Rocking The Crib

The Cribs are on the crest of a wave, and by all accounts the conditions are looking very good indeed. The West Yorkshire, England 3-piece (brothers, I might add) have a whole raft of musical friends and admirers, from the Kaiser Chiefs (whose songs they often cover live, and vice versa) to Franz Ferdinand, and with two good albums and accompanying singles under their belt, the sky is clear for take-off. New album, Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever, is days away from release, recorded in Vancouver and produced by Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos, and now that they’re signed to Warner in the US/Canada, they have the big label machine working away in their favour, and all the advantages that entails.

I caught up with singer and guitarist Ryan Jarman on the second day of Toronto promo, and the day after their low-key (but no less intense) show in El Mocambo. It’s not hard to hear how tired the seemingly endless interviews, video shoots and promo work has made him, and his Yorkshire drawl often drifts off and he searches for the right way to answer a question (his answered are peppered with ‘You know what I mean’s’), but like any good musician, once you get him talking about the songs and the band, Ryan bristles with the excitement of a man who knows his band’s future is wide open, and its up to them to make of it what they can.

TS: I know you’ve already done a little groundwork Stateside when you toured with Franz Ferdinand before. This time have you had cases where’ve you gone back to play somewhere and those people who saw you last time have come back and this time brought their friends?
RJ: Yeah that’s how I think it’s working. There is definitely no substitute for putting in the work and touring. We did that two months touring in arenas with [Franz Ferdinand], and it was really hard work, doing it without any money or a record deal. That’s the only bit of promotion we had. I think the same goes for the UK or anywhere, you make a name for yourself by touring. You shouldn’t be shy of touring because that’s the kind of promotion that gets hardcore fans. And hardcore fans are, in today’s environment... music, it’s completely a commodity. So you need the hardcore fans.

TS: I was reading yesterday about the difficulties of getting beyond this 60, 000 hardcore fan threshold unless you have the major-label support to really push you to the next level.
RJ: Yeah, its good for us to get that exposure, especially in this country where we’ve never had it, we never even had the opportunity. It’s so important to have the hardcore fans because they do so much work for you.

TS: Then of course there’s all this talk about the big record companies are going to disappear because of the impact the internet and cheap home recording technology has had on the industry.
RJ: I do think it’ll go that way, but in some ways I think it’s a little bit upsetting. When you get a record, the artwork, the lyrics, the actual physical form... I think when the internet does take over, it’s a good thing in some ways, but in other ways it makes music even more disposable. You can do well, but you’ll never make any more than one record, because by the time it comes to your second everyone’s moved on to the next thing. And also, I think although it’ll give exposure to a handful of really good bands, at the same time it’ll give a lot of shitty bands a chance at exposure. The world will be awash with so many bands, the value will get diluted. You’ll get one band starting up and a million imitators. It’s so easy to do it, and get exposure quickly.

TS: This is my big issue, why can’t record companies, instead of selling music, advertise how great it is to go to a shop and have a CD in your hand.
RJ: The thing I remember when I was a kid, I used to know what album I wanted, I’d never heard it cause obviously you couldn’t hear it on the internet. I’d have to save up for two weeks to be able to afford to buy the CD, and by the time you got it you listened to it religiously, you read all the artwork, you got your moneys worth out of it. You’d get into bands in a way that you really believed in the band. I’m worried that if things become too easy... you can hear any album you want on the internet now, you don’t even have to want it any more, you just stick it on your iPod. A lot of that romance will be gone, it can never be a good thing.

TS: I was always concerned when it was announced that you didn’t even have to buy a whole album on the net, you could just buy certain tracks off it. It’s death for the album-format, but some of the best albums of all time have to be listened to all the way through.
RJ: I think that’s really weird. If you sit down and think about it, an album should be viewed as a complete body of work. If you could look at an album like [Nirvana’s] Nevermind on iTunes, and see the number of times “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had been downloaded compared to all the other ones... I find that kind of depressing.

TS: So what albums would have been formative to you growing up
RJ: The first CD I ever bought was either [Nirvana’s] In Utero or Nevermind. Stuff like that was really important to me, these were bands I believed in, not just the music, but the attitude that came across, the values that you could get on board with and make you feel good about yourself. This is when CDs were sixteen quid each, four weeks pocket money! So you got your moneys worth out of them. That’s why bands used to mean so much to me.

TS: I’ve been listening to The New Fellas (The Cribs sophomore effort) and the new one too, and the new one definitely sounds like a step away from your influences and more of your own sound. Would you say that’s fair?
RJ: Yeah, and I think it’s definitely a good thing, the last two albums were definitely more brash, but you have to work on a broader level. I didn’t want another album where we were just grinding the same axe, just shouting at people, but there’s still a bit of it on there. The album came about by accident anyway, we spent a couple of years touring, then a few months away from each other where we didn’t hang about together at all. When we got together we wrote the album in six weeks, we didn’t have any idea how it would turn out. Subconsciously though I think we wanted a personality that was different than anything that’s going on in the UK at the minute, since indie music has become the new pop music, things are starting to sound similar. The last two, we just went into a room and bashed them out live, whereas this one we really had in our minds to make the best album we possibly could. Every track was written before we went into the studio.

TS: Two things I’ve noticed about Cribs songs. Firstly is that they’re, if not anthemic, then certainly they’ve got something of the tub-thumping rabble-rouser about them...
RJ: I Guess that’s just the way they are, with writing them live. We are a punk band at the end of the day. I think it’s just our personality coming out.

TS: I was going to say maybe it’s a Yorkshire thing, because Yorkshire has a reputation for bands who aren’t afraid to stand up for themselves
RJ: Yeah, maybe it is. Things like that definitely ring true. Bands from small towns generally have something to shout about, seem to have a chip on their shout. Growing up in Wakefield, it definitely lights a fire inside you. In small towns people call a spade a spade.

TS: And secondly a Cribs songs is always a lean mean song. Do you have a strong 3 minute song ethic?
RJ: In general I’ve always believed less is more. Keep the playing simple, cut out anything that doesn’t need to be there. Especially on the first album we had whole sections we used to cut out, two and a half minutes sections got cut. If it doesn’t need to be there, what's the point on spending money on recording it? On the new album there are some longer songs, but they were probably twice as long when we wrote them.

TS: How did working with Alex from Franz Ferdinand go, and what was his contribution to the recording process?
RJ: A lot of the things that he brought... we just along so well. We agreed on so many things. Before in the studio I would have said “I want to do it live, I want to play my guitar, I don’t want to do any overdubs.” And he’d say “You should try and make something sonically better quality, there’s nothing wrong with trying to get your songs to more people.” Because on the first album I think we suffered from indie snobbery, we’ve always viewed anything as selling out. So he brought a lot of good ideas, and he brought his own keyboards, his own guitars and amps. We didn’t bang heads together at all; it was a very productive relationship.

TS: How do you keep yourselves occupied on the tour bus?
RJ: Well for a start we don’t have a tour bus, we have a tour van! You don’t keep yourself occupied, you just sit there and get on with it.

- Kid Lupin 











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