Talk About Your Mob Hits

Larry Love is probably the first singer in the history of the record business to admit he owes his success to a New Jersey mobster.

No, we’re not talking about a belated confession about the payola and mob control associated with the early days of rock.

Love is the leader of A3, a colorful techno-country band from Britain with outrageously theatrical pop-rock sensibilities. And the mobster is Tony Soprano.

In HBO’s series “The Sopranos,” A3’s “Woke Up This Morning” is played over the opening credits as Soprano drives from the grit of the city to his peaceful suburban home. The lyrics, served in an ominous grumble, carry the tension eating at a man whose work is filled with intrigue and violence: “You woke up this morning/Got yourself a gun. . . .”

The song was originally released on A3’s 1997 debut album, which generated so little attention that the band was dropped in May by its U.S. label, Interscope Records, in the reorganization after Seagram’s purchase of PolyGram. But the TV exposure has suddenly made the group a hot property again. It is now in contract talks with Columbia Records.

“Woke Up This Morning” is the centerpiece of the “Sopranos” soundtrack album, which has been getting rave reviews and sold more than 200,000 copies in three months. The version on the show and the soundtrack is a remix of the recording on A3’s debut album, and Jay Leno is such a fan that he flew A3 over from London to perform it on “The Tonight Show.”

Love’s story tells a lot about the uncertainty of the record business, and how easy it is for something once ignored to be toasted later--a tale that is especially important during a time when record companies seem increasingly impatient for immediate results.

“I must say it’s nice to finally be wanted,” Love says during a brief visit to Los Angeles. “After years of being in the wilderness vis-a-vis record companies, it’s a bit of vindication now.

“The thing that the labels kept saying was you can’t mix country with dance music. But it seemed natural to us. Hank Williams hung out in after-hours country juke joints, where drinking was illegal--which isn’t all that different to a warehouse party in South London, where police are trying to bust it up. There’s the same kind of illicit feel to the music--which is probably why it works so well in a TV show about mobsters.”

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Love, 35, is one of those pop stars who can talk a good line as well as write one in a song. The hyper singer-songwriter prepares for an interview much as an athlete warms up for a game. He paces his Universal City hotel room, then lays out a row of cigarettes on a table before settling into a chair. He lights one of the cigarettes, takes a long, hard puff, then begins describing his background in the kind of detail that suggests he has an eye for history.

Born Robert Spragg in a village in Wales, Love describes himself as the “son of a preacher man” and says he heard mostly church music until he discovered punk during his early teens. All these years later, he still seems to delight in recalling his parents’ horror when he started bringing home records by the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols.

“All my family were Mormon, descendants of the massive influx of American evangelists who moved to Wales in the late 19th century and brought all this fire-and-brimstone imagery with them to these tiny Welsh villages,” he says, already onto his second cigarette.

As he got older, Love was caught up in the British dance scene. In the mid-’80s, he moved to London and worked as a DJ in clubs. Love drew on these memories when he put together a group he called Alabama 3 with a bunch of other “stray lunatics.” Love’s main cohort in the band is Jake Black, a Scotsman who calls himself the Very Reverend Dr. D. Wayne Love, the self-proclaimed minister of the First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine.

Love can fill a couple of tapes talking about the connection in his head between the religious ceremonies and dance-club and rock celebrations--and the humor behind the whole First Presleyterian concept.

But all you need to know at this point is that the music itself is no lark. There may be humorous and theatrical edges to some of the songs, but the tunes on that debut album are compelling tales built around identifiable themes and emotions.

As Love tells it, the unlikely connection between A3 and Tony Soprano began two years ago when Love woke up one morning in London to learn that a song by his band was going to be used in a series on what he thought was some obscure U.S. cable network.

All it meant to him at the time was a $40,000 check, most of which, he recalls, went to his British record company to help pay off some of the band’s debt.

So Love was jolted a few weeks later to get a call from friends in New York telling him that the show was the talk of the town--and that “Woke Up This Morning” was one of its signature elements.

Martin Bruestle, who is co-executive producer of the “Sopranos” soundtrack album, said the original thinking on the show was to use different recordings in each episode of the TV show, but that changed after creator David Chase heard a version of “Woke Up This Morning” on the car radio. “One reason I think David felt that the song would work was that it sounds different yet very familiar,” Bruestle says. “It samples a couple of blues pieces, yet also has a rap section that makes it feel very contemporary.”

The song is a modern country-blues gem, but the whole debut album, which was released in this country by Geffen Records, is impressive.

Titled “Exile on Coldharbour Lane,” the album explores classic themes of sin and salvation with sometimes serious, sometimes off-beat sensibilities. One British critic described the band as “cartoon cowboys with some very smart, sharp songs. Their mix of roots music and soft techno beats and samples makes for a contemporary hootenanny.” Think sonically of what Hank Williams might come up with if he came back to us in the form of an adventurous dance club DJ.

A3’s influences include such American country and blues figures as Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmie Rodgers, but one of the group’s most important models was Sex Pistols manager and mentor Malcolm McLaren, for his perverse sense of theater and the way he loved to raise the eyebrows of the pop establishment.

Love’s target: the “Britpop” obsession that gripped English rock in the mid-’90s with the rise of bands such as Oasis and Blur.

“I hate anything that has a feel of jingoism and nationalism, so everything we did was a slap at Britpop,” Love says, furiously smoking a cigarette. “So think of how the pop world in England felt when we showed up with this American name--Alabama 3--and singing with American accents and playing American country music.

“The more we got into it, the more fun we had and the more we poured it on. We adopted these odd names--Larry Love, Conga Man Love--as a kinda daft comment on stardom. Our first press release was about how we all met in rehab, which was a way to take the piss out of all these fancy pop stars going in and out of rehab.”

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There’s a danger that fans will tire quickly of a band when the musicians seem to spend more time developing a concept than making the record--and there is a lot of concept to digest with this band, which changed its name to A3 in the U.S. to avoid confusion with the veteran country act Alabama.

It certainly took a while to convince anyone at a record company that there was any future to A3’s odd mix of sounds. Eventually, however, there was enough of a buzz about A3 to attract record company executives. Among them was Mark Kates, who then worked for Geffen Records, where he served as the chief creative liaison with such acclaimed acts as Nirvana, Elastica and Beck.

“I went to this little bar and the music was much different from the music that you hear on the album,” Kates says now. “They were all eight-minute songs, done roughly in the same tempo. I wasn’t all that impressed, but I ended up going to dinner with some of the band members and I got intrigued by them, their wild, anything-goes imagination. I wanted to be involved with them.

“The group not only came up with an individual sound, but the songs themselves spoke about issues in a way that you might miss if you just listen to the music casually. It was clear that these were real artists.”

Kates left Geffen a week before the album came out to take over as president of the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal label, but he was thrilled when he heard “Woke Up This Morning” in the first episode of “The Sopranos.”

“It fit so perfectly,” Kates says. “It was like the band wrote a song especially for Tony.”

In truth, the Soprano character might have to schedule an extra session with his charming psychiatrist if he learned that the song everyone identifies with him was actually written as a salute to female empowerment.

“It sounds odd to say this now that everyone associates the song with such a macho guy, but ‘Woke Up This Morning’ was written after an incident in England where a woman shot her husband to death after being abused by him for years,” Love says

“There was this big debate about what constitutes sufficient provocation. The song is just about the building pressures that lead someone to explode.”

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Love is proud of the debut album, but he’s also eager to get on with his music. The band has already finished much of a new album for a small British label, and Love is more than happy to preview some of it.

The tone of the music still relies on country, techno and blues elements, but they aren’t fused quite as aggressively as they are in “Exile.” The sounds are more stripped down, so that the techno tracks have more of a traditional techno feel and the country tracks are a bit closer to blues-country.

Now that the Britpop fascination has eased a bit back home, A3--whose membership grows from seven on the record to a dozen or more at times onstage--may also ease up on some of the exaggerated theatrics.

“I think what we did was necessary the first time around, but we may have sort of overloaded a bit,” Love says. “In some ways, I think we were too clever at being stupid. It became a little bit like KISS. This time, I think we’ll wear a bit less makeup.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.