|
|
 |
Gomez.
 "We've been in the States again," declares Gomez's drummer Ollie Peacock when I ask about his summer break. "We seem to be there all the time, to be honest. So we had a bit of a break for Christmas, and a few of us were in Hawaii, doing some recording over there with some friends. And then before that we were doing a UK tour. So we've just been touring touring our socks off."
And those socks are unlikely to be put back on for a while, seeing as Gomez are just about to head back down to our shores. Peacock has some fond memories of the last time the band travelled around our fine brown land.
"I made a really good blunder on the last tour in Australia, in Melbourne. For Revolutionary Kind, we've got this loop that I set off, and I was having a bad gig to say the least, it was all going pear-shaped... And then, this was the last song before an encore, and I managed to press this button that skipped it on, like, four beats more. And so everybody else in the band is playing four bars behind what the loop is playing, and there's absolutely no way that it can be changed. So I just put my head down and sat there with this angry face for five minutes while everybody stared at me, going, 'What the hell are you doing, you dickhead?' The crowd didn't seem to mind too much; they didn't seem to notice, but there were a few people going 'Ah, he's fucked it. He's totally fucked it.'"
On that basis, Peacock seems quite chuffed that last year's 'Split The Difference' was a return to much simpler songwriting and instrumentation, without such a need for samplers and other digital wonders.
"I think people were... surprised that it was like that, that it wasn't too eclectic. That was part of the point of doing it. You won't be able to expect what the next one sounds like."
Some people have tried, though: it seems the English press has tried to get ahead of itself on numerous occasions. "There were probably some English reviews, I'm sure, that were suggesting that it sounded like something completely different. It's really funny, because you can read a whole consistent bunch of reviews and then generally you'll read something in the English press that's totally off the mark. They'll say, 'It resembles this band,' and you'll be like, 'well, it can't possibly. There's no way, if you actually analyse the music...' The NME; I don't know when it turned into a comic magazine, but it's an absolute joke. If I was reading an album review, I want to know what the album was like, not what kind of haircuts they had or who they'd been seeing last week. This doesn't give me any idea the music."
At this point I too want to get ahead of myself and ask Peacock what we might be able to expect from their recent recordings. He doesn't give too much away.
"I guess that we're roughly heading in the direction that the next one will be a kind of fusion between those two albums ['Split The Difference' and 2002's 'In Our Gun']. Somewhere in the middle. It will probably be a bit crazier."
So more machines then? Peacock sighs, and declares that for him using machines is mostly about "...sitting there, pressing buttons all the time and not actually getting anywhere. The machines blow up and they can't actually talk to each other. Get a computer involved, and you talk about MIDI, and you think, 'Ah, right, here we go. This is going to take us a long time...'
"On the last album, we had to put Sweet Virginia into a computer, we had these strings that we had to link up with each other, and that was really good because we had strings on the track, but it took a day and a half to put them in at the right time. And this is just ridiculous, you know? If we had the people just come in and play on it, we could've flown them in from Australia and had them play on the track by the time we've got these fucking things in place. So it's very frustrating, that sort of thing. It's a shame, because it's one of those songs that's so well recorded, we've never been able to get it right live."
Ben Revi
 | Gomez play at Thebarton Theatre on Tues 22 March with Paul Dempsey. |
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
