Music
08 Nov 10

The Lisbon Treaty

Ten years into their career, The Strokes-who-never-became-huge have been quietly building a substantial word of mouth following. Ahead of a long-awaited Irish date, The Walkmen stand back and take it all in

Those of you who are fans of simultaneously walking and listening to music (and who are of a certain age, naturally) will no doubt have been saddened by the news that Sony is to cease production of the Walkman. The revolutionary cassette player will now only be seen in landfills, or gathering dust in attics. A relic of the ‘80s, buried under a billion iPods. Oh well, progress and that.

On the brightside, we still have The Walkmen. The New York band, best known for their 2004 song ‘The Rat’, have yet to become obsolete. Rather, over the course of a decade, they’ve slowly built, never burning out or truly going supernova. With the recently released Lisbon, they may have created their best work to date. Fresh from a Chicago show, organist Walter Martin talks about the record and the reasons why they’ve had a successful career in the business – going to Lisbon, using copious amounts of tambourine and being ‘boring’ chief among them.
“I don’t know why we‘ve lasted really,” admits Martin. “None of us can figure it out. It’s because there’s very little flash to what we do. Our presentation is really boring! It’s never really gotten that big because our presentation doesn’t impress people. But we work really hard on the music and that’s what’s kept us alive.”
The band now have the kind of loyal following that makes touring a joy.
“Having just played Chicago, I’m really happy,” says Martin. “It’s been fun to play shows because people seem to already know the songs. It makes it easy for us. Last night we played mostly new stuff and it felt great.”
A good thing, because as the man himself admits, the live end of things is where bands now must make their living.
“You can really only make money by going on tour. Either that or by getting your song in weird places, like TV commercials, stuff like that.”
So has the digital revolution and downloading been a hindrance or a help?
“It’s the only way we know it. I think it’s good in the long run because so many more people hear your music. In general, there’s much more enthusiasm about music nowadays.”
There certainly has been a lot of enthusiasm coming the way of their fifth album proper (excluding their collection of Harry Nilsson covers). Sparser and yet more hopeful than their previous work, Lisbon was inspired in part by both the Portugese capital and old Sun Studio records.
“Our last album was very lush and had a lot of orchestration on it,” explains Martin. “We love listening to ‘50s records so we decided, while listening to old Sun sessions, that we wanted to imitate that. We wanted to have it very plain, with a flatback guitar, bass, a simple drum pattern and a solid melody. That was the idea. We strayed from it occasionally but we really were trying to ultimately imitate that sound. It helped give direction.”
That old-fashioned approach helped force them to play to their strengths.
“We always record everything live, it’s the band all playing together in a room. We were very confident about the songs we had written so we didn’t have to doll anything up. Once the basic track was recorded we were done. In the past maybe a flaw in the songwriting would be covered up by a tambourine or something like that! With this we tried to have it very solid and bare bones.”
For a band long associated with New York, it may seem unusual that Lisbon would be the first place to get a namecheck on their album sleeves. Though the band didn’t write or record in the Portugese capital, two key trips they took there in between sessions were suitably inspirational to earn the city a tribute when it came to coming up with a title.
“They were really nice to us in Lisbon, very supportive,” Martin says of his time there. “It’s such a beautiful, old-world place. The architecture’s so beautiful. We just really loved it. We had the song ‘Lisbon’ – the last one on the record – and we felt that the tone of that fit with what we were trying to achieve. It made sense as a concept for us. Actually the song nearly didn’t make it because we initially wanted to make a very short album and Lisbon is quite long. But we realised that we really loved it, so we just said ’screw it, we’ll put it on anyway.’”
The attitude of a band truly doing things their own way. Having hit upon the sound they were looking for with 2008’s You & Me, this year’s assured collection continues that direction and looks to expand upon it.
“I feel exactly the same way,” says Martin, finally. “I think that we found our sound on You & Me. We really got into our stride with our songwriting and arranging. With Lisbon, we were able to use that and focus on a more positive, happy, energetic way of writing. There are more songs in major keys – the first track sounds pretty chipper! A lot of people have talked about how it’s still quite depressing but I don’t hear that. It definitely sounds happier to me.”
Well, when you’re creating one of the finest releases of the year, you have every right to do so with a smile.