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The Cribs, touring New Zealand this week — worth every bead of sweat

UK band The Cribs are playing shows in Wellington and Auckland this weekend. Last night they played a MySpace secret show at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios in Auckland, which was damn good. You should go see them, they’re a high energy, feelgood band.

The Cribs’ reputation and fan base has grown through many years of constant live performances and over four studio albums. Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr officially joined the band in 2008 and his playing forms an essential part of the sound on their latest album Ignore The Ignorant. He’s not their only big fan — The Cribs have worked with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, they were asked to open the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks 2007 anniversary shows at Brixton Academy and in 2008 they were chosen as the headlining act of the NME Awards Tour.

Seeing them live was a real treat — the twins sharing lead vocal duties, Ryan sometimes looming large over a short mic stand and all members chanting their way through stadium-friendly choruses on songs including their anthem “Hey Scenesters!” and their recently released pop classic “We Share the Same Skies” (watch it below). They have big songs and enough back catalogue to make the set sound like a greatest hits package. Seeing them in a reasonably intimate pub setting — Bodega in Wellington on Friday or the Windsor Castle in Parnell, Auckland on Saturday — will be worth every bead of sweat.

Photo: MySpace Secret Show

Formed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire by twins Gary and Ryan Jarman and their younger brother Ross Jarman, The Cribs have released four albums. First came 2004’s self-titled debut The Cribs followed by The New Fellas, produced by Edwyn Collins in 2005. The first step away from their lo-fi roots came in 2007 with Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever, produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos. And their latest release, 2009’s Ignore The Ignorant, produced by Nick Launay, whose career dates back to assistant engineering The Jam’s Sound Affects and XTC’s The Black Sea — and whose CV includes mixing or producer credits for albums by PiL, Tim Finn, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Supergrass, The Veils and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Some pretty good company then.

The presence of Johnny Marr is certainly hitting the spot as far as getting media attention goes. In 2008 Q magazine called them the “biggest cult band in the world”, a description that Ryan Jarman suspects was to cover themselves for not pushing the band in the past. “But we are more underground than most,” he admits, “we’re still outside the mainstream.”

Ryan says it’s strange to get media hype for the first time after close to ten years of grafting. “It’s so weird, being around so long and playing big shows and then we get Johnny,” he says, “and all of a sudden everyone’s ‘we’ll take notice of them now’. ‘Oh we’ve always like this band, we’ve always followed you.’ No you haven’t … it gives that impression of overnight success. Hype for the first time. But it’s our fourth record, you know what I mean? It doesn’t piss me off and in some ways it makes it very easy to deal with because you just take it all with a pinch of salt. We did pretty well without people giving us attention.”

From their bio/press release, here’s what Johnny Marr has to say about The Cribs: “They’ve got the brains of the Buzzcocks, the guts of Nirvana, the fizz of the Ramones. I know how to be in a really good group and that’s what this is. Despite who I am and my history, what really counts is the way it sounds when we write songs together and when we’re in front of an audience. I surprise myself that I’m back in a band, but I haven’t had to second guess it, because it feels like they’re the right band for me.”

“When we first started,” says Ryan, “we weren’t like the sort of band who got hyped straight away or got any sort of press coverage or radio play. The record we made was so lo-fi, we weren’t expecting anything. So we spent all our time touring in the van, we bought our own van and toured like, constantly. And we still love it now, it’s so fundamental to the development of this band. And the development of our relationship with our audience. The people that come, they’re not casual fans. We have a hardcore fanbase, with very devoted fans. It doesn’t matter what city … they just go crazy.”

Word of mouth is what works, says Ryan, and that only comes from constant touring. “Touring all the time is how it all started. Obviously when you go into a studio you want to make the best record you can, but you’ve got to be able to pull it off live.”

The live feel is something that The Cribs have tried to capture with each album and he says they’ve been lucky to work with producers that understand that. “It’s good for every record to be better than the last. If we can feel that, it’s all an accomplishment. We don’t necessarily need a producer to make a record, apart from the sonics of it. I really liked working with Edwyn Collins — his approach was to keep everything raw and stripped back. We go into the studio with the songs written, so there’s not a lot of input needed there. But working with Nick Launay — we’ve always recorded live which is what people used to do back in the day. And that’s the way Nick likes it. He has a really good ear for making things atmospheric.”

The most surreal part of releasing Ignore the Ignorant last year was sharing the UK charts with the Beatles album re-releases. “If you can pick the worst week…” he laughs. “I don’t see chart placement as the be all and end all — but to be in the top ten, beating most Beatles albums, well there’s a story. Most people pick a quiet week so they can sneak into the top ten. Beating the biggest band in the world though, there must be some honour in that.”

The Cribs NZ Tour:
Friday 26 February at Bodega, Wellington
Saturday 27 February, Windsor Castle, Parnell, Auckland

Video: The Cribs “We Share the Same Skies”