INTERVIEW
What were you doing 20 years ago? Popular culture was dominated by Lara Croſt, we all spent at least 3 days crying aſter the end of Armageddon and football most definitely didn’t come home then either. Music was harder to sum up; the post-Britpop landscape was leſt crying out for music that was leſt of the middle; pop dominated, with American R&B taking up the remainder of the top 100 slots. But if your flavour of alternative wasn’t Chef asking you to suck on his Chocolate Salty Balls, you at least had Gomez. Gomez beat the odds; five guys, predominantly from Southport - a north west hinterland between Liverpool and Blackpool – pedalling a sound that was American-influenced and inventive. They blew up the conventional song structure rule back and had three strong vocalists in the growling Ben Ottewell (yes, that Ben Ottewell), Ian Ball and Tom Gray. They’ve remained unassumingly active ever since, successfully exporting their sound to the United States that influenced their early sound, trading on a catalogue that lives beyond their biggest hits like ‘Whippin’ Picadilly’ and ‘Rhythm & Blues Alibi’. Journalists have spent years asking bands like Oasis and Take That why they didn’t crack America, ignoring the fact that Gomez were quietly doing it for them. Now, 20 years on from their debut album, ‘Bring It On’, they’re bringing us an anniversary tour to celebrate the legacy, as Outline found out when we caught up with them ahead of their Norwich show.
12 / AUG-SEPT 2018 /
OUTLINEONLINE.CO.UK
W
hen you perform songs from the back catalogue, do you connect with the young guys
you were then, or as men, the husbands and fathers you are now? Do the songs take on a different vibe or do you regress? Regress is the wrong word. The songs transport you into another moment - or even the hundreds of moments - you've performed them before. From club gigs to big festival stages around the world, to lost weekends in the American mid-west and drunken aſtershows in the deep south. We played a lot of these songs a lot for a few years and they took us to a lot of places. They are full of sense memories that come back and surprise you when you least expect it. You’ve had steady success since ‘Bring It On’, both here and across the pond. Do you think your breadth of musical influences and leanings has allowed you the longevity you’ve had? A narrower sound would’ve lived and died in a short generation. Aſter your first two albums, you felt friction with mainstream music press because you didn’t fit into the carved out niches being otherwise presented. Do you think the musical landscape
Photo: James Hole
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