Dandies in the underworld

Interpol are an incongruous presence on the summer festival circuit. A band that looks like a bunch of Eastern Bloc revolutionaries fancy-dressed as 19th-century absinthe dandies, playing wintery, austere music in broad daylight to a sunburned crowd wearing outsized novelty hats and slurping lager from plastic cups. It doesn’t compute.

“I try not to look!” drummer Sam Fogarino laughs. “Yeah, the whole outdoors festival thing is very much in contrast to Interpol as a concept, but, y’know… whaddya gonna do?! As long as it’s at night, it’s okay.”
As we speak, it’s late June in New York, and Sam is fresh from rehearsals for an upcoming 26-day festival campaign that will take the quartet from Aarhus to British Columbia, with a stop-off at Oxegen in Punchestown on July 11.
“We went in four days straight, about five, six hours a day, and we’re done,” Sam says. “We’ve a few days off now, it’s good to do that, because I find that when you over-rehearse and then go right into it, there’s no time for your work to seep in, there’s no gestation period, and it almost takes away from the rehearsal.”
Consider the mundane predicament of a working musician on the eve of a tour, roughly analogous to that of a longshoreman on the last day of shore leave. Pay the rent in advance, set up the answering sevice, and, most importantly for a band as dapper as Interpol, get the laundry done.
“You’re right about the laundry,” Sam says. “I’ve been living in Athens, Georgia for about two months, and I’ve been back in New York for the last few days, and I leave this Sunday. I dropped off my cleaning yesterday.”
Those of us who file through the turnstiles tend to forget that the talent isn’t always magically beamed on stage for an hour and spirited away in a chopper afterwards. Itinerant musicians read ‘Travel Day’ on the tour itinerary and weep at the prospect of yet more interminable hours logged in airport lounges.
“Y’know, that is a good point my friend,” the drummer concedes. “When you’re away from home and you have a day off from the performance or whatever, you’re still working, because you’re not at home, and you’re still looking for your day off. What do you do in a place that is totally unfamiliar, or even if it is familiar, none of your comforts are in reach? It’s a little bit of a strain. When you say something like that, you kind of sound like you’re complaining, but it’s a bizarre feeling, it’s not a physical thing, it’s a very emotional and deeply mental thing, and a lot of people don’t understand what it’s like to be away from home for a long time.”
Plus, the dislocation is often made more difficult by enforced cohabitation with three people you’ve already spent weeks cooped up with in rehearsal rooms and recording studios.
“That’s one important thing that a band has to learn,” Sam says. “To escape each other while being in the same room. I think we’ve got that down. We’re all so hard-headed, very headstrong individuals in different ways, and if we didn’t know how to politely ignore each other, we would have imploded three years ago.”
Two words often uttered by fatigued touring bands: Das Boot.
“Yeah, it can be like that. But we’ve done a lot of work, and each time that we go out on the road we’ve heightened our level of creature comforts, so at least it’s not like that submarine. But I enjoy, for example, the tour bus, because you can carve out your temporary cocoon, or your little lair. It’s just me and my laptop, and my little world inside my laptop, and that’s as close as I’m gonna get to home. I have a project with Adam Franklin from Swervedriver, called Magnetic Morning, and most of the stuff that I contribute to our songs have been written on Interpol’s tour bus after the shows. It’s interesting that there’s this cross-inspiration of live performance, and then the contrast in coming down off that and subliminally funneling it into what I do with Adam.”
Speaking of technology, it used to be a matter of course that bands could road-test new material before recording. These days, the risk of work-in-progress being leaked online or posted on YouTube often prohibits major acts from playing new songs live.
“The technology bit pisses me off,” Sam admits, “because we did do a tour of Canada before Our Love To Admire came out, and it’s a beautiful part of the world and we always wanted to go through there, so it was perfect timing to do a week of shows leading up to our Coachella performance the year before this one. And sure enough, brand new songs from the album were popping up on YouTube, and people were asking me how I felt about it, and I was like, ‘I appreciate the immediacy of that documentation there, but there was a lot of work on these songs, to write them and record them, and you’re missing the point by capturing them on a cheap DV microphone.’
“Like, I know what these songs are supposed to sound like and the record will come out and they will be what they’re meant to be, but the audience member with their impatience, their need for the instantaneous, fucks it up for everybody. They don’t even care about the sonic quality, the point is being totally missed. It’s very cheap. How about if I just throw out a picture of me defecating? Cos that’s what’s happening. I’ve got replies on Interpol’s forum saying, ‘Aw, Sam’s just too fucking old! He’s got to sync up with modern times!’ And it’s just like, ‘I’m gonna put you over my knee, you little bastard! And you know what? I’ll put it on YouTube!’”
Even a cursory listen to Our Love To Admire impresses upon the listener the importance the band places in grand, majestic soundscapes, most apparent in the set-closer ‘Lighthouse’, which takes Interpol out of the winter palaces and into the realm of the spaghetti western. This song, more than any other, suggests the band might explore another season on the next record.
“Another season, yeah, but still very open and desolate,” Sam says. “I think expanse is something that Interpol, unspokenly, are totally attached to. Y’know, you just said ‘spaghetti western’, and the amazing thing is that was the working title of ‘Lighthouse’. I think the common affinity for that space and grandeur is the biggest influence on the band.”
If Our Love To Admire is the culmination of a three album trajectory that, from the outside, appeared seamlessly executed, nothing’s that easy. As Sam explains: “It was pretty much non-stop, and there was a lot of stuff on a personal level for everybody. A lot of internal complications and strained relationships between one another in the band, and it takes a lot of patience and understanding, and letting one freak out and wait on the other side for that person to come around, and luckily it’s happened.”
What kind of internal complications is he talking about?
“Typical stuff: band puts out a record and it does very well, the van turns into a tour bus, then there’s drugs, constant stimulation, a lot of people around that pretend they want to be your friend, and it’s all masked by intoxication, and then you come back and realise that you’re about to fall apart. And the one band member that may not be in that situation has the responsibility to help the other one. I think the love for what we do collectively has endured, and the respect and sense of responsibility for it is what has maintained this band, because we’re all simple individuals, human beings that fall prey to a lot of temptation which turns into heavy duty neurosis. (Laughs). And you really have to be patient. And at the end of the day nobody wants to piss this away.”
And, as the drummer admits, the endorphin rush of performance is so potent, the post-show slump leaves musicians vulnerable to the lure of, shall we say, self-medication.
“Yeah, to postpone reality. Grim, placid reality. That’s why I tend to just dive into non-Interpol work. And maybe a joint! Something to just soften the comedown instead of crashing to the concrete, maybe a little bit of a parachute.”
Without getting into Metallica territory, one wonders why more record labels don’t hire group psychotherapists to counsel their investment and perhaps prolong the life of the cash cow. It seems like good business sense.
“Well, y’know, they don’t care about the slow dime, they want the fast nickel,” Sam avers. “They’ll cash in because it could be fleeting, so they’d better get it while they can. Why invest when they can just move on and find the next one? You take a band like Metallica, who cares about itself, as with Radiohead or any established band, they don’t need record labels anymore. So it’s up to them to make sure they protect themselves, because they are their own investment. But it’s that exact mentality that is probably going to kill the record industry as we have known it. And I think after a certain period of reconstruction, the musician’s gonna come out totally empowered. And that’s payback for 50 years of mafia mentality.”
Speaking of payback, Our Love To Admire reached number one in two countries, Ireland and Mexico, both pagan cultures with a thin film of Catholicism grafted on top. What’s the Interpol connection?
“Well, I think… it’s kinda funny, that’s a little ironic considering that from certain perspectives, other countries overly intellectualise Interpol, and here you have ‘the simple people’ saying, ‘Well fuck that, this is reaching the heart, and we just accept it, without over-analysis, we’ll just physically show you how much we love this fuckin’ record.’ That’s what I find amazing and beautiful, so when you have the rest of the EU and parts of America really trying to figure out what this thing is, Mexico and Ireland are showing us what it is. I identify with that: ‘Let’s put the words away man, let’s just show each other what this is about.’
“You don’t have to go look for the definitive in music, you can feel it and relate it to your situation. Even if you don’t know what somebody is saying, the way they’re saying it will make you feel something that has nothing to do with the content. That’s a powerful song. And nine times out of ten what the singer is conveying is something deeply personal anyway, and you can just toss meaning aside and get to the raw emotion of it. That’s something beautiful. And Ireland and Mexico will forever be Interpol’s favourite places to go because of that simple experience; that simple exchange is more powerful than anything you can put into words. We go and play our songs and the audience responds. And massively so. What more could you want?”