Three piece indie band The Cribs have been going from strength to strength for the past ten years, and they're showing no sign of slowing down now. From winning this year's NME award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, to releasing their new singles collection Payola, The Cribs are ensuring that they'll be prolific in the music industry for years to come.
We caught up with guitarist and vocalist Ryan Jarman to have a chat about which songs mean the most to The Cribs, whether award ceremonies these days have become irrelevant and what it was like to work with Johnny Marr. Just don't ask him if he's got a plan for what to do next...
Hi, Ryan. The Cribs recently won NME's Outstanding Contribution award - how do you feel about that?
I feel good. I think we started quite young, really, when I think about it now and it's fairly rare that bands are around for so long. Because we're all brothers, there haven't been any egos involved.
Does the award - and the fact that you've got a Best Of album in Payola - feel like an end, in some ways?
The truth is, with The Cribs, right from the start we've never discussed what we're going to do in the future. That's just not the way our minds work - we don't think about the future, it's not the point. When people ask us questions like 'what are you doing next?' I can't say, but that certainly doesn't mean it's the end of the band. We just don't plan for things, it's not in our nature - and I think it's contrary to making any form of art if you have a plan for what you're going to do next.
You've released about 200 songs in 10 years, which is quite a lot for a band.
I think it's something like that and it does sound a lot, because you generally think of a band struggling to get together a twelve track album every couple of years.
It's usually about three years in between albums...
We've always stayed fairly prolific but I think that's always been the reason for the band - it's just a vehicle for songs that we write. Writing songs is my reason for getting out of bed on a morning - I'm tired because I stayed up all last night writing, it just doesn't stop, so I don't find it surprising that we wrote that amount of songs in that amount of time. If I hadn't, I'd be disappointed because it would mean that I hadn't been particularly productive and if I hadn't been that productive, it'd be a tough ten years, really. Writing songs is the main thing for me.
So when you listen back to the greatest hits, which tracks mean the most to you?
'Back to The Bolthole' is one of the most important songs to me. It's one of the ones that we wrote most recently and I feel like it's one that represents where the band is now, so I feel a lot of connection to that song and it's my favourite from the last album. But at the same time, you have a huge connection to the early songs. If someone asked me to pick just one song to represent the band, it would always be 'Another Number', which was one of the first songs the band ever wrote. It just seems to encapsulate everything we were trying to do - it's kind of The Cribs' motif now. The simplicity and the naivety and the fact that it's very pop is something synonymous with our band, and I feel like that song's a good crystallization of it. Maybe because it's one of the first songs that we wrote. You start so fresh that you're not trying to explore anything, you're just doing what comes naturally, so I feel like that plays a part in it. It's always a combination of the early stuff and the new stuff that I feel most proud of.
At the same time, I have a huge connection to all the B-sides because they're songs that you write in a much more flippant way - you almost go into the studio and start recording whatever's in your head, and that can be very liberating. You haven't sat and crafted a song but just bashed it out or it's materialised out of nowhere, so it's often strange and quirkier. The fans always seem connected to the B-sides, so the second disc of the record is one that I feel particularly proud of.
Last time you "won" an NME award, you jumped across a table and ended up in hospital. Do you feel like award ceremonies have got more boring recently?
The music industry seems to have gone through a bit of a lull at the moment, and seems very anodyne and quite faceless. At the minute you can compare it to the late 90s, where everyone got sick of Brit-pop and how boorish the bands were, always talking about being the biggest. The natural response was everyone became very apologetic and I think the same thing's happened again now. In the mid 2000s it was like there were so many bands just shooting their mouth off - which we were never part of, we've never felt any affinity with - and now people are reacting to that. I think we're missing a bit of vitality. I don't think there's any generation gap whatsoever at the moment or anything we'd consider the youth movement and there hasn't been for quite a while.
So you're not going to get stuff like that happening at award ceremonies. I just ignore it - I always end up talking about that thing at the awards and it's almost like it's gone down in some kind of folklore, but at the time to me it really didn't seem that extreme or that entertaining. I'm glad that people found it interesting enough to still be talking about it all this time after - it means we did something vaguely interesting at one point, and no one's really doing that now.
Do you think that events such as the BRIT awards aren't necessarily relevant anymore?
I don't know if it's not particularly relevant, it's just the music to me - especially in the UK, as far as the mainstream music goes - is irrelevant. I've always found that I've never been interested in what's going on in the mainstream. That's just a fact, and not being like, 'oh, I'm so underground', I just don't care about what goes on, never have done really. I don't look to that for my culture. I didn't watch the BRIT awards or know it happened, but I heard people saying it was particularly dull this year. It can only ever be, award ceremonies, anything like that, all they're doing is holding up a mirror to what's going on. It's not the fault of the awards, it's just that things are a bit grey at the moment.
You collaborated previously with two of the big alternative icons - Johnny Marr and Lee Renaldo. Who was the most interesting to work with?
When we collaborated with Lee, that was literally one day. It was a case of getting in the studio and just trying it out and if it doesn't work then we go home and if it does work then we've got a song for the record. What Lee was doing was very stream of consciousness - it was an interesting way to work, because you didn't know what you were going to get at the end of the session. With Johnny, it was a completely different experience altogether - we grew together, and the band changed slightly as a result of him joining. I enjoyed both of them but they were so different, it's difficult to compare.
Are you pleased for Johnny that his new album has been met with huge critical acclaim, plus an NME Award himself?
I wished him the best, because he's a friend. I mean, we were surprised when he left the band because we didn't know he was going to do it, but when he said he was going to leave to make a solo record, I absolutely didn't have a problem with that at all. I always think you have to go where the art takes you. If someone's heart is saying 'I wanna make a solo record', but you're going to work on something else - f**k that, you know? You've got to do what it is you want to do at the time.
To be honest with you, The Cribs were already wanting to write as a three piece at that point anyway. We were quite excited at the prospect of writing together just us three brothers, so we were very supportive of Johnny when he decided to leave. I'm pleased that his record's doing good because at the end of the day, he chose to leave our band to make this record, so I hope that for him it's a worthy trade off.
Thanks, Ryan. The Cribs' singles collection Payola is available now.
