Crib notes

“It’s strange to me how indie music got so popular,” says Gary Jarman of The Cribs. “Suddenly you have to sell bigger shows, and people are saying: ‘This is what the people expect at this level’. I hate when they go: ‘You have to do it once you reach this level’. It crops up a lot.”

In many ways The Cribs (Jarman brothers, Gary, Ryan and Ross) are angry (or at least annoyed) young men from a different age. They just want to play old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, but ‘the man’ keeps bothering them with Spinal Tap-esque suggestions for their live show and future records. Because they initially pulled themselves up by their own DIY bootstraps they find many of the demands from the industry a bit perplexing.
“Suddenly everyone is saying we make really lo-fi records,” sighs Ryan Jarman. “But it’s actually because all these other bands are making ridiculously polished records now.”
In keeping with this traditional attitude to playing and recording, they feel a kinship with some of the older luminaries of the independent scene. They’ve been writing and recording with Johnny Marr, for example.
“I met him at a party over in America,” Gary reveals, “and because we’re both English we ended up hanging out. He liked The Cribs and we were big fans of The Smiths, and one day we said we should work together. We do like collaboration. We put our first record out in 2004 and since then we’ve released about 60 tracks. We never wanted to release something we didn’t like just because we needed a B-side, so we’d come with ideas of things we wanted to do and just do them. So we always wanted to do spoken word stuff but didn’t feel comfortable doing it ourselves. So we had Jon Slade in because he was a mate of ours. We knew that we wanted to do it again so we got Lee Renaldo in. And none of it was tokenistic. Had it not worked we just wouldn’t have used it.”
Johnny Marr, Lee Renaldo, Jon Slade, aren’t all these people from “the past”? And wasn’t Jon Slade in seminal feminist, riot grrrl band Huggy Bear? How did the Jarman brothers get so interested in the more political indie music of the early 90s (considering how apolitical and hair-obsessed young people are nowadays)?
“We got into riot grrrl because of Sonic Youth,” Gary explains. “They would talk about bands like Huggy Bear and that was a big, big influence for us. I used to work putting on the riot grrrl shows and benefits for Ladyfest. I was involved in the London one back in 2002 and that was the first time it went to London. Riot grrrl was proper punk because they were actually trying to have a revolution. It wasn’t just about the music. If you liked a band then there was something else they believed in. It was serious. And it wasn’t just politics for the sake of it, if they did anything they did it for a reason.”
And this ultimately is the source of The Cribs’ disgruntlement.
“I think that’s what’s missing from music now,” Gary concludes. “Being successful on a mainstream financial level is completely attainable for an indie band now. Indie is a commodity. But it used to mean something more and we want to go back to that.”