After more than 25 years in perpetual motion spreading the gospel of groove around the world, The New Mastersounds are hitting pause.
With the majority of their mammoth, 40-stop TTFN (Ta-Ta For Now) U.S. tour in the rearview, they’re looking toward their remaining handful of stateside performances this month, due to wrap up with a two-show New Year’s run at Denver, CO’s Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom in Denver, CO featuring special guests Mike Olmos, Jason Mingledorff, Michelle Sarah, and Lamar Williams Jr. The New Year’s Eve show is sold out, while limited tickets remain here for 12/30. Livestreams of both shows will be available here.
Fortunately for The New Mastersounds’ thousands of adoring fans, the foursome is not calling it quits as a band. There will still be new studio releases via guitarist Eddie Robert’s imprint Color Red, plus the occasional pop-up concert when the mood strikes. But mounting tours in the U.S. presents economic, logistical, and physical challenges for an outfit whose members are scattered across the globe. (Drummer Simon Allen and keyboardist Joe Tatton make their home in England, while Pete Shand lives on the Balearic island of Menorca and Eddie Roberts lays his head in Denver.)
Still, the closing of The New Mastersounds’ touring chapter brings about an appropriate moment for reflection, both on the road they’ve traveled for a quarter of a century and what the future might look like when they finally come to a stop.
Eddie Roberts last week took a break from mixing the debut album by The Breaks, his new trio project with Stanton Moore and Robert Walter, to speak with Live For Live Music about the TTFN Tour, his various current and future projects, and what fans might expect from The New Mastersounds going forward as their post-touring era begins. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Live For Live Music: I’d like to start by asking you to please clarify the purpose of the band’s final tour for those who think this is the end of The New Mastersounds.
Eddie Roberts: It’s basically the end of international touring. The only place we’ve ever toured for any extensive amount of time has been in the U.S. Our days of sitting in a van for five hours a day, then playing a show, then rinse and repeat, those days are over. It doesn’t really work bringing the band to America because the infrastructure I need to be in place is an expensive thing for foreign artists and it’s only getting harder and we’re only getting older.
We had an incredible tour. It felt like a real celebration of everything that we’ve done. And we really felt the love from our fans who came out. It was sold out everywhere and it felt amazing. It’s kind of bittersweet, but it’s just going into the next chapter of the band. The band’s not breaking up.
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Live For Live Music: You even have new album you recorded at the beginning of the tour in Sausalito, correct?
Eddie Roberts: We recorded an album at The Record Plant. It’s actually now called Studio 2200. But it’s the old Record Plant where they recorded [Stevie Wonder’s] Songs In The Key Of Life and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and crazy amounts of incredible records.
It was an amazing way to start the tour. We went in for 3 days and kind of did a day’s rehearsal and then hit record. We managed get a full album together, but it’s gonna be a while before I have time to mix it.
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Live For Live Music: Could you tell us about the special guest you’ve got on the album?
Eddie Roberts: We worked with a vocalist out of the Bay Area called Destani Wolf who’s an incredible singer. We had her on a couple of tracks that Pete, our bass player, and her had written together remotely over the last year. We’ve known her a while. She sang with the band down in Baja when we did that festival (in 2023), and the guys were just like, “Whoa! We need to do something with her.”
Live For Live Music: The band’s last record, “Old School” was just that—old school, with classic Boogaloo as its theme. Will this new record have a different tenor?
Eddie Roberts: It’s definitely got a very ’70s vibe just because of the kind of studio it is. It lends itself to almost ’70s disco, but early ’70s rather than late cheesy ’70s, if you know what I’m saying. You know, more organic-sounding funk and disco. I would say that it has a bit of a leaning towards that for sure.
Live For Live Music: Besides still playing with your band The Lucky Strokes, you’ve also just announced a new project with Stanton Moore and Robert Walter called The Breaks. How did that come about?
Eddie Roberts: I met Robert 30 years ago, when the Greyboys played their first European show. It was in Leeds and I opened for them with my band The Three Deuces. I met those guys literally 30 years ago. Funnily enough, the first non-Mastersounds show I did in U.S.A. was playing for the Stanton Moore Trio, which included Robert and Stanton. I’ve done a lot of stuff with Robert, but not so much Stanton except when I lived in New Orleans. For a while we did some jazz gigs together at Snug Harbor.
Stanton and I have always talked about [starting a band] and we started talking on Jam Cruise—like, I guess, 2 years ago. It just made sense, especially with the easing of touring with the Mastersounds. We all went to New Orleans in October and made an album and that’s the one that I’m in the middle of mixing right now.
Live For Live Music: Your first shows as The Breaks will be opening for George Porter, Jr. in Denver in February. What can we expect from this band, some mix of jazz, funk, and soul?
Eddie Roberts: Yeah. It actually leans quite heavily into the New Orleans sound, probably because we recorded there and are also all so rooted in the music of NOLA. All three of us have lived there at some point, and Stanton still does. There’s some flavor to the album that almost reminds me of Lee Dorsey or Ernie K-Doe.
Live For Live Music: The New Years performances and livestream at Cervantes is a gift to fans and those of us who missed your live shows this last tour. It seems like a fitting ending to touring. What made you decide to livestream the event?
Eddie Roberts: New Years Eve is sold out. There’s a handful of tickets left on the 30th. We’re urging people to buy before they’re disappointed.
And then there’s the whole livestream thing.. Where the initial idea came from, there was a movie made about us going to New Orleans for the first time in 2007 called Coals to Newcastle. It’s called that because Newcastle’s where they’re mining coal and why would you take coal to Newcastle? That’s an expression that [English people] use. You know, we’re taking funk to New Orleans. Like, why would you take a British band to New Orleans playing funk where they invented it? So that’s where the title came from.
That was May 2007. And even though it was cringey to watch at the time, now when I look back on it, I’m like, “Wow!” I’m so happy somebody captured us at that young, ripe, enthusiastic stage. We were so bright-eyed and bushy tailed. We really were on the start of our U.S. career taking off. And so we decided we wanted to film these final shows. I want to capture this. I want to bookend the story of this amazing 20 years that we’ve had out here.
I started talking to a friend of mine who does pro-level live streaming, and we decided to put that whole thing together. It’s not a social media live stream, not like those kind of things that we had in the lockdown. This will be streamed on our own website, thenewmastersounds.live. It’s essentially movie-quality cameras with a director. It’ll give people a chance to watch it live or watch it through the following weekend. We wanted to be able to share these shows with people who couldn’t make it to Denver, and also, I really wanted to capture this as a moment in time, a moment in our history, in full quality, and have that as a bookend from the Coals to Newcastle movie to the last shows in the U.S.
In addition to the livestream performances at Cervantes Ballroom on December 30th and 31st, The New Mastersounds’ Ta Ta For Now tour will make stops on December 28th in Aspen, CO (early and late shows) and December 29th in Steamboat Springs, CO. The tour will culminate on Jam Cruise 22, sailing from Miami on February 7th. For more information about the remaining tour dates including tickets and how to access the New Years livestream, click here.