More about: The Cribs

After the couple of years The Cribs have had, you’d understand if they’d had the romance beaten out of them. They’ve always been deeply enamoured with the idea of being in a band, and for all their accomplishments - for every time they played the main stage at Reading, for every corner of the world they’ve seen, for all the teenage heroes of theirs that they’ve worked with - what’s always driven them onwards has been the excitement of jumping in the back of the van, of playing to rooms packed with people religiously well-versed in their records, of giving over their entire lives to music, the way they’d dreamed they might as kids. The trajectory that took them from lo-fi Wakefield upstarts to beloved indie rock stalwarts was born from that attitude, and from rejecting the corporate and the commercial.

For well over a decade, it was an approach that seemed to serve them well at every turn; if you’d told them back in 2002 that fifteen years later, they’d score their fourth consecutive top ten album with a record produced by Steve Albini, they’d have known that their punk outlook would ultimately be vindicated. In reality, though, it was shortly after 24-7 Rock Star Shit’s release in August of 2017 that the group split with their long-time management, setting into motion an ugly sequence of events that would drive a band for whom rock and roll was their lifeblood to the point of wondering whether to call it a day. “It was a question of, “how long do we want to suffer for?” recalls singer-guitarist Ryan on a Zoom call from the Jarman brothers’ studio in their West Yorkshire hometown, where - after months separated by oceans and time zones - they’ve regrouped for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic took hold back in March.

There’s no real need to get into the nuts and bolts of the band’s issues here - they did enough of that themselves. “Without any management, it was like trying to land a plane yourself because the pilot’s just had a heart attack,” bassist Gary relates grimly. Suffice to say that because of contracts signed in the early days - when they were young and perhaps a touch too wide-eyed - the rights to a significant chunk of their catalogue had been sold off without their knowledge, with some of it - in a cruel twist for a band so dogmatically committed to punk rock principles - landing in the hands of the same major labels they’d railed against for so long.

This is a group who’s biggest concession to the materialist trappings of the music industry was to reluctantly upgrade from van to tour bus during Johnny Marr’s stint on guitar in the Ignore the Ignorant era; for them to now realise that their songs, spiritually under the ownership of a diehard fanbase, were financially part of a faceless corporate portfolio was galling in the extreme.

“We couldn’t release new music because we couldn’t sign a new deal, and we didn’t want to inadvertently benefit the people we were fighting by touring,” explains Gary. Accordingly, much of 2018 was swallowed up by poring over years’ worth of paperwork and taking constant conference calls with lawyers - often at ungodly hours, with Gary based in Portland, Oregon, Ryan in Queens, New York, and drummer Ross back in Wakefield. “You’re up against people who have a legal team on the payroll, who’s job it is to try to wear you out until you give up.”

Tied up in red tape and having to keep their fans at arm’s length long before social distancing was fashionable, doubts about the long-term viability of The Cribs began to creep in; for the first time, they found themselves discussing the band as if it was something that was in the rear-view mirror. “I remember we were all here in Wakefield, sitting around and kind of lamenting our career, really,” says Ryan. “We realised we’d done pretty much everything we’d dreamed of as kids. The idea that we’d play the main stage at Reading - that was unachievable, don’t-dare-to-dream stuff. We’d ticked every box, and the only thing we hadn’t done was play a stadium show. Literally the next day, the offer came in to support Foo Fighters. Which was great, but a part of us was thinking - is this an omen? Should that be the last show?”

What came next is already the stuff of Cribs folklore; backstage at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium, Dave Grohl offered them the chance to make a record at his own Studio 606 in Los Angeles, which seemed like a sign of an altogether different sort; that the drummer from Nirvana, perhaps The Cribs’ single biggest influence, should intervene in their hour of need suggested that their legal quagmire was still worth wading their way out of. “To be offered a hand up from somebody who was so instrumental in us taking up music in the first place - we knew we’d regret it if we didn’t do it.”

At that point, they already had five songs written for a new album, when or if the opportunity to make one arose; realising they weren’t as enthusiastic about them as they needed to be, they scrapped the tracks and began, around Christmas of 2018, to work on an alternative eighth album, writing what would become Night Network in Ross’ garage. Rave reviewed across the board upon its long-overdue release last month, the album is an elegant exercise in what the band have always done best; gorgeously melodic pop songs, dressed up to convincingly look like something else - be it freewheeling punk (‘Running Into You’), dreamy melancholia (‘I Don’t Know Who I Am’) or warped inversions of Britpop (‘In the Neon Night’). It’s a record that unabashedly plays to the group’s strengths as songwriters - even if the circumstances surrounding its gestation might have lent themselves more readily to something altogether more caustic, like the raw grunge of 24-7 Rock Star Shit.

“This is gonna sound slightly romantic,” says Gary, “but we didn’t want to taint the experience of being in the writing room with the things that we were going through outside of it. I think the process of making 24-7 had already been so cathartic and intense that this time, we didn’t want any screaming, or any aggro. We just wanted to sit down and enjoy it. I still think the hardest thing to do is write simple, poppy stuff that’s sophisticated and interesting. A lot of the time, it’s more satisfying to just turn all the distortion pedals on and get a kick out of the guitar sounds, but I think we’d rather be trying to write pretty music, when it comes down to it."

In part, that’s a matter of the writing process providing some escapism for the trio. Night Network feels like comfortably both their most personal and their most mature collection of songs to date; a far cry from the political positioning of old, whether that be within the confines of the noughties indie rock scene, as on The New Fellas and Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever, or the country more broadly, as was the case with the stingingly anti-fascist Ignore the Ignorant. This time out, only ‘Goodbye’, the tranquil opener, nods directly to the tumult of the past couple of years: “goodbye when you chose the sons of privilege /goodbye to that world that we can't live with” is as scything a cutdown of the suited side of the industry as anyone’s committed to tape in a long while. 

“Ross wanted us to write something like ‘Death on Two Legs’,” laughs Ryan, nodding to Queen’s vitriolic broadside against former manager Norman Sheffield. “We really did have to bite our tongue a little bit at times, and try not to aim at the people we were pissed off with. That’s tough, because often the lyrics that come easiest are the ones derived from whatever’s most prominent in your brain. Without sounding dramatic, we didn’t know if we’d get the chance to make another record, so if we couldn’t be honest and sincere this time around…there was just a sense of, if this is going to be our swan song, let’s find a better use of our energy than to go out settling grudges.”

Instead, the songs on Night Network deal handsomely with nostalgia, lost love and crises of confidence; ‘Never Thought I’d Feel Again’, ‘Under the Bus Station Clock’ and ‘Earl & Duke’, in particular, are all sumptuously wistful cases in point. Even with so much potential fuel for the fire, they’ve resisted lashing out - not just against the those who sought to rob them of the rights to their work, but also those who don’t share their worldview, be it the 66% of people in their hometown who voted to leave the European Union, or the tens of millions in the twins’ adopted homeland who backed outgoing President Donald Trump in last month’s election. 

“If you were to dwell on that sort of thing too much,” says Gary, “the music would become a negative in your life. The band would almost become a cesspit, if all you did was use your lyrics for catharsis. Me and Ryan just turned forty, and Ross has a young family; we’re at a different place in our lives. If you look back at something like ‘Hey Scenesters!’ now, it’s almost funny how the focus of it just seems so narrow and specific. At the time, it was really important to us, but you’re not going to grind that axe forever. We’ve become more self-aware, and part of that is making sure you’re not on that kind of treadmill of tunnel vision.”

Night Network was recorded between Grohl’s Studio 606 - to which Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins was a regular visitor during the sessions, almost to the point of making a nuisance of himself with his limitless supply of Queen anecdotes - and Halfling Studios in Portland, an eccentric space with a skate bowl in the main room, which lent some extra echo to Ross’ percussion. It’s the first Cribs album to be self-produced, bringing to end a colourful A-list procession of knob-twiddlers that has included Albini, Alex Kapranos, Edwyn Collins, and the late Ric Ocasek. 

“On every record we’ve made, the producer’s always been more of a vibe man,” Ross explains. “The extra guy in the studio that we respect, and who can help us out if we’re having trouble making decisions, or can chip in with a cool keyboard part. Gary and Ryan are total gear nerds and have become more and more hands-on with every album, to the point that this time, with the two of them plus our engineer and Foo Fighters’ engineer, it would probably have been a case of too many cooks to have anybody else in there.”

As the summer of 2019 wound down and with Night Network in the can, the end of a torrid two years finally appeared to be on the horizon. “We were convinced that we were past the issues; we thought we had the rights back, and we had a new deal on the table that was really exciting,” remembers Ryan. “And then we walked slap bang into another mess.” This time, another party was staking a claim to the discography - one the brothers hadn’t even heard of, according to Gary. 

“Honestly, that Autumn of 2019 was like finishing a marathon, being absolutely exhausted, and suddenly realising you’re actually only at the halfway point. That was the lowest point for me, personally. It was around Thanksgiving last year that it hit me how long we’d been gone for. I was starting to wonder. We were so tired - do we quit the race now? Or do we see it through?”

They persevered - a stunning David-and-Goliath achievement in itself, given they represented themselves with nothing more than dogged determination and a meticulously-kept paper trail on their side. By February of this year, the rights to The Cribs’ catalogue were back where they belonged, and moreover, a new record deal meant that they could finally put Night Network out, and hit the road again to reconnect with a fanbase still reeling from 2019 - the first calendar year since the band’s inception in which they didn’t play live even once. “And then the pandemic hit.”

COVID-19’s dramatic shutdown of the world as we knew it left the band needing to drag themselves off the canvas once more. As individuals, they responded in different ways; in Portland, where residents spent part of the lockdown battling toxic smog from forest fires that ravaged America’s west coast, Gary was stoic. “Bizarrely, I felt better this year than last year, because the pandemic’s something that’s out of my control,” he explains. “I have to stay off the road, and I have to modify my lifestyle. Whereas, last year, it was like I did have some way of trying to affect the stasis that we were in, and that nearly drove me up the wall.” Ryan fared much worse; being holed up in the global epicentre of the first wave was traumatising, especially when his girlfriend, Here We Go Magic’s Jen Turner, was hospitalised for a week with the virus. “The reality of what was happening in New York made it hard to worry too much about what was going on with the band, really,” he mutters darkly.

It did, though, strengthen his resolve to ensure that Night Network finally saw the light of day before 2020 was out. “A few people suggested we wait until the start of next year, but people need a bit of escapism, you know? People need entertaining. And that’s the reason we still make music after eighteen years - because it does something for us. It gives us a bit of relief from our everyday frustrations.”

With the pandemic nixing any possibility of a traditional rollout, the Jarmans instead busied themselves with what might be their most expansive album concept yet. From roping old gigging buddies turned Hollywood stars into their videos (Sam Riley, once of Leeds rabble-rousers 10,000 Things and later of Control, On the Road and Rebecca, plays a newsreader in the clip for ‘Running Into You’) to opening up a hotline through which fans could chat with them directly, there’s a decidedly retro through-line across every aspect of Night Network’s aesthetic; further throwbacks include cartoon versions of the brothers channeling Beavis and Butthead’s famously unflinching critical eye in the ‘Running Into You’ video, as well as the presentation of ‘I Don’t Know Who I Am’ as a black-and-white late-night movie.

“I think I came up with the concept, and Gary came up with the title,” Ryan recalls. “There was one Christmas Eve, when we were about eight, where me and Gary decided we were going to stay awake all night. The TV in those days was called ‘night network’ in the early hours of the morning, and you’d see weird, creepy shit like Nosferatu. Plus, we both had a fever, so the whole thing was a trippy experience.”

You could also take the title as a subtle nod to the darker side of the industry that the band have always reviled. They were never quiet, at the time, about some of the worst excesses of the Camden-centric, mid-noughties indie rock scene, and - in the same way that there was a bleak irony to the way they named 24-7 Rock Star Shit and 2012 singles collection Payola - they settled on Night Network after two years out of the game brought home the nocturnal nature of the music world. “That’s when decisions are made, that’s when palms are greased; the seedy side of the business is just a total night network,” says Gary. “You realise that everything happens on a night; that’s when you do the gigs, that’s when everybody gets together. So it’s a little bit of a comment on that, but also, a lot of the cooler and freer ideas on the album came from late-night sessions, so it feels like a nighttime record.”

For now, the bedrock on which the band was built - relentless touring - remains out of reach. A UK tour is in the diary for June, and optimism abounds between the three of them that the shows will be viable; in the meantime, they’ve already recorded a further six songs, one of which - their first festive single, ‘Christmas (All Year Long)’ - is out now. The rest won’t arrive any time soon, so as not to clip the wings of Night Network, and there’s a sense that until the band can deliver these songs live, there will remain a feeling of incompletion about the album. 

The second lockdown torpedoed plans for socially distanced gigs in Kingston during the week of release, and whilst they did livestream a show packed with new material from Liverpool’s Cavern Club last month, they’re palpably impatient to be back in front of crowds. “I understand why everything’s on ice right now,” concedes Gary, “but the idea of just accepting that gigs are not going to happen any more - that’s just not sustainable. Culure is not expendable.”

Ryan concurs. “It’s such a massive thing to be missing out on. It’s easy to see it as trivial, especially when you’re talking about a pandemic and people’s health, but ultimately, it’s a huge loss from your life. That communal experience, a load of people in one room - it’s so important. We’re just hoping everything will be alright next year; in the meantime, it gives everybody time to live with the record, which is no bad thing.”

Night Network is out now via Sonic Blew. The Cribs play seven UK shows from June 11 2021.

More about: The Cribs