HENRY portrait of some serious kidders

INEW YORK’S They Might Be Giants are one of the most consistently challenging pop groups of the ’90s, hiding their often obscure lyrics beneath a maelstrom of catchy hooks and ripper melodies. The irresistibly tuneful ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ from 1990’s Flood album provided them with a breakthrough of sorts on this side of the Atlantic. Now, three years after delivering the somewhat patchy Apollo 18, the boys are back with John Henry, perhaps their strongest LP yet – 20 of the most complex pop gems you’ll hear this year, revealing a duo of enormous stylistic range, from the perfect Beatleisms of ‘Subliminal’ to the gorgeous acapella harmonies on ‘Do Not Forsake Me’.

John Linnell – that’s the guy without the glasses – plays keyboards and horns, and takes care of a good chunk of the songwriting. For a rock-star, he looks sickeningly healthy, something which he attributes to his disinterest in drink, drugs and groupies. He’s the guy responsible for these jingly, jangly melodies.

“John (Flansburgh)” he reveals, “pays more attention to the words. I’m the melody man. Personally, I’m totally guilty of this thing of not listening to words, even among people I like – I’ll just listen and check out the melody and maybe find out a year later what the words are, which can be kinda embarrassing. I’d want our listeners to be entertained by the songs, rather than thinking deeply about them. It’s fun just to listen and groove along to a song, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

The opening track ‘Subliminal’, replete with psychedelic fade-out, owes a huge debt to the Fab Four in mind-altered mode.

“Well, John and I were definitely really into them, they were one of the first things we heard. It’s not a subliminal song, though, it’s very overt. John wrote the lyrics to that song, so I can’t really speak for him. I guess it’s just about how something can be subliminal and staring you in the face at the same time.”

It was this John, however, who penned the lyrics to the album’s grand finale, ‘The End Of The Tour’ which declares emphatically that – “We’re never going to tour again/No, we’re never going to tour again.” Does this mean that the Giants have traded-in their Dodge van and settled for a cosy life in suburbia?

“No,” he laughs, “it’s not meant to be taken literally, although we were sort of joking around the time we were recording it about how it would be taken, particularly live. If you tell people you’re going to stop touring, it’s a way to generate more interest – then we can come back and have a reunion next week! It’s not really about us, it’s more the idea of the tour, any tour. It could have been called ‘The End Of The Road’.”

One of the album’s standouts, ‘I Should Be Allowed To Think’ features a passage from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Have the Giants been dipping into Beat literature?

“Not really, although I think it’s a great poem. But it’s more relevant to the attitude now – the song addresses something contemporary, a generation after Howl, which is that there’s an idea currently in the US that everyone’s problems, y’know, their alienation and their disaffection and their disinterest in doing stuff is somebody else’s fault – whether it’s their parents or the government. It’s a very popular cop-out.”

Coming from New York, were the Giants influenced by the whole NY scene? Their brain-over-brawn approach certainly has parallels with early Talking Heads.

“Yeah, we were into that stuff. I loved Television. John and I moved to New York in 1981 and by then most of that stuff had already folded up or moved away or wasn’t happening any more, so we kinda missed that. But there was this secondary scene that started up, this East Village scene, performance art, poetry readings etc. and that was our only arena. We were a duo, I played accordion and we did tapes and we did other visual stuff so we were sort of allowed to be part of that. We could be on the same bill as these very esoteric performers. That was a lot of fun. From 1983 to 1986, our world was the East Village and by the end of that we’d actually started to get gigs up in Connecticut and had a record out and stuff. Now, it’s like the West Village is basically a tourist trap, whereas the East Village is full of punky kids with rings in their noses and stuff like that. You’d like it. It’s funny, ’cos New York is turning into one of those former empires. When I was born there it seemed like the cultural centre of the universe, but now it’s moved into that club of cities that have a certain past. It’s definitely still important, but a lot of its selling point is based on a nostalgia trip. With being from New York, we really get to see what other people’s idea of it is, and it’s usually based on Sinatra and stuff.”

Does that appeal to him?

“Oh yeah, we love old Sinatra and Sammy Davis records. John’s really into the Mills Brothers. We’re both into music that came before rock ’n’ roll, and we always have been. And coming more up to date, two of the bands that we were really into in the Seventies were Pere Ubu and the Residents, y’know, two slices of oddball America. They’re both highly personal, they’ve got their own universe, their own language, and that was really inspiring for us. I think the Grateful Dead had that, too.”

While a large amount of Flood was devoted to experimental, quirky material, this LP sees the Giants exploring the more conventional song format. Lyrically, has there been a deliberate shift between Flood and John Henry?

“Yeah,” Linnell admits, “we’re trying to be more plain, say things that make sense. ’Cos people are constantly asking us what the songs are about and we realise it’s our job to tell a story that makes sense. It’s harder to do that, actually, to write a good simple song. It’s easier to write obscure lyrics, ’cos they often don’t mean anything.”

Why do Bryan Adams and Mariah Carey go to number one?

“I don’t know,” he chuckles again. “I was just talking to my girlfriend about that. We were talking about Phil Collins, actually. I was saying that I thought everyone could like him ’cos he’s so inoffensive, nobody really loves him but everyone could like him, so he sells more records. And she was saying that Phil speaks to people, because he’s doing something they could do – he’s not above them. But the debate we were having was whether or not he’s replaceable, whether he’s a truly unique one-of-a-kind phenomenon that’s created his own market, or whether he’s just filling a slot that’s always there. That’s the difference between us and the ‘mainstream’. We’re trying to do work that’s personal. Work that means something to us, instead of seeming to mean something to other people. And if we like it, it follows that other people will. If we tried to do something just to please other people, we’d be bound to screw it up. That’s the genius of Phil Collins – that he can second-guess other people, whereas John and I seem to be unable to. So we just do what we feel like. It’s personal without being autobiographical – like ‘Meet James Ensor’ is about a Belgian painter, ‘Destination Moon’ is about a guy that’s terminally ill.”

When scanning the lyric sheet of John Henry, one comes across a lot of mad scientist subject matter that isn’t the usual stock-in-trade of pop groups this melodic. Just check out ‘Thermostat’: “There’s a thermostat that regulates the temperature/That might not be reliable/That should be disconnected.” Does John feel that the band’s cerebral image is a barrier to the commercial success they deserve?

“Well, possibly. But we’re doing the best we can, and if we were to try and change that, I think we’d probably fail, and be less accessible. It’s the cross that every group bears. On the other hand, this is a job and we want job security. And having a hit’s great, I wouldn’t feel guilty about it, it gives you longevity. So I’d be definitely kidding myself if I said that it didn’t matter. You need to make money to keep going. And it’s important to be liked. And there’s a lot of people out there who really are with you.”