Older guns go for it

Having taken a much-needed hiatus from the music industry merry-go-round, those eclectic English guitarslingers Gomez are back with a new album, the spankingly good In Our Gun, and a six-date Irish tour in early April.

Four years ago, the quintet shot to attention with their debut single, ’78 Stone Wobble’. The ensuing album, Bring It On propelled them to the giddy heights of international success, picking up the coveted 1998 Mercury Music Prize along the way. Their mixture of delta blues, southern boogie, infectious melody and refusal to conform to any genre struck a universal chord. Their second opus, Liquid Skin, proved that they were no one-album wonders. What followed was almost four years of world tours, industry plaudits and wowed punters, a mixed bag compilation CD (Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline) and a five-track EP of completely new material (Machismo).

After all that, I presumed that it was a conscious decision to step out of the limelight, taking six months away from the band.

“It wasn’t a decision: it was a necessity,” stresses Ian Ball, one of the band’s three vocalists. “After four years, we were at the end of a phase, at the end of a long, long road. So we just finished all the touring commitments that we had, released the Shopping Trolley record, and just disappeared for six months. We were pretty much knackered, in every sense of the word: physically, mentally, constitutionally. There wasn’t much petrol left in the tank. We had done more in four years than other bands do in eight.”

He’s not joking. Gomez managed to fit so much into those four years that you could be forgiven for thinking that they have been around forever. The overwhelming success of Bring It On catapulted the still-teenage ensemble into a relentless cycle of touring, recording and touring again. I wondered, if, in hindsight, perhaps that success came too early for them and took them by surprise. The band disagree.

“It might have seemed to happen a lot quicker and it might have seemed a larger thing than it actually was,” notes Olly Peacock (drums, percussion). “As a band, we were only a year old when we won the Mercury Music Prize so we just accepted things in our stride.”

“When you don’t know any other way, you just accept things as they happen,” Ian adds. “It is just a case of dealing with things and doing whatever you have to do next.”

Back to Olly: “Fortunately, after the Mercury prize, we went to America straight away for our first tour there and that brought us back to earth and meant that there was no chance we were going to get carried away.”

They strenuously deny that the success of their debut put pressure on them to follow it up immediately, despite the fact that Liquid Skin was recorded in between touring the first album.

“We wanted to get that album out because the songs were getting old and if we didn’t release it, we would have been really sick of them,” Ian explains. “We could have taken a year off then but we were still on a roll, so we decided to release it and buy ourselves some time after that album.”

Before they took a break, however, Gomez still found the time to release Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline, which was something of an odds’n’sods collection of alternate takes, remixes, cover versions and b-sides, but still managed to fit in quite a lot of never-released material. “The idea behind that was to clear the decks so the songs would be brand new for this album,” Olly explains.

After their six-month hiatus, going back to life in Gomez was like slipping into an old comfortable pair of jeans for the quintet, who moved into a large manor house in Gloucester for two months, where they recorded In Our Gun (“A studio has a slightly more clinical feeling to it”).

““It was really easy,” Ian recalls. “We just got together, got pissed, played a few tunes and started recording. We just flopped back into it.”

Like all their previous recorded output, In Our Gun, was produced by the band themselves, which is a very unusual situation in the big money music business of today. From their very first release, Gomez have been responsible for their own sound: I wondered if they realised how lucky they were?

“That was the whole point of choosing our record label,” Ian enthuses. “The thing they liked about our band was that we sounded different. And they know, as anybody who has a brain knows, if you put a band in with a producer and then put another band in with the same producer, you are going to get the same sounding record. Producers have very set ways of doing things and they don’t change them for anybody. If you’re signing a band because you like their production style, you don’t put them in with a producer: it’s simple as that. We are lucky, but it was a sensible decision at the start.”

Being responsible for the overall sound of a record is a concept that is very dear to Ian’s heart, it seems. “That is the most exciting, most interesting bit of being in a band, actually producing stuff,” he gushes. “That is where we enjoy ourselves the most so to give away that would be just stupid: it wouldn’t make sense.

“Some bands don’t really want the pressure that comes with producing,” he continues. “You’ve got the final say and you can’t hide behind the producer, blaming him for fucking it up. If we fuck it up, we fuck it up: it’s our responsibility and that’s fine. It’s better than blaming some American geezer you don’t know.”

So how democratic is their songwriting and production process?

“Well, it’s not democratic in that we don’t take votes and stuff,” Ian laughs. “But it is usually a case of enthusiasm.”

Olly joins in: “And it is usually song-based, as well. If you are very feeling particularly inspired towards a certain song, and you’re very much into it, then you are going to work on it. For this record, there were various rooms where some of us would be working on one tune, and the others would be in another room working on something else. So if you had done enough on one song, you could just move into another room.”

At this point, Ian is quick to explain that the creative process behind In Our Gun, “Wasn’t a case of sitting around a camp-fire jamming: it was all recording-based”. Recording a Gomez album, according to Ian, is like, “A jigsaw puzzle, especially when you have no idea what is going to happen next”.

He’s referring to the fact that any one of the five members could take a basic song structure and then add some trademark Gomez effects and loops on top of the mix, taking the song in a completely different direction. “It’s a case of putting everything down and then starting to throw things away,” Ian sums up the unique manner in which Gomez work.

“We tried to keep the melodic side of things slightly easier, this time around,” Ian says. “If something is melodic, get everything else out of the way and turn everything else into a rhythm instrument.”

I venture the opinion that In Our Gun sounds a more cohesive record than their past work.

“It still sounds like there is shit-loads going on, but there is not as much as on previous albums,” Ian agrees.

“We know what we’re doing in terms of structuring and putting the various pieces together in a song, as opposed to before, when it was often a case of throwing too much at it,” Olly adds.

Despite their new-found sense of keeping things (relatively) simple, Gomez still don’t write songs in traditional structures, however. I wondered if they could ever see themselves writing a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eighth-chorus to fade kind of tune.

They laugh: “There are a couple of songs on the record that go verse chorus verse chorus stop,” Ian laughs. “So we are taking it even more down to basics. If we can do it on one chord, we do it on one chord.”

I bring up the subject of the title track, which to these ears is like two songs welded together, the second of which sees the band veering close to the edge of the dancefloor. Gomez in techno shock!

“They are actually the same song, the same chord structure,” Ian insists. “We just tried to get that move from the tension building in the first part of the song to the release at the end. The more you hear it and get into the lyrics, the more the end bit makes sense, the wanton destruction of it. Live, it just sounds like Motorhead.”

Having been through the next-big-thing stage and flirted with fame, things have settled down in the world of Gomez and this album is simply the next chapter in what is an ongoing story. So are they hoping that this release will bring them fame and fortune all over the globe?

“No,” intones Ian as if he finds the very notion distasteful. “We’re certainly not seeking fame, at any cost. Fame seems to be a very crap thing. I think we’ve too many vacuous celebrities in this world already without any more.

“The only time we get any expectations is when the album has been out a while and people come to the shows. That is the only way that we can realistically see what is happening to our music. All the rest of it is just bollocks. It is just peripheral nonsense. All that matters is when you play the songs live, if people like them.”

Speaking of things live, Gomez are embarking on a six-date tour of Ireland in early April, with stop-offs in Limerick, Galway, Cork, Belfast, Derry and Dublin. They are looking forward to it immensely.

“It’s going to be our first gigs for 20 months so we decided to do it in the friendliest country we could think of,” Ian smiles. “It’s going to be a bit of a laugh, I think, and hopefully we’ll be fairly well together by that point.”

When their brief sojourn on these shores ends, it’s a case of tour, tour, tour, including a series of festival dates this summer. In fact, their every waking hour is pretty much mapped out between now and August. After that, they reckon they’ll be off touring the album around the southern hemisphere.

So basically, they’re following the sun?

They laugh. “Yep, exactly.”

“The plan is basically to release the album and mooch around the world, playing it to people,” deadpans Ian. “It’s not that original an idea. It’s been done before.”