Despite only rising from his hotel room bed all of five minutes ago, it's not what's for breakfast which is on The Cribs singer, Ryan Jarman's, mind.
Bored of being asked the same question in interviews - the uninspired ‘why he chose to form a band with his brothers?’ to which he always impatiently quips: "Why wouldn't I? I wouldn't want to be in band with anyone other than my brothers," - he gets straight into talking about overcoming the hype of drunken mistakes, the band's crusade to keep their indie independent and standing out in a commercial and corporate-heavy music scene.
Not that the Wakefield-bred three-piece are entirely innocent when it comes to attention-grabbing controversy. But Ryan insists the point where they came to be known for causing a scene at award ceremonies was the time such antics stopped.
It’s just not what they want to be remembered for. As one of this summer’s greatest singles, ‘Men's Needs’, protests in its lyrics, The Cribs just aren't fussed about scenesters: ‘Have you noticed/ I’ve never been impressed/ By your friends in New York and London?’ says it all.
To prove it they’ve not decamped to Camden. They still live in Wakefield and spend spare time in small towns - a pursuit which influenced second album; ‘Men’s Needs Women’s Needs Whatever’s’ ace closer ‘Shoot The Poets’. All this combined with the topics of our chat, Fused soon realises The Cribs care as much about the superficial as Beth Ditto cares about being size zero…
Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos producing the second album is a bit exciting. How and why did that come about?
We spent a lot of time on tour with him. And after spending two months with somebody you get a good idea of what they’re like as a person and if we’d not have got on so well we might not of agreed with him on a lot of different levels; we’ve got the same kind of ethics, we liked the same kinds of music so we knew it were going to work out quite well.
It’s kind of weird because he’d not done any producing before and in some ways he had the same enthusiasm for doing the record as what we did. A lot of producers do the whole production line thing, so for many bands there's a sense of wanting to get them in and get them out. And they all have their records kind of sounding the same.
It were nice to do it with Alex, someone who’d never done any kind of production before and someone who makes records with, sound-wise, a little personality about it.
Since indie music has become so mainstream a lot of bands use exactly the same producers and that’s going to make it so when you listen to a lot of the records back in a few years time this couple of years will have its own sound. We don’t want to get stuck in something like that.
Is steering clear of the mainstream something the band is conscious of?
Completely conscious. We’re not a band which has mainstream concerns. I’ve never really been a fan of the mainstream, never been bothered by it. But it seems a lot of indie bands nowadays are completely mainstream minded and I certainly don’t want to be lumped in with that.
We couldn’t make stuff like that any way, because of our mindset. We’ve always had a different mindset. Never been bothered about general corporate ideas. We’re only in a band for own artistic reasons, that’s the way we’ve always been. We just naturally avoid it.
We’ve obviously taken certain steps, like turning things down, that a lot of other bands would do because we want to maintain integrity at all times. I don’t want to look back on the band and think, ‘fuck man, it would have been really good if I hadn’t of done that’, know what I mean?
Any temptations?
The only temptations that you get are financial. Stuff like going on TV shows that you don’t want to go on. If you don’t want to fuck that, you just don’t do it. Since bands have started getting in the top ten and doing well commercially, a lot of bands have been like, ‘I want that so therefore I have to do all that fucking commercial bullshit’. That’s just really disappointing.
We’re doing this for our own reasons but we certainly would like to have more success with this record because that would mean more people are understanding what we’re trying to say and trying to do. It’s not that we don’t want to do well or anything but you’ve got to do it on your own terms. So I’d like it if this record does a lot better.
Having never done anything intentionally attention grabbing, do you find it frustrating the focus is put on the Men's Needs video being banned and that NME incident?
It’s insane. And it irritates me. Everyone does things, like the NME awards thing. But yeah that were a bit fucked up.
Have you fully recovered?
I’m alright now but it took a long time to get over. People will always focus in on things like that because it’s easy which is kind of irritating. That whole thing has overshadowed everything else we were doing, which fucks me off. And that whole thing with the video, that just pisses me off. We spent a long time trying to come up with that concept. We worked closely with the video director it really fitted the song and it were exactly what we wanted to do. At the time, it were kind of close to the bone but we were like, 'fuck it'. But for it to get banned...
It seems like some supersensitive conservative complained. They put a complaint into Ofcom who got in touch with MTV. It’s either a conservative or a malicious industry insider who has got something against us. One way or another it is certainly not a good sign when things like that happen. It’s depressing.
It's a cool video. Surely most people got the idea behind it?
If you listen to the lyrics of Men’s Needs and then we’ve got this naked girl just completely ignoring us. A real cliché of rock bands is having naked girls so we were purposely trying to put forward an anti-band video. Fortunately most people have taken it the right way.
There's no exploitation and no sensationalism, it just artistically went with the video. We only do things for artistic reasons anyway, it’s all we ever have in mind.
Bands are quite ladish and we don’t want to get misconstrued and seen in that sort of light because that’s not the kind of people we are.
Less jumping on tables for you then?
Well things have been changing quite a lot. With the last record the campaign went on for like two years and there was so much touring that mentally and physically we were in really poor health.
Also the attention we got for the NME awards made me start thinking about things a little more than what I used to. It weren’t good, I hurt myself really badly and things like that can overshadow the things you do. I certainly try and think about my actions a little more now. But not in the way that I’ll be completely dull.
Words: Kerry Eustice