Music
20 Feb 14

Info the Kill: Hot Press meets Maxïmo Park

Maxïmo Park’s new album, Too Much Information, finds them spreading their musical wings and being honoured with their own beer. Scott Walker, Morrissey and hip American authors are also on the agenda as erudite lead singer Paul Smith meets our man Olaf Tyaransen.

Paul Smith doesn’t drink beer but, if he did, he’d probably drink Maxïmo No. 5. That’s the name of the brand new ale specially created by Newcastle’s Mordue Brewery to celebrate the release of Maxïmo Park’s fifth album, Too Much Information.

“Mordue are a local company who do all sorts of interesting ales,” the 34-year-old singer explains. “They got in touch and wanted to collaborate with us. Rock ‘n’ roll and alcohol have come together since time immemorial so we decided to get involved.”
One of the new album tracks is titled ‘Drinking Martinis’, which possibly gives an indication of Smith’s own alcoholic beverage of choice.
“There’s quite a few beer drinkers in the band, but I’m not actually one of them. We went for a tasting in their brewery and it was quite unusual for me to be sampling beers. Because it’s our fifth album, it’s going to be called Maxïmo No. 5 in a slight nod to a very famous perfume that we probably shouldn’t mention in case we get sued.”
The initial recording of Too Much Information began in December 2012 in the Sunderland studio of their friends and musical allies David and Peter Brewis, the siblings behind Field Music. The original intention was simply to record an EP to capitalise on the impetus built up behind 2012’s well-received The National Health. However, that plan quickly changed.
“When we went into the studio, the plan was to record five songs. We just thought, ‘Well, these songs don’t really sound like each other, maybe some of them won’t work – but hopefully we’ll get an EP out of them and we’ll be able to play a few of them live’. But we came out of those recording sessions very proud of the songs. Everyone that heard them in our close circle of friends said, ‘You’re halfway to making a record, so why don’t you just finish them off?’ In the meantime, we’d been building our own studio in Newcastle, so we finished the other six songs on the record up there.”
Showcasing quite a diverse range of styles (first cut ‘Brain Cells’ sounds like vintage Depeche Mode), Too Much Information is at times only barely recognisable as a Maxïmo Park album. Certainly nobody could ever accuse the Geordie indie quintet of being musical one-trick ponies.
“Yeah, every record is completely different to the last one, and also a continuum. You try and pick up on what you’ve done before and learn from your mistakes. Also not throw the baby out of the bath water and try and maintain a thread through all of your records. We’ve been going nearly 10 years now in terms of releases: our first album [A Certain Trigger] came out in 2005. So five albums in almost nine years is a steady rate. It’s not like Scott Walker or something, where many years go by and then something comes out and it’s quite different. I think the changes across our albums are quite subtle. But they are there, and they are intentional.”
Lyrically, Smith wears his artistic influences on his sleeve on this outing, with some songs clearly influenced by his love of literature. The moving ‘Her Name Was Audre’ is about Caribbean-American poet Audre Lorde, ‘Lydia, The Ink Will Never Dry’ was inspired by the short stories of American author Lydia Davis, and ‘I Recognise The Light’ – which features the eerie chorus “I’ve never been to Mexico City/ but I recognise the light/ I’ve never been to Santiago/ Its history keeps me up at night” – was fed by the work of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano.
“I think in the past the literary influences have been more subconscious,” he says. “You’re trying to establish yourself when you’re making your first few records, but I feel like I’m happy with the way that I’m writing, and so I wasn’t afraid to allow the books that I’d been reading to more overtly influence the record this time. I think it adds an extra layer to the record and develops the themes that our songs are about ever so slightly.”
Staying with things literary, has he read Morrissey’s Autobiography?
“I have,” he admits. “It’s a very odd book – which is one of the reasons I liked it. It’s got a force coming from it. I was speaking to a friend of mine and she was defending it to the hilt. Whereas I was thinking he could have been perhaps a little bit nicer about people, and been a bit more magnanimous. But this is his autobiography, this is his chance to tell it from his side and his way. I really enjoyed the odd sentences that came out of it. It felt like you were actually reading Morrissey’s mind, in all of its glory or decay.”
Given that he’s regarded as one of the more literate frontmen in contemporary indie rock (often compared to the likes of Moz and Jarvis Cocker), does Smith have any literary ambitions of his own?
“Nah, not really,” he laughs. “I mean, I’m just trying to write the best songs that I can possibly write. I put everything into my lyrics, and sometimes you have things that spill over that feel more like poetry or something like that, that don’t quite fit into a song. I’m actually working on a project at the moment with Peter [Brewis] from Field Music. And we took some of my travel writing and music, and made arrangements for a string quartet and tuba percussion. So I suppose I’m still kind of obsessed with music and I love putting things to a tune and seeing how it works, and how the words work in music. So that’s kind of my main occupation at the moment.”