Skyscraper's The Limit

“If I had put these songs out under any other name, I would feel like I was plagiarising.” Although Essex-born Interpol frontman Paul Banks first began performing under the moniker Julian Plenti more than a decade ago, it’s taken him until this year to finally release an album, Julian Plenti Is . . . Skyscraper.

“Julian Plenti is an alias, it’s an alter-ego,” the 31-year-old musician explains. “Julian is my middle name so there’s that. It’s like a sidestep from myself. I’ve always loved the concept of alter-egos. I like the artifice of an alter-ego to serve as the vessel for an artistic product. Because my artistic product is often a reflection of characters within you rather than me. To me, it’s very natural to put out music to an unknown public as a character in a sense. I think that’s what everybody’s doing anyway. It’s just whether you use your real name or not.”
The first Plenti shows were solo acoustic affairs played around such hip New York venues as Tobacco Road, Pete’s Candy Store and The Knitting Factory between 1996 and 2001. Then Interpol took off internationally and Banks’ side project was put on hold.
It wasn’t until 2006 that he returned to writing and recording as Plenti. “I guess it was just high time,” he explains. “It was something I always intended to do, but I got caught up with the band and so it sort of went on the back burner. Then there came a point where I realised that to be able to move forward as an artist, I had to get out these songs that had been tinkering around the back of my mind for so long. I’d a lot of new material that I’d written and was excited about, so eventually I just sort of said, ‘that’s a new album’s worth and it’s time to start getting this ball rolling’.”
Fluidly mixing guitar with analogue bleeps, martial beats and string arrangements, and occasionally sounding like a more baritone Bon Iver doing art rock, Banks explains that it wasn’t until he properly familiarised himself with the music production software Logic Pro that he was finally able to properly nail down the arrangements he could hear in his head.
“Well, I’ve far from mastered that programme but definitely getting the confidence that I had the music was directly as a result of using Logic. You know, I hear whole arrangements in my head sometimes and I’ve always been kind of frustrated at like, ‘wow, I wish I had the ability to conduct an orchestra’. You know, ‘someday I’m gonna need to figure out a way to depict the music that I hear in my head’.
“The only instrument that I was actually any good with was the guitar, and there’s only so much you can do with guitar and voice,” he continues. “So I’d have these songs, but essentially what they were was sketches of songs. I kind of thought they were acoustic songs that were not quite good enough. And then I finally realised that what was actually missing or wrong was just that the song hadn’t been fully clothed yet. I’d be saying ‘I really want to put horns here’ or ‘I really want a bass-line here’, and when I learned how to use that programme, it allowed me to just put the music I was hearing in my head down. I can immediately translate what I’m hearing in my head into the computer. It’s just infinitely convenient – and without that I would never have made the record.”
Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino plays on one of the standout album tracks (‘Games For Days’), but what do the rest of his bandmates make of it all? “This is no secret to them. This has been around as long as the band’s been around so they’ve always known that I had this in the wings. So I’d say that they’re happy that I’ve quit fucking talking about it and finally did it.”
Although currently “busting my ass” on the next Interpol studio album, Banks will be moonlighting as Julian Plenti for a series of European dates next month, including a show at Dublin’s Academy on December 1.
“Who’s to say how this will go down in Ireland because this is very different music from Interpol. But I’m hoping to get even a sliver of that Irish enthusiasm for this project.”