MUSIC IN THE HEART: How come Gomez sound like a bunch of Swamp Delta veterans? 'We had found our own stuff to listen to and that comes out on the record,' guitarist/vocalist Ian Ball tells Brian Boyd.
It's a soul/delta blues/Tex-Mex thing or as the band would prefer it, a "cotton-pickin', lo-fi psychedelia for latter-day Cowboy Junkies". The descriptions are all important for Gomez, the five-piece band from Southport, Lancashire.
The band, almost uniquely in contemporary music, don't belong to any movement or scene, they don't play in one identifiable style and the members have no "personalities" to project on to the pages of the music press. The only remarkable thing about them is how a group of people whose average age is 25 can produce the sort of music they do.
Their combination of rootsy Americana and pastoral psychedelia - think Dr John, Tim Buckley, Tom Waits and Marvin Gaye - is heading up the "Campaign For Real Music" movement. No boy-band vacuousness, no Brit rock loutishness, no dance music pyrotechnics, Gomez are out there by themselves, steering the good ship "Authentic".
As they look out of the window of their Dublin hotel at the squalling conditions, wondering if they would be better off cancelling their flight back to the UK that night, they get to murmuring about their position in the music industry.
"We haven't got the energy or even the facility to do that Hello! magazine thing, which seems necessary these days," says guitarist/vocalist Ian Ball.
"We just don't have any over-riding sense of image. Anyway, we all have an inherent fear of, and are slightly disgusted by, fashion. Whether that be in music or anything else. People should stop 'listening' to us with their eyes."
Their albums though have a pan-generational appeal and they've been on an upward trajectory since their debut, Bring It On (1998), won the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Up against The Verve's Urban Hymns and Massive Attack's Mezzanine, Gomez's victory was a charming story in an industry led by PR and bluster. Here was a band who had recorded their album in a garage without an engineer or a producer, here was a bunch of white kids who sounded like a full-on Swamp Delta experience, and here was a band who had almost quaintly old-fashioned ideas of putting the music first and everything else second.
The albums sold in its droves and is still selling today. The follow-up, Liquid Skin (1999), was equally acclaimed but the band, like Portishead before them, had lost the "surprise" factor - as in seemingly coming out of nowhere with a stunningly original collection of songs.
When Liquid Skin sold as much as its predecessor, the band were wary of becoming a new Dire Straits.
"All the bands you see who are really huge," says Ball, "are career bands who've developed their art to a point where the point of it is just to be successful. I'm sure that's an attitude that has always been there, but if everybody's standard comes from that point of view, it's not a good thing. And something gets lost along the way."
The band decided to take an extended break. "We did those albums back to back and were on the road constantly. To give ourselves some space, we released a rarities and B-sides album called Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline. The band would have split up if we had kept going, so we all went off for a while but we always planned to get together again."
Curiously, the band first met through a mutual love of heavy metal records and used to play Metallica and Slayer songs ad infinitum. That was an early adolescent phase though and Ball traces their musical development in an original way: "You can see the different phases people go through. It's like Hendrix is for your acid phase, early Beatles is for your speed phase and The Pogues and Tom Waits are for your beer phase," he says. "Just with us though, we seemed to go through many more musical phases and were always saving up our money to go into Manchester to buy records. People always ask us how come a band who are still so young sound like a bunch of Mississippi 60-year-olds? It's all to do with what we listened to. We never followed the Brit-pop or Madchester scenes that much, we had found our own stuff to listen to and that comes out on the records."
When the band reconvened for this new album, they decided to avoid using a standard studio and instead booked themselves into a large manor house in Gloucester where their sense of democracy was severely stretched. "There would be five of us in five different rooms each doing totally different things. We'd sift through everything we had produced, dropping some stuff, working on other stuff and eventually we found the songs," he says.
In Our Gun is no huge musical departure for the band but does seem more "mature" in that it contains more changes of key and time signatures than anything they've done before. They're still using three lead vocalists - Ball, Ben Ottewell and Tom Gray - a stylistic quirk which means, thinks Ball, that they'll never be a Gomez tribute band - "tribute bands have difficulty enough finding one lead vocalist, they'd never get three. We have, though, decided that if there ever is a Gomez tribute band, they should be called Nomez."
In Our Gun is released next week on the Hut label. Their current single is Shot Shot. Gomez tour Ireland with gigs at Black Box, Galway, Saturday, April 6th; Dolan's Warehouse, Limerick, Sunday, April 7th; Savoy, Cork, Tuesday, April 9th; Ambassador Theatre, Dublin, Wednesday, April 10th; Mandela Hall, Belfast, Thursday, April 11th.