An audience with Maximo Park's Paul Smith

[Welsh Rich]

I'm a huge fan of Maximo Park, though I'm a little worried about the new record. Time will tell. I think Paul Smith comes across really well, a mix of confidence and self-depreciation.

 

From the Independent yesterday

The first thing to note about Maximo Park's imminent return is that the singer's comb-over is no more. No, that's not strictly true. It still exists, of course, if only because there are precious few ways to reverse the saddening reality of prematurely thinning hair, but these days Paul Smith hides what was, in 2005, the most idiosyncratic thatch in British rock under the protective sanctity of a hat. This being a man who shares his name with a fashion empire, it's often no ordinary hat but something overtly stylish. In the video to the band's new single, "Our Velocity", for example, it's a 21st-century update of the Laurel and Hardy bowler. He is wearing a hat this afternoon, in fact, but because it's a day off - a cold Saturday in early February - it's a casual one, something sporty by Adidas, which he complements with a fitted, military jacket, skinny jeans and scuffed trainers.

 

He has just arrived back from Milan on a promotional trip in support of Maximo Park's soon-to-be-released second album, Our Earthly Pleasures, and strides across the concourse of London's King's Cross station with his bag slung over his shoulder. He has one hour until his train home departs. Time, then, for one drink, a Coca-Cola taken in a nearby pub, where he stealithy administers a tissue to his nose, bright red from the ravages of flu.

 

"The whole comb-over thing," he begins, sniffing gently, "was an accident, of sorts. It was our very first photo shoot as a newly minted five piece, and I guess I wanted to look individual, I wanted to stand out. And so I put on a suit, Oxfam's finest, as it was all I could afford back then, and I complemented it with a Twenties-style combover. It kind of stuck, I suppose, in more ways than one."

 

It certainly did. Well-dressed and bizarrely coiffed, Paul Smith had plucked his Newcastle bandmates out of a collective funk when he joined them back in 2003, and promptly helped to turn around their fortunes.

 

"It was ultimately a collaborative effort, of course," he admits, "but it is true to say that when I joined, they were on the brink of splitting up. They asked a lot of me as the incoming frontman, and I answered their call."

 

It is statements as swaggeringly grandiose as these, alongside some particularly vigorous music, that quickly established Maximo Park as an unusually intriguing proposition. A Certain Trigger was a confident debut album that marked them, whether they liked it or not, as immediate peers of Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand, though Smith has yet to hear an album by either act: "I'd rather listen to Joni Mitchell, if I'm honest, or read the new Cormac McCarthy. Or paint; I like to paint. I've nothing against those particular bands; I just have a lot of demands on my attention."

 

Quite. Their new album, Our Earthly Pleasures, is a bruising, confident record, full of muscular melodies, Smith often singing as if gnashing his teeth together, enamel spraying.

 

"We didn't want to make the same record all over regain, so this one is The Smiths by way of Smashing Pumpkins," he says, with customary defiance, "harder and heavier than our first, and the result of an awful lot of effort. But then that's as it should be. Music is my life, and so the songs we make are not something we knock off lightly."

 

In many ways, Paul Smith, now 28, is your classic misfit, the very awkwardness he felt while growing up proving to be the ideal preparation for future frontman status. Born and brought up in Newcastle, he describes his teenage self as "the class oddball; not properly weird - I was good at sports, I had friends - but wilful, different, and never keen to follow the crowd, any crowd." At university, he studied art history and linguistics, and went on to do a masters in American history. But despite the comparative highbrow nature of his chosen studies, he was nevertheless ultimately drawn to music, though he resisted forming a band until he had something sufficiently worthwhile to impart.

 

"Where I come from," he notes, "you're surrounded by cocky wannabe Liam Gallagher types, but I never saw the point. If I was going to pursue music at all, I'd have to do it on my own terms, and with something very definite to say."

 

His first band was called Me And The Twins, an instrumental outfit which he describes, rather worryingly, as "post-melodic rock". They were experimental and arcane, deliberately so, never really going anywhere but happy merely to naval gaze in the manner of all overly thoughtful student types.

 

Meantime, across town, a nascent Maximo Park - Duncan Lloyd (guitar), Archis Tiku (bass), Lukas Wooller (keyboards) and Tom English (drums) - were coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the band they'd formed in 2001 no longer had a pulse. According to Lloyd, who at the time shared vocal duties with Tiku (and was a pot washer by day), their songs were a little too shambolic and wayward. They needed a focal point; they needed new blood. And so when the drummer's girlfriend came across a besuited Paul Smith singing loudly along to Stevie Wonder's Superstition in a local nightclub one evening, she endeavoured to make introductions.

 

"He really was the last piece of the jigsaw," Lloyd says. "We'd always wanted a distinctive frontman, and it was pretty clear straight off that Paul was certainly that. I was happy to give him our songs, which he helped mould into something much punchier and more immediate. Suddenly, we had ourselves some momentum - at last."

 

Within a year, they'd signed to Warp, an independent label known more for techno than indie rock, the label's MD convinced he'd discovered the new Buzzcocks. In 2005, the band released A Certain Trigger, an immediate success that spawned three Top 20 singles - "Apply Some Pressure", "Going Missing", "Graffiti" - selling over 300,000 copies, and securing a Mercury nomination. Smith, due largely to his willingness to be interviewed and an on-stage penchant for dancing as if possessed by something either electrical or demonic, was hailed the new Jarvis Cocker, another Morrissey. This would have satisfied many of today's lesser singers, but not Smith, who craved only comparisons to the likes of Leonard Cohen, Mark Kozelek, Iggy Pop.

 

Sitting in this King's Cross pub and dabbing at his nose, he says, with sublime insouciance: "It's nice to inspire devotion in people. I like knowing that what we do has an effect, especially because, in my case, songwriting gives my life purpose. If I didn't write songs, there would a gap I'm sure I wouldn't otherwise be able to fill."

 

It's a role he clearly takes very seriously, perhaps overly so on occasion, but then this is a man who didn't develop a functional social circle until he was 22: nowadays, everything he does is conducted at breakneck speed, as if to catch up.

 

For the past two years, his band has played live all over the world (including Istanbul, Moscow and Beijing), Smith continually propelled not just by the music he makes but by certain, almost puppyish hedonistic urges, the kind he once spurned for being, he says, "unmoral".

 

"Firstly, I love playing live, I think it's where we really excel as a band, and I'm very seduced by the idea of winning over a brand new audience every night. That's why I put so much of myself into every performance. I watched a South Bank Show special on Iggy Pop recently, and he explained how he gives everything of himself to every show, so much so that he is exhausted, sapped of all energy, afterwards. That's my approach, too."

 

Thing is, Maximo Park shows don't conclude with the singer's exhaustion. Instead, he continues to pump with an adrenalin that needs further outlet, and quick. Post-gig, then, Smith invariably disappears off into the night, "to find out what life is all about", waking the morning after in a puddle of shame as the recollections of his antics begin to filter through, now gaudy and obscene in the cold light of new day.

 

"Let's just say I've had many urges along the way, and that I've investigated them all fully," he smiles, pushing ice around his empty glass with a straw. "Often, it has resulted in wreckage and total emotional fallout, which I suppose I regret now, but it has certainly given me good material for songs. If our first album was all about escape and freedom and becoming a more rounded person, then this one deals with just what happens when you find out what it is that makes you tick. I think I've done that now. I was quite disgruntled with my life until just recently," he concludes, eyes peaking from beneath the brim of his cap. "I'm not anymore."

[Azzurri]

i like them too....the new single is decent, but i hope it's not representative of the whole album. the song sounds like much of the first album. what's cool about this band is the song structures and lyrics.

[solace]

new song is a bit too Devo-ish for my taste

 

so yeah, hope the record is a lot better