Where The Buffalo Roam

Cast your mind back a couple of months, before frightening events in the musical calendar like M People winning the Mercury Music Prize and Suede recruiting a guitarist so young he can only play on non-school nights and will have to have his own personal rider consisting of Fanta and Milky Bars, and you might remember Féile.
Four of my favourite memories from this year’s Féile involve Alex Blur fondling the curtains in a backstage tent while murmuring, “These are very sexy, aren’t they?”, and Bjork’s dress, too much cider and some incredibly good and honest person finding my purse containing a month’s wages – yes, I am that stupid – and actually handing it in to the authorities. Running a close fifth are Grant Lee Buffalo, who played on a pissing wet afternoon, had to contend with the power blowing three songs in, and still produced one of the best sets by miles.

Says drummer Joey Peters, “If you’re out in the crowd spinning upside down on someone’s head you have no idea if something’s unplugged or not, you don’t even give a shit if something’s unplugged. You’re just happy to be spinning upside down on someone’s head, and it’s raining and you’ve been drinking and it’s only two o’clock in the afternoon.”
But it was more than just that. Grant Lee Buffalo made a splendid, sprawling noise that confirmed that, in spite of accusations to the contrary, their live performances can match their recorded material for passion every time.
“They’re two different mediums,” says bassist and producing maestro Paul Kimble, “and trying to cross-collateralise those things and sacrifice one of the other is a bad idea, for me. You have to treat those things with the respect that each deserves. It’s probably more aggressive live, because you get the visual image of Grant sliding his guitar across the floor which is always a good one (laughs). I think all three of us approach our instruments in an unconventional way on stage.”?
You’ve heard of Grant Lee Buffalo’s debut album, Fuzzy. You’ve heard of it, even if you’re not a fan of the band, because Michael Stipe – a man who whole-heartedly endorses records about as frequently as the Stone Roses release albums – declared it to be his favourite of the year. It was a majestic album, and the follow-up, Mighty Joe Moon, has just been released.
Grittier than its predecessor, Mighty Joe Moon is also far more diverse, juxtaposing a sweet mandolin stroll like ‘Last Days Of Techumsa’ alongside the mournful, druggy ‘Happiness’. Grant has been described as sounding like a young Elton John, and it’s an accurate if slightly embarrassing comparison, but his lyrics are from somewhere infinitely darker and dustier.
Mighty Joe Moon is, says Grant Lee Phillips, “a creature of our own invention. A creature who embodies the spirit of the band in his sheer defiances of law and reason.” Whatever, it’s great, and they know it, dismissing any suggestion that they might feel even the tiniest bit apprehensive about the successor to the Official Best Album of last year. “Everyone feels a little apprehensive for us. Even journalists, record company folks. Everybody’s setting us up to be complete paranoids,” says Grant.
“We know it’s gonna be alright.”
Whereas in the past, Paul Kimble was largely responsible for shaping their recorded output, Mighty Joe Moon has benefited from a more collective approach.
“For us it’s been a really calm experience in terms of recording the album and in terms of the three of us working together. It was really, really fulfilling. The focus of what we do is playing music between the three of us and to be able to play with the other members of the band is what’s really important to us.
That’s the only way that we have to measure any kind of success, and what we actually can come out with that the three of us can sit together and go, I’m really happy with that and I like the way that came out. And that happened on the Mighty Joe Moon album, I think, even more so than on Fuzzy. The three of us were really unified in the direction that the album took. It’s always been people from the outside who were worried about what it was going to be.
“Grant and Joey on this album were a lot more beneficial than they were on the Fuzzy album, for me personally, because of just the way that we work together. Grant and Joey would come in and make suggestions, and the song always was better for that. Right from the start on this record, everything that happened, whether it’s arrangement or production of the song, whatever, those songs developed in to a good working process between the three of us, and that’s what is satisfying. It’s not satisfying as an individual to have taken this part or that part, it’s the fact that what we can come up with between the three of us working together is bigger than what you can come up with by yourself, and transcends your own personal ability.”
“It’s such a strange thing, the process of giving birth to a record,” Grant muses. “It’s like pushing a piano through a knothole, and it’s taken time for the three of us to learn how to do that. It’s like three people trying to get through a doorway at once, and we’re just finding better ways to do it as we go. Maybe we’ll go one after the other, maybe I’ll squat and Joey will get on my shoulders. There’s a lot of ways to do it.” (Grant has a charming habit of strewing his speech with unlikely comparisons and metaphors stretched thoroughly out of shape.)
“I imagine our goals are pretty united. We’ve worked together for quite a while. We’ve wanted the same things out of the group and we’ve actually been able to attain some of those dreams. Our goals have been simple really, just to record the music that we’re making and see that music evolve. It has everything to do with that and a lot less to do with picking the singles and conceiving the videos and all that kind of stuff.”
“We’ve been fortunate I think too, working with each other,” says Paul, “and even more so with this album that the members of the band don’t want to do what another person in the band is good at. I have no desire to go in and say, ‘Grant, what do you think about this lyric’. There are specific areas that we all have a specific talent in, and I think they gel really well between the three of us.”
There are eleven million clichés in Band Interview City, and ‘even if our record company dropped us, we wouldn’t quit’ is definitely one of them. It has a nasty habit of cropping up two months before said band falls apart to ‘musical differences’ and the fact that the drummer has run off with the bassist’s girlfriend. When Grant Lee Buffalo say it, though, it’s tempting to believe them. Grant, in particular, speaks in tones of quiet Stipe-esque self-assurance that could convince you of almost anything.
“I’m behind this record so much that I imagine you will be behind it, and I think you’ll like it because I like it, y’know, and I’m willing to share it with you,” he says, and I nod, overcome by a strange desire to murmur thanks. Luckily though, Grant Lee Buffalo combine this confidence with a generous dollop of distrust for the music industry.
“It is just an industry, and for the folks at the top it’s just like baseball cards or something. They trade people like some folks trade baseball cards. There are good people though. There are people who are music fans, and you cherish those people when you find them.”
“We got signed by one of those people,” continues Paul. “We got signed by somebody whose only real concern was that he thought we were a really good band, and we were really fortunate to have the sort of arrangement we had. It was all based around the fact that they saw us as something valid and something that they wanted to put their energy behind.
“But that’s really rare. You can’t base any kind of expectation of what you do on the idea that people are going to follow you through your career, because it’s such a flighty business.”
“It’s flighty by nighty,” giggles Grant. “Hey man, it’s happening everywhere. The folks who have given fifty years of their life to work at the steel mill, or for GM in America, and then someone ups and moves the whole plant down to Mexico and hire folks for a dollar a day – it’s the same thing.
“The music business is no different. You don’t know what’s happening around the next corner, and I think it’s important to make note of this clause in our metaphysical contract, the clause that says, ‘You understand that all of this could be bullshit’. It’s important to pay attention to that.”
“It keeps complacency out of what we do,” says Paul. “We’ve never believed that it’ll go on further than us actually being up on stage, and we don’t even believe that till we actually get on stage. It may get cancelled when we’re on the side waiting to go on. What we strive for is to make some kind of connection with people, and to believe that we aren’t living in the world by ourselves. That’s the most gratifying thing.”
“The things that we care about are the shows and our records,” says Grant, “but there are other things that we end up doing. We are thrown into a lot of situations that are strange, just frivolous. And sometimes that really takes it toll on you. It’s very difficult to sit here with a complete stranger and open up to the degree that I can tell a person what a song’s about. It’s very difficult to open up that much and then to wrap the interview up and moments later walk to the next tent, where we’re supposed to be funny, supposed to be clowns, you know.
“That makes me psychotic. It makes my head spin, and that’s the hardest thing about the carnival that we’ve been thrown into. The carnival is about the best metaphor I can come up with that really distils what our life has turned into,” he smiles. “There are lots of things about carnival that I find really attractive. The tunnel of love. I like the monkeys, I like the guys on stilts. But there’s far too many barkers and knife-throwers.”
Their songs are wonderful. In the end, that’s never enough, but let’s be optimistic for once and imagine that this time it’s all going to work out before apathy and disillusionment and musical differences land on their doorstep, and before Grant gets his poetic licence revoked.
“Some days I feel like I wanna come out and play, others I wanna stay indoors. We’re often on call, and that’s the hard thing, but that’s the price we pay in wanting to share our music with such a vast audience. It’s like the person who wants to provide a plumbing service that’s open all night. You’re going to get all the plumbing business around, but you might not get a lot of sleep.
“We’re just plumbers really. A plumber is a utilitarian thing, and at the end of the day what we do is utilitarian too. I guess we fulfil a desire as musicians, we fill some sort of void that isn’t filled any other way, through food or drink or anything else. That’s what music does, helps us deal with all these other things. Now, show me that leaky faucet.”