New York’s finest

If you’ve ever been to Manhattan, the central emotional moment of Turn On The Bright Lights – an album with many – will make you shiver with recognition. It sounds eerily like the experience of waiting for a train a four in the morning, alone, the wind distantly shivering through the gratings overhead, whisking trash downward from the street - and, until the train comes with its whistling metal-upon-metal shriek - only the sound of dense filthy air reverberating from somewhere miles down the track and your own muttering voice for company. It’s getting a single release in March, and it’s called ‘NYC’. "The subway is a porno/ The pavements are a mess," Paul Banks intones, sourly, sounding lonely, as if remonstrating with the city itself. "I know you’ve supported me for a long time/ But somehow I’m not impressed…"

So clearly Interpol are a New York band, but please note, they’re not ‘a New York band’. They don’t follow in the Strokes’ sneakered wake; nor are they Downtown Electroclash Art Terrorists (doesn’t that already sound so last year?); nor are they in the vanguard of the (granted, extremely healthy and exciting) Williamsburg-is-the-new-Manhattan movement. Nor, thankfully, have they been on the business end of a now-patented NME week-long "blow-up". Rather, the intelligent, soft-spoken, besuited Interpol have been not so much deliberately avoiding the eye of the NYC meeja storm as (in bassist Carlos D’s words) "kinda living our own independent lives, the way basically everybody who lives in New York City kind of does", and existing in a kind of quiet, fruitful parallel. It’s obviously working, because their debut, Turn On The Bright Lights, a jittery, torn-open, relentless masterpiece of classic New York guitars and a peculiarly north-of-England self-laceration, was universally lauded on both sides of the Atlantic as of the dark-horse highlights of 2002.

One misconception about Interpol, a band with many. That they are half-British. "Paul (Banks, lyricist and gasping, desperate, uncannily Ian Curtis-ish vocalist) and Daniel (Kessler, co-creator with Paul of shivering, chiming guitar reverb-scapes shot through with violent noise, pitched somewhere between Television and early U2) …are native Britons all right," clarifies Carlos. "But they’re not British in any sense of the word culturally. They both [left Britain] before they were 5." Another wrong-ism: that they are "that gloomy band". Morbidly, almost unbearably dark, in a kind of early-Eighties, broken-lightbulb, derelict-warehouse, substance-abuse-problem way, fair enough. Reminiscent of Northern depressives like Echo and The Bunnymen, Joy Division and the Smiths, undeniably. Terribly emotional, and almost too-personal, and visceral as hell in that way that makes you want to dance, or yell, or form a band, yes. Anything as boringly monochrome as ‘gloomy’… no.

Here’s another: that Interpol - who have found themselves being bigged up for their style almost more often than for their music - wear suits for a reason other than that they normally dress in suits. "Style’s something we’d very much consider to be an admirable characteristic in somebody. It’s something we do collectively, but individually, too," says Carlos. "This is actually how we dress." Surely 2003 is a tricky time to adapt such a distinctive look: mightn’t there be a danger of people reading premeditation, gimmickry, into it, in a kinda Howlin’-Pelle sort of way? "Yeah, I know what you’re saying. But I think that our reputation, and our approach, is pretty faithful to the concept of the band: which is, that it’s the strength of our songs that’s taking us forward. At bottom, the only reason that anyone would ever say that they like Interpol, is that they enjoy listening to our music."

Fiercely integral, then: independent New Yorkers to a man, in what looks like an un-easy time to be from that city. Perhaps sometimes, between the terrorist bullshit and the music-media bullshit, it would be easier to be from somewhere else. "I know what you mean," Carlos says. "But we would definitely lean more on the ‘love’ side of a love-hate relationship. In [the song] ‘NYC’ Paul is kind of outlining the spirit of being really, really lonely in New York City, and how, because of the structure of the city and what it’s like and what the people are like, if you are in that mode, it can be devastating. The city is brutal and harsh and indifferent in that way, because it’s so big and so busy and nobody has time to slow down for anybody, so if you don’t wanna keep up, then you’re kinda left… to the side, and that can be an extremely devastating experience. And we’ve all… had our fair share of that sort of thing," Carlos murmurs pointedly. "But I think in general, [Paul] and the rest of the band are very, very proud to say that we are from New York, and for the most part we really love living here.

"But the song stands for ‘New York Cares’, you know. That’s what he’s singing, in the chorus," Carlos adds. "Embarrassingly enough, for a long, long time even I thought ‘NYC’ was ‘New York City’. But it’s ‘New York Cares’."

‘NYC’/’Say Hello To The Angels’ (double A-side) is released in March on Matador. Turn On The Bright Lights is out now