them. How could they not? Most of them work in kitchens when they’re not onstage. Now, a few years after the band’s story started – beginning with a stoned podcast, a squat, and a nine-minute song – they’re cooking up something even tastier.

Having come up in Bristol’s DIY scene, the experimental funk-rock outfit have cut their teeth on the city’s indie venues, cheffing up psychedelic ballads and reggae-pop tunes. Wherever they are, the stage looks crowded – there’s six of them riffing over one another – but it’s easy to see the bonds that have kept them in the tight knots of this difficult-to-define act.

Tonight, they play in their chefs’ whites, but on other occasions they’ve been swapped out for robot heads smoking spliffs or drone suits. I meet the three Louises - Cooper, De Schynkel, and Wilson - and the other band members Danny and Hamish. Chris is absent but clearly missed. I catch them on their smoke break to ask about their beginnings.

How did Trans-Siberian Express start?

Cooper: The first gig was a Kill the Bill thing. I was visiting a friend who was squatting [at Hotwells House], where the old pork shop was, and they showed us around. We were like, this would be a great place to do a gig, and the next day they were like, do you want a two-hour slot? Before that, we were just playing around. Some songs were covers, or jams where we’d just say the same lyrics over and over. So a three-minute song turns into 10…

But we kind of formed when De Schynkel started the music club.

De Schynkel: So you have a microphone in the middle to record everyone, and everyone would come in with one song they love. You play the song, everyone listens, and they’d be ruthless. Brutally honest. It got really competitive. Whoever got the highest ranking would be the winner. Some people would cop out: they’d pick a classic, so you can’t spin up on that.

Which part of the process matters most to you?

Cooper: For me, the biggest dub is when we’re working on a song and it really clicks. We had it the other day where we were like, Oh, we’ve got something new, and we can see the potential of it. Performing live is great as well.

Hamish: Yeah, [when it goes right] you literally rub your hands.

Cooper. My little tic.

Can you tell me about the song you had that moment with a couple days ago?

Cooper: Oh, it started with a nicked riff from a Captain Beefheart song. The great thing about this band, with so many people, is it doesn’t take ages for something to build. Sometimes it’s instant, because of the talent behind the rhythm section and guitars.

The bit that surprised me about seeing you live was The Tennessee Three rhythm guitar behind so many of your songs. What came first, the rhythm or the band name?

De Schynkel: When we play, my thoughts are purely train-based.

Cooper: The name came from watching a Karl Pilkington thing where he was on the Trans-Siberian Express. In the episode he meets a man who’s magnetic; he sticks to spoons.

De Schynkel: What was the thing we used to say? Our music goes through a wave of genres, and the Trans-Siberian Express goes through a variety of terrain - that isn’t true by the way, it’s all marshland. It’s nice though, because we all have very different music tastes.

So what are the music preferences?

Cooper: Louis is very bluesy, but also very electronic. Me and Louis love electronic music.

(Other loves between the members are Beck, Mark E. Smith, Bob Dylan, folk, and oldies rock.)

De Schynkel: Things change when people join. When we started, we all had quite a rigid sense of what our music taste was, and over the years, with exposure to people and tastes, it’s changed. It’s nice to have such a fluid attitude.

And you’ve been recording?

De Schynkel: Well, that’s the thing. We’ve got the recordings for an album, but we feel like they don’t represent us. When we did that recording, Hamish and Danny had only been in two months. We’re thinking of redoing the album, doing more EP stuff. It would be good to release work that sounds better. When I listen to a new artist, I always listen to the first album. I want ours to be up to snuff.

What feels different to how you are now?

Cooper: It’s janky and jaunty, nonsensical, genre-less music. It was all about trying to keep ourselves from being bored. Back in the day, we were like, ‘Let’s mix and match for the sake of it.’ We didn’t really have control. Nowadays, we analyse the tunes a bit more, look more to the scope and concepts, try and blend them in a better way.

A good example is one of our earliest songs, ‘Triple Whammy’, which is three songs merged into one. A nine-minute mess. We just can’t recognise it anymore as ‘us.’ We’re having a better understanding of what we want from this and each other; better cohesion.

What’s next for Trans-Siberian Express?

Cooper: We’re going to do it until it’s not plausible, or we get bored, or we get jobs. Maybe someone moves to Australia to be a joiner.

De Schynkel: There’s a music video for a song called ‘Typhoon.’ The video was recorded by Phoebe Ashford - we made it at Harlequin Fayre last year on the DHS camera.

Hamish: Within our bigger friendship group, we’ve got so many brilliant people; talented filmmakers, talented people. It’s really nice to have that community. I mean, most of us went to uni in Bristol together.