Pol positions

In the evening gloom, Carlos Dengler looks like he’s just slithered out of an Edward Gorey engraving. Wearing a flapping grey trenchcoat and 19th-century moustache, Dengler, Interpol bassist and prominent alt.nation clotheshorse, is doing a good job of making everyone else in the Oxegen VIP area feel vaguely shabby.

Backstage at the Kildare mud-fest, Dengler is Interpol’s most forthrightly dapper member. But that isn’t to say the rest of the New York goth-pop foursome don’t cut a dash: singer Paul Banks glowers beneath a black beanie cap; guitarist Daniel Kessler sports a Gatsby-ish tie and waistcoat combo; drummer Sam Fogarino, in vintage felt hat, suggests an extra from that period gangster flick Tim Burton never got around to shooting.
“Presentation is important to what we do,” Fogarino will explain in a pokey conference room a little later. Not, he says, that Interpol are entirely comfortable with their fashionista rep. “When the fashion aspect gets brought to the forefront – that’s when we get uneasy. It’s not for us to say we look stylish. That’s a question of taste. Some people probably think we look ridiculous.”
Released last month, Interpol’s third album (and major label debut), the imperious, propulsive Our Love To Admire, seems destined to catapult the group out of the ghetto of cult adoration and into the bosom of the mainstream. Already a number one in Ireland and across the Continent, the record recently crashed the US album charts at number four. Your favourite underground gloomsters might be on the verge of REM-shaped hugeness.
“When we began recording Our Love... we didn’t have a record deal,” says Fogarino. “We were going to start recording no matter what. We did the same with Turn On The Bright Lights [Interpol’s 2002 debut] – it was already finished when we did the deal with Matador. So, although this is our first record for a major, we didn’t write it with that in mind. It was going to be the record it was, regardless of the circumstances, whether we were on an indie or a major. It’s about growing as a band, not about selling more records.”
Before saving rock and roll of course, Interpol had to save themselves: which meant calling time on drugs, booze and road-to-oblivion living. “If you are susceptible to those things, if you’re that kind of person, well, being in a successful band, you’ll simply dive in further,” says Fogarino, the sole member of Interpol not to meet at New York University (the group was put together in 1998 by Kessler and, prior to Interpol, did not know each other). “For me it was making up for lost times. These were the college years I’d been missing.
As chronicled by new tracks such as ‘Rest My Chemistry’ and ‘All Fired Up’ (a heroin horror story which mentions sweat, shaking and ‘dealers on the take’) the party lifestyle began to extract a dangerous toll. “After about a year of that lifestyle you think, ‘No, wait, I’m a mature man. This cannot go on.’ You start losing clarity,” says Fogarino. “And to me that’s the scariest thing. Losing the sense of reality. Your life becomes surreal – and not in a good way. Things becomes hazy and thick, like being stuck in the mud. At different points in time, I think everyone in the band started to feel that way. The warning lights started to flash.”
Plunging off the rails was, in part, an attempt to come to terms with the boredom of life off the road, says Fogarino. “The end of a tour is hard to deal with because suddenly everything is so dull. The highs are gone. You look for new ones. I’m only glad that we’re a little older now. If we’d gone through this in our early 20s, then people would have been in trouble.”
Interpol’s frostily cinematic sensibility gets picked up on a lot: guitarist Kessler actually composes while watching movies in his Lower East Side apartment (he’s the only one of the four still living in their downtown former stomping ground: Banks and Fogarino both moved to Jersey City last year; Dengler resides near Washington Square in the West Village).
“He writes with the sound down,” says Sam. “He’ll stay up all night watching a movie, working on guitar parts. Usually, he comes in with them basically finished. I can’t say any riff is inspired by any particular movie. It’s not as if he goes down to Blockbuster and rents Apocalypse Now if we’ve got to do an album. He’ll turn on the TV, plug in the guitar and see what happens. You get a lot of beautiful accidents that way.”
Six months ago, Interpol contacted the American Museum of Natural History in New York with an unusual request: they wanted to come in and shoot some pictures of stuffed animals mauling each other.
“And they said no – but that was exactly what we needed for the cover of the album, a violent diorama,” says Fogarino. “I’ll be honest: the first time I heard the record was going to be called Our Love To Admire, I thought ‘That’s so shit!’ It sounded so smooth. When I realised it was going to be coupled with such a graphic image, such a visceral image – that had such different connotations. In the end, we did it in LA. They were far cooler with that kind of stuff out there.”
Considering how closely Interpol are associated with New York, it’s ironic that Our Love To Admire is the first record the band recorded in the city. The album was assembled at Electric Lady studios in Greenwich Village, where Jimi Hendrix once kept an apartment. “You really get caught up in who used to be there, all the great records that were made there. Bowie did some of Heroes at Electric Lady. I think Led Zeppelin mixed Houses Of The Holy there. The room where we recorded used to be Hendrix’s bedroom.”
When Interpol hit Electric Lady last year, Patti Smith was finishing her covers album in the neighbouring studio and Ryan Adams was hanging out (the recording complex is a sort of a personal fiefdom for Adams, who has made all his recent records there). “And apparently Axl Rose was in the building,” says Fogarino. “There were no confirmed sightings but that’s what we were told. Our engineer kept ringing reception asking, ‘Is he here yet?’ From what we’ve heard, he’d get there at four in the morning, when everybody else was gone. Hah! I guess he’s a creature of the night, just like us.”