COINCIDING WITH A TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY DELUXE REISSUE, AND AHEAD OF A SUMMER RUN OF CELEBRATORY DATES, VOCALIST AND MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST TOM GRAY LOOKS BACK AT BRING IT ON – THE 1998 DEBUT ALBUM FROM THE ALMOST INDEFINABLE GOMEZ…

 

IN SOME WAYS I THINK THE DEBUT SINGLE 78 STONE WOBBLE COULD ALMOST BE THE… ‘MANIFESTO’… OF GOMEZ. THERE’S LOTS OF MELODY, GREAT PERFORMANCE, LOTS OF IDEAS…
Yeah, I entirely agree with your statement. I agree with your description.

SIMILARLY WITH ONE OF THE OTHER SINGLES FROM THE ALBUM BRING IT ON… WHIPPIN’ PICCADILLY… THERE’S LITTLE BITS OF TOM WAITS IN THERE, I CAN HEAR A LITTLE BIT OF OTIS REDDING, THERE’S SOUL, FOLK, THE BLUES, LATINO… THE RANGE OF INFLUENCES IN THE MELTING POT, AND THE WAY THE BAND COMBINES THEM, FEELS LIKE ALL CARDS ARE ON THE TABLE FOR GOMEZ, AND NO CARD HAS LESSER VALUE…
Yeah. It’s hard to say where all that came from, but I remember very clearly a conversation I had with Bally (Ian). It’ll have been in Wigan Pier. We were talking about how people were making music in what was actually a very conservative way in the 1990s. It felt, certainly at that time, that music had become quite conservative, quite deliberate, and that that had become quite marketed. There were lots of examples, though, of people from the past, from a long time ago, taking whatever was around them that they were enjoying and turning that into pop. We really wanted to bring a different energy to it – allow people to hear all of those different things. See if it was possible for us to combine all those different things. I suppose what’s kind of surprising is that we were in our late teens and fixed on doing that. We were fixed on making the song the thing that we hung all of that off. It had to be a great pop song, first and foremost, before we started being silly with it. Do you know what I mean?

YEAH… AND THE DIVERSITY OF ALL OF THE IDEAS, THEN, THAT YOU HUNG ON THE SONGS… AND THE WAY THOSE IDEAS WERE PRESENTED (THREE VOCALISTS, FOR A START) MEANT THAT THOUGH THE BAND HAD A RECOGNISABLE CREATIVE AESTHETIC, THE APPROACH WAS NOT ABOUT IMAGE, SO WAS HARD TO PIN DOWN… THE MUSIC ITSELF BECAME ‘THE STAR’…
Yeah. And it allowed us to show off different aspects, through that. Sometimes people just aren’t that tuned in to the different influences that are going in to music. So in a way I suppose it was also a way of showing off what we were doing. You could have a real ‘indie’ voice like Ian’s and people would connect with Gomez because they were into indie music… They’d be accessing stuff that was slightly more off-kilter, ha ha, or post-modern or whatever you wanna call it… And then similarly with Ben (Ottewell), people who were into blues or folk or whatever, more roots music let’s say, were brought to Gomez by that. They were brought to the table as well. We never saw that diversity as a weakness. Plus, early on, some people were saying “What you doing? You’ve got three singers, what’s going on?” and we were, like, “Imagine that! Three singers!” – ‘cos, y’know… The Beatles had four different people singing on their records. The Beach Boys, whoever… The Eagles! All these different bands with multiple singers. It’s not that different an idea.

AS YOU SAID, ROCK HAD BECOME CONSERVATIVE BY THE MID-’90s, SO ANYTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY WAS A LITTLE TOO DIFFICULT TO FULLY DIGEST, MAYBE? 
In a way, yeah. By the mid-1990s rock bands had become a formulaic thing. By that point U2 had probably ‘perfected’ the exact formula of what a rock band is supposed to be  – and, in a way, that was it. Game over… To be absolutely fair, though, U2 had completely figured it out and done that very very well. Coldplay took that formula and ran with it, successfully, y’know. But for some of us it was just, like, “God… I’m so bored of that now”. It was a different time.

IT WAS A DIFFERENT TIME… AND I THINK IT HAS ADDED TO THE LONGEVITY OF THE BAND, AND PARTICULARLY THE ‘SHELF LIFE’ OF THE DEBUT ALBUM, THAT GOMEZ SAT COMPLETELY OUTSIDE OF THE MID-TO-LATE ’90s ZEITGEIST… YOU CAN’T PIN IT DOWN AS A 1998 ALBUM.
Yeah, you can’t. Also, the other thing was, people seemed to be into ‘white music’ or ‘black music’. that really confused as well. In many ways we were really influenced by the trip-hop that was coming out of Bristol – the textures they were creating and the things they were doing with their ideas. In some ways we felt there was a deeper connection between Tricky and Tom Waits than there was between other things which might have ‘seemed’ closer, if you see what I mean? It was interesting the way we, in the band, were hearing things. These things have musical similarities. There’s something in those two, Tom Waits and Tricky, that provides context and divides cultures and time. Something that’s speaking about the same thing.

… AND SPEAKING ABOUT IT WITH DEPTH AND SUBSTANCE…
Absolutely, yeah. And also a darkness, and a sort of juddering aspect to the music, y’know? Tom Waits and Tricky, they’re just the two that came off the top of my head, though they both did inform that first album in some way, I think. Weirdly, though, they were both actually signed to Island Records… Anyway, there was stuff about that made us think twice about music. Like, for us it was “Supergrass or Chuck Berry”? Well, those two things were not quite that distinct from each other, in so many ways, were they? Why does it have to be produced in this way? Why does it have to sound like that? I think that was it with Gomez, really. First of all we were all very much into ‘groove’ – and that’s really really significant. What was going on with white, mostly male, indie-pop in the 1990s was the antithesis of groove music. I think people sometimes get confused about that with Gomez – people talk about us having made swampy blues music. There are moments of that in there on BRING IT ON, definitely… but really the thing that underpins absolutely everything is a sense of groove. A sense of ‘feel’. That’s the most important thing…

THERE WAS OFTEN THIS NOTION OF THE BAND (AND I THINK IN SOME WAYS IT WAS PUSHED BY THE PRESS) THAT YOU WERE A BUNCH OF OLD MEN TRAPPED IN YOUNG BODIES…
It was a bit weird, that. I didn’t hear our music as being a bit old or whatever. I was always a bit confused by that. They either said we were ‘old men trapped in young bodies’ or they said we were students. It was one or the other. They put us down because they didn’t think we belonged to our generation, or they put us down because they thought we were being, I don’t know, ‘slightly ironic’ or taking the piss or something… Or being too clever and coming at it all from an intellectual point of view. We really weren’t. We were definitely too stoned to come at it from there.

TO BE HONEST I CAN ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND THE PERCEPTION THAT YOU CAME AT IF FROM AN INTELLECTUAL ANGLE… IN COMPARISON TO MOST OF WHAT WAS GOING ON AROUND YOU, BRING IT ON IS ‘INTELLIGENT MUSIC’…
Yeah, it is. It is. But that’s simply because of the dumbed-down nature of other things, of what else was going on. I remember that as we were releasing BRING IT ON, Oasis put out BE HERE NOW. Somewhere around the same time, anyway. I remember being very confused by that record, and thinking “Bloody hell. Listen to this. How are we making music at the same time as this?” – I didn’t know what was going on. That record was… well, it was an era where, basically, there was a bunch of people just doing cocaine and reading LOADED… What’s funny about it is that it often it was people who were much more intellectual than us doing all that cocaine and reading LOADED who were making those criticisms of us. We were just music enthusiasts, y’know?

YOU WERE ALSO SOMETIMES DESCRIBED, AS A CRITICISM, AS ‘MUSOS’…
Yeah. Well, that’s a real thing. We were, and are, musos – and unabashedly so… I think all musicians are, actually – but we were just very very very straightforward about it. I remember when we first started being interviewed at the time and we’d talk about SPIRIT OF EDEN (Talk Talk) or The John Spencer Blues Explosion or Tim Buckley records, or whatever. Stuff that was bouncing out of our heads – and the interviewers would just sit and stare at us. I remember meeting this MOJO journalist who hadn’t heard this particular Tim Buckley record we were talking about – and him being annoyed that some twenty-year olds were going “What? You haven’t heard it? You haven’t heard HAPPY SAD? What you on about? Are you mental?”… and you just can’t imagine that happening now.

MUSIC IS SO MUCH EASIER TO ACCESS NOW BECAUSE OF THE INTERNET. IT’S LIKE A GIGANTIC SMORGASBOARD, AND SO SOMETHING FROM 1968 HAS BECOME AS RELEVANT AS SOMETHING FROM 1982 OR FROM 2006… AND SO ON…
Exactly, yeah. That’s right. Music was so much harder to access back then. So no-one bats an eyelid these days if you say “I’m well into Arthur Russell” (or whatever). Now, no-one would think twice about it. Now, of course, everyone’s using him as a reference point – whereas when we were talking about him back in the late ’90s, people would just go “Who the fuck’s that?” and so… it’s funny stuff. It’s funny how things change.

YOU MENTIONED THAT PERCEPTION OF GOMEZ AS ‘STUDENTS’… THE THING IS, YOU WERE STUDENTS…
Yeah, ha ha ha… Go on…

YOU WERE ACTUALLY STUDYING POLITICS. IS THAT AN AREA THAT YOU’VE CONTINUED TO BE INTERESTED IN?
Yeah, it is. It’s pretty messed up at the moment, y’know what I mean? Please God, let me bored again! Please let normal service be resumed… What else is there to say? We’re between a rock and a hard place. The most useless, utterly incompetent, most lying government we could probably ever experience in our lifetime… and a beautiful socialist dream on the left, but who unfortunately has absolutely the same Brexit policy. Hooray! Hooray for us! We’re doomed! What are you supposed to do?

THE OTHER DAY I GOT QUITE WOUND UP BY SOMETHING ON THE TV TO DO WITH ALL OF THIS… AND I LISTENED TO BRING IT ON – HAPPINESS ROSE AND, AS THEY SAY, “TOTAL CALM DESCENDED”…
Ha ha… Thankyou for that. It’s a beautiful thing to hear – very sweet of you, actually. You know what? It’s not that uncommon, actually. We do hear things like that a lot about that record – that BRING IT ON is people’s favourite de-stressing record. Quite recently BBC 6Music had a mental health awareness day and they asked listeners to get in touch and say what record they listened to to not feel anxiety. A lot of people said BRING IT ON, which was good. It’s pure escapism, I suppose…

IS IT LIKE THAT FOR YOU NOW? CAN YOU LISTEN TO IT SORT OF SEPARATED OFF FROM THE CONTEXT? 
I’ve never really put politics into my music. Well our third abum has a bit of it. IN OUR GUN was actually an anti-war album, but no-one really noticed that. The song IN OUR GUN itself was actually written from the point of view of bullets. It’s about bullets inside a gun, waiting to be fired…

THAT’S INTERESTING… I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS LIKE AN OLD BLUES SORT OF THING… I THOUGHT IT WAS SPERM!
Ha ha ha, no it’s bullets. It’s less analogous than you thought! Ha ha ha ha… But, anyway, the thing about BRING IT ON is… when we were kids we were trying to escape small town thinking. That’s kind of what it was about. Romanticising our own experiences and then looking out at the rest of the world like it was a sort of big playground… It was deliberately having a kind of cinematic view of the world.

PAINTING YOUR OWN SCENE TO UP AND WALK INTO…
Yeah, exactly that. We’ve all continued to write songs about that. escape is a recurring theme in rock ‘n’ roll, isn’t it? It’s that Bruce Springsteen thing – running away, getting away, from what’s keeping you down. I think BRING IT ON is so much fun, and it’s very sweet-natured. In equal measure it’s naive and world-weary… It’s actually a pretty strange kind of a record.

DESPITE THAT STRANGENESS IT WON THE MERCURY PRIZE IN 1998… DID THAT EARLY SHOT OF ‘WIDER NOTORIETY’ AFFECT WHAT CAME AFTER (IN TERMS OF THE WORK)?
Not really, because LIQUID SKIN (the second album) was recorded in kind of the tail-end of the same recording session. We just carried on. It’s crazy, really, that we released LIQUID SKIN in 1999. That’s crazy isn’t it? Imagine a band doing that now!

IT WOULD BE AT LEAST FIVE YEARS…
Yeah, exactly… with the record company sending things back, making the band do it again, blah blah blah blah blah… We just released LIQUID SKIN like we weren’t even thinking twice. And when our third album dropped, which was only three years after BRING IT ON, remember… people had already moved on: “Oh, we’ve had two albums from them”… Anyway, the Mercury thing. I don’t think it affected how we did things, no. But I think a lot of people had kind of decided they knew what we were about – and that was that.

I SUPPOSE WHAT I’M SUGGESTING IS THAT FOR A BAND SO YOUNG, THAT AMOUNT OF SUCCESS AND ATTENTION COULD MAKE A BAND SELF CONSCIOUS ABOUT WHAT IT DOES… IN FACT ABOUT WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT MEANS… 
Somewhat. Somewhat. But no. I don’t think we got that self conscious. I think we got knackered. We were knackered – ‘cos we played all over the world. So we got tired… But, actually, if you now went and listened to IN OUR GUN, without the context of where we were in 2001, without the context of how it was playing out and how we were being perceived at that time, and without the internal narrative of the band, I think you’d probably be surprised by how good an album it is. I sometimes think that the narrative people want to tell about bands far too often stems from a false narrative anyway.

WHEN YOU SAY ‘FALSE NARRATIVE’ WHAT DO YOU MEAN? A NARRATIVE IMPOSED BY THE RECORD COMPANY, BY THE PRESS YOU WERE GETTING… ALL OF THAT?
Yeah, yeah. An idea of the band that just becomes an accepted wisdom within the journalistic sphere, the business sphere. We didn’t have any say in that. For years we had to put up with this semi-hilarious ‘Mercury curse’ sort of thing, which was bizarre… You’d say to people “What do you mean a Mercury curse?” – and they’d be, like, “Well, we didn’t really hear much from Gomez after that”… So you’d go “Well, we went to America and had a really successful career over there. We had proper ‘radio hits’ over there and all that. Our fifth album was our biggest album in America – and you’ve never even heard it”. And they’d go “What? A fifth album?” – so…

I SUPPOSE IT’S A BIT LIKE THAT NEIL YOUNG THING… I’M REALLY PUSHING THE PARAPHRASING, HERE, BUT HE SAID SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF: A BAND OR AN ARTIST GETS THREE YEARS IN THE SPOTLIGHT, AND IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW GOOD THE REST OF THE WORK IS BEFORE OR AFTER, THE STUFF WITHIN THAT THREE YEARS BECOMES THE CONTEXT SURROUNDING EVERYTHING ELSE, RATHER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE PROVIDING CONTEXT FOR THE WORK DONE IN THAT TIME…
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. There was a very strange cultural drift happened with us, y’know what I mean? Like, the last time Gomez appeared on British television was in 2001. The last time Gomez appeared on national American television was 2012. So you get into a real strange area where people are talking to you like the narrative of your career was these two or three years when the UK gave a monkeys… But the lion’s share of my life and career has been spent in North America, not giving two monkeys whether people in the UK are paying attention to me or not. Having said that, we are lucky in the UK – ‘cos the fans have stuck with us and we play to enough people anyway… It’s been one of those things where you’re like “It’s good but one day maybe the other people will come back”. How many bands are there in the UK like Gomez? Yet I think we’re treated like an aberration rather than a rarity, y’know what I mean? Maybe one day someone in the press will say something nice about us without some weird caveat about the late 1990s…

THE BRING IT ON TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY TOUR THAT THE BAND HAS JUST FINISHED A LEG OF (AND THERE ARE MORE DATES COMING THROUGH THE SUMMER) WENT REALLY WELL. YOU PLAYED THE ALBERT HALL…
Yeah, and we played The Forum a couple of days later. I mean, who knew that Gomez was worth nearly seven thousand tickets in London in 2018? That was mental.

I FOLLOWED IT ALL QUITE CLOSELY ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND IT LOOKED LIKE YOU WERE HAVING THE TIME OF YOUR LIVES, ACTUALLY. THERE WAS SOMETHING VERY FREE AND EASY ABOUT IT…
Yeah! Well, that’s it. When the filter gets turned off, and when people are just enjoying it, and when it’s only about the thrill of the music… well, we’re really quite good at that. It’s annoyingly simple: are they good or are they bad? You know what I mean?

YOU’RE ALL (OBVIOUSLY) TWENTY YEARS OLDER THAN YOU WERE WHEN BRING IT ON WAS RELEASED, AND YOU HAVE FAMILIES AND OTHER RESPONSIBILITIES… HOW MUCH DO THOSE THINGS INFORM ‘THE GOMEZ LIFE’..?
Not much, actually. Not much has changed, I’m afraid to say, ha ha ha… It was all pretty silly.

I SAW SOMETHING ABOUT JOHN SMITH, THE TOUR SUPPORT, WAKING UP ONE DAY COVERED IN BREAD… LOADS OF BITS OF BREAD STUCK TO HIM, HA HA…
Yeah. Ha ha… We did give John Smith a full costume of bread. He was sleeping on our tourbus, so he got fully hazed – but in the most gentle and polite way possible. He did his own work, though, of course. I seem to remember that he covered somebody in bananas. It was all a bit tit-for-tat for a while, there. Ha ha… If you find my Instagram [here], there’s a really good clip of John doing an impression of Ben. It’s really good. We’re actually just priming John to replace Ben, when Ben eventually falls down from too much scotch. They’re both tall and hairy and a bit growly and gruff, but I think people might notice… But you never know do you?

Buy the 20th anniversary edition of BRING IT ON from the Gomez store, here

Thurs 23 Aug   OXFORD   O2 Academy   Tickets
Fri 24 Aug   NEWCASTLE   O2 Academy   Tickets
Sat 25 Aug   NORWICH   UEA   Tickets
Sun 26 Aug   PORTSMOUTH   Victorious Festival   Tickets
Tues 28 Aug   BIRMINGHAM   O2 Institute   Tickets
Weds 29 Aug   CARDIFF   Tramshed   Tickets
Fri 31 Aug   BRADFORD   Bingley Festival   Tickets
Sun 2 Sept   MANCHESTER   O2 Ritz   Tickets