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Gomez.
I'm speaking to Tom Gray, who sings, plays keyboards, guitars, and more for Gomez. That would be impressive enough in most contexts, but in the case of Gomez, where most of the band takes their turn at vocals, guitars, and pretty much everything else, it's just business as usual.
Busy in the midst of promoting their fourth studio album, 'Split The Difference', I ask Gray if the routine of radio, television, and press interviews is starting to tire him. "I'm a bit sick of it," admits Gray. "The problem is, you figure out how you feel about it, and then trying to say new things starts to become quite hard. Because inevitably people are going to ask some or mostly the same questions, you know?"
Knowing that this is precisely one of the topics that has been asked to death, I ask him about his experience working with Tchad Blake, who the band decided to work with for the first time despite being long term friends with the Crowded House producer.
"We've known him and the wife and the kids and the dog for quite a few years," he laughs. "Basically we'd recorded most of the record ourselves. We've always done it the same way: we record it ourselves, and then take it to an engineer, and say 'right, well we want to tighten this up and record this again.' The label wanted us to use a producer, which we were never particularly comfortable with, and then the idea came up of using Tchad. He's a producer but he's also just one of the world's best engineers, so we thought 'we could kill two birds with one stone here - we can use a really good engineer, but if they want to write his name as a producer on the packet then they can!' So we asked him if he wanted to say he was producer but he just wanted 'made by Gomez and Tchad Blake,' which was what we wrote on the record. He was just like another head on the job."
As Gray notes, there was a substantial change in tack towards this record, away from the experimentation of 2002's 'In Our Gun.'
"I think we were all in a funny place, because a lot of the guys had split up with people, and gone through big life changes. It was pretty fuckin' messed up," Gray sighs.
"Four of the guys all went through big, long relationships that had been going for like, five years, and had broken up," he says, pausing briefly. "I think to a certain extent, this record was like having a good time together. You know, any group of male friends, if something was going wrong, would just get pissed together rather than talking about it. It was kind of about being a band again, in the old sense.
"To be pretentious for a minute, I think 'In Our Gun' very much sounds like the music of a creative collective, that kind of disparate group of people who have all got silly ideas, whereas this record sounds like a band again: five blokes in a room with guitars and drums and whatnot.
"It didn't feel like we were doing it in a reactionary way - it wasn't like, 'well, we were too weird on our last album, we'd better straighten ourselves out.' I read a review the other day that was saying that, and I thought 'oh, I don't really get that, that's not true'."
There are exceptions, most obviously in the six minute breakup lament Sweet Virginia, but for the most part the lyrics don't seem to reflect the difficulties that the band members went though.
"There's the odd edge of bitterness to some of the lyrics - it was inevitable that that would come out - but for the most part it was about trying to have a good time. A lot of our music has always been about escapism. From the very start, first song, first album, was Get Miles Away," explains Gray, of the 'Bring It On' opener. "It's just part of who we are, as people. We just kind of see music as being escapism, we don't want people to remind us about how miserable life is," he laughs, "you know, necessarily. Plus you don't want it to be sugary pop bullshit either."
As for the next record, Gray is unsure about a future direction ("more camp, maybe?"), although he's adamant that it will be one thing: a collection of good quality songs. "That's the only standard we've ever set for ourselves. Don't bother putting it out unless you at least can be sure some of the songs are good."
Eddie Chan
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'Split The Difference' is out now through EMI.
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