The 22-20s Wanna Be Your Dog

The 22-20s want a dog. “We should have a tour dog: this big mean Rottweiler. Yeah!” Charly is a particularly strong proponent of the idea. “There should be like an agency providing dogs for bands on tour. A canine escort agency.” The Lincoln quartet are in a relaxed mood; not exactly bubbling over with enthusiasm, but nonetheless happy with their current dog-less lot.

However, the novelty of talking to press has worn off. “Hey, at least it’s not like being in Japan,” Glen points out, “there we were doing interviews from 9am ‘til 6pm, and every single one finished bang on time and then we’d go straight into the next interview afterwards. It was a conveyor belt.” So they are understandably less than awed by the presence of Gigwise on this, the opening night of their UK tour. Well I say opening night, which officially it is, taking in 20 cities, but in reality they’ve only just got off the festival circuit and as soon as the UK tour is over, they start on the European tour. “Actually I think we have a week off in between,” points out Glen, though nobody is really sure.

They profess to be having fun, and watching their performance later they certainly do, so perhaps they are simply saving their energy. I suspect though that the true crux of the problem comes from the fact that they are itching to move on. They never say so explicitly but the impression remains that they are keen so have some new stuff to talk about; they are after all touring an album that, as Martin points out, they “finished recording in January.” It is “old to us.” The debut album, The 22-20s, is, plus few b-sides, their set list for the tour. “We’ve got about four new songs that we are working on but haven’t really had the chance to develop.” “We have a tour bus now though,” Glen interjects, “which we didn’t before, so that may well allow us to be creative on the road.”

We discuss their creative process and their influences, the usually rigmarole of expected interview questions. They try and avoid being pigeonholed, reject suggestions that they are trying to fit in with any particular scene, or that they let outside factors affect the way they write and perform. I attempt to make a joke about the interviewer who wrote that they were “influenced by Led Berry” but it falls flat because they can’t work out whether they meant Led Belly or Ric Berry. The Stones and T-Rex pop up in conversation a couple of times. “People like the Stones and T-Rex wrote great pop songs; they took blues out to the people and made it work. We aren’t a retrospective band but I’d like to try and achieve that. I want us to keep producing pop songs.”

Martin, it seems, is looking forward to writing again: he is the main driving force, though with the addition of Charly to the line up a year ago (well after the current set list had been written) may well result in a second song-writing voice. “After all you can only really write songs on guitar and piano, so we’re looking forward to seeing how things pan out when we get some time to write.” When asked about how the next crop of songs will differ from the current one, they ask why it should: “It’s not every band that can follow The Bends with an Ok! Computer: we just want to be ourselves. We’ve always been a little introverted, there not being much of a scene in Lincoln, so we are used to getting on with stuff without really paying attention to what’s going on around us.” Perhaps this goes some way to explain why, exactly, they failed to return to play the encore the Bristol crowd was shouting for. They might be a little tired of playing the same tunes, but when it gets down to it they are completely submerged in their own music.

Photo by Theo Berry