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The Shins - London, UK, Winter 2004

By: Thomas Hannan

The Shins aren't used to all this. At least James Mercer, the figurehead of this particularly melodic US pop-invasion, isn't, as his reminiscing on the beginning of this, the band's first time in London, tells.

'We were completely on our own the first few days we spent here. We couldn't get hold of anyone, we didn't know anyone. We felt like absolutely nameless organs.'

Marty Crandall, deft at the keyboard and quick with the wit (as shall become apparent), chips in eagerly. 'We felt like shit.'

James continues; '... pathetic, horrible. We just wandered around; we ended up walking through Harrods doing whatever stupid American tourists do.'

Marty: 'I bought some juice. We found out later that's what a lot of people do, just buy something cheap so that they can get the bag.'

This finishing-sentences and interrupting-each-other routine is not one that fades throughout our time together. Neither is Marty's habit of occasionally, stealthily grabbing our Dictaphone and providing us with, shall we say, a more personal commentary on the events of the UK tour. For instance, by way of kicking off our chat, whilst James is in full and very articulate flow, Marty slowly reaches for the machine...

'Yes, that's exactly what I thought at first, until I realised I was the shit.'

Oh Mr. Crandall, you do crack us up so. But, as will also become familiar, returning to the topic - by the sounds of it, this brief London experience is hardly similar to their humble Albuquerque beginnings.

James: 'Home is a small town with an even smaller music-scene, but it ought to have a larger one. The college in Albuquerque seems to attract a hippy crowd, so there's a lot of jam bands, not much of an indie-rock scene. If a band forms that's any good, they usually move; it's like a tyre being deflated perpetually. It's not easy to find other people to play with; it's pretty f**king lucky that we found each other. All the arty pop bands, even the punk bands, were super pretentious. I guess I don't want to talk shit about them because lots of them were really great, but...'

Marty: '... Truth be told, a lot of those guys were jerks.'

James: 'It's not that they were jerks so much; just not our type of crowd...'

They talk about Albuquerque with such finality, as if everything about it is in the past - it certainly doesn't suggest a group desperate to return, or one in any way, shape or form homesick.

Nor should they be, as a reputation spreading largely by word-of-mouth around the globe for being one of the finest songwriting combos to come out of the USA in recent memory (one which has seen them sell-out, almost instantly, three London dates inclusive of tonight's excellent show at the Camden Barfly with barely any UK press whatsoever) seems to ensure them a welcoming home wherever they feel the need to tread next.

So, United Kingdom, meet The Shins. We cotton on at second album stage, the magnificent 'Chutes Too Narrow' expecting a full scale UK release on Sub Pop imminently. Preceding it was another full-length, the much-celebrated 'Oh, Inverted World!', and a curious little venture which shared the name of a Nestle chocolate.

James: 'Marty and I and Jesse were in a band called Flake. I was the only singer, there were no keyboards - it was pretty different. Dave was in a really awesome punk-rock band.'

Marty: '... the world's most pretentious punk-rock band.'

James: 'Oh yeah, he was super pretentious...'

David Hernandez, bringing the bass-skills (only drummer Jesse Sandoval is absent from the conversation), suddenly raises an eye at his colleagues' friendly mockery. So he guilt-trips them into a muffled apology.

'We were given shit for playing with indie-rock bands, but they were the best band we played with. I just f**king loved playing with Flake, I loved them.'

James: 'It's funny, too - you're in a town like Albuquerque, New Mexico, which - to most people around the world - provokes a sort of chuckle, yet the kids there acted like they were in f**king New York City and it was 1978.'

Marty: 'You can't say that! We've got to f**king maintain some allegiances!'

Not on James' mission-plan.

James: 'They never left the city. The reason we weren't like that is every time we came back we realised what a f**king dump the place was.'

Marty waits for a convenient pause, then utters with a wink... 'It's a great place.'

So where did Flake end and The Shins begin?

James: 'Well, I started The Shins as a side-project from Flake; it was going to be a solo record.'

Marty: 'We were pissed, we tried to prevent it.'

James: 'And then Flake broke up, so I just concentrated on The Shins, got some other people on it.'

Perhaps it's down to the criminally piffling amount of attention this lot have been garnering from UK press, but before waxing lyrical about James Mercer's wordplay or the way certain tracks actually sound like pure sunshine, when confronted with The Shins, most people seem to pick up on the quirky nature of their title before anything else.

James: 'I liked the way it sounds. It's nonsensical, which is what I wanted, but it's also taken from a musical called 'The Music Man', about a town in Indiana. The mayor's family are called 'Shin', so everybody would be asking, 'Are the Shins coming?'

Marty: 'Where are the Shins?'

James: "Where are the Shins?' I could hear it referred to; I thought I'd name a band after it.'

Marty grabs the Dictaphone again, puts on a high-pitched, childlike voice, and shouts - 'The Shins!' It's as if he does this so often that James and Dave barely notice, and just carry on deliberating on their band's name. We'll let Mr Mercer continue.

'It's a strange, vague enough thing. I didn't want anything that pointed your head in any particular direction.'

You've had no trouble fitting in with 'the' bands then?

James: 'Yeah, right! I'd like to say that, we, The Shins... well, that name comes from 1995 when there were probably two bands in the States that I could have named with a 'the' in their name. We don't fit, we existed before it all. We've got a different aesthetic.'

Marty: 'The Strokes, The 'Stripes, The Hives: they ripped us off.'

James spots the flaw in Marty's logic. 'Well, they ripped off what I ripped off.'

For a band of such subtlety, inventiveness and imagination, it's surprising how many of their critics have chosen to sum them up using just three, albeit hardly derogatory words - namely 'timeless', 'retro' and, most common of all, 'pop'. Well, timeless is a compliment in anyone's book. But the other two, especially that 'p' word, are points for contention, especially for Mercer.

'We're a pop band, but The Strokes are not a pop band? What are they, then? I guess they get a different genre, right?'

He sighs, waiting for us to show a sign of agreement.

'We're all pop bands, right? I mean, The Sex Pistols were a pop band, right?'

It's difficult to argue with the man. After all, we can't expect to see The Shins emerge on vacuous reality television (a la a certain so-called punk-visionary) any time soon.

James: 'I guess it's OK, as long as everybody's open-minded enough to know...'

Marty: '... to understand we're not Britney Spears.'

James: 'You know what I guess it is, if all of our songs were like 'Pink Bullets' and 'New Slang', we'd be a folk band. If all of our songs were like 'Turn A Square', we'd be a sixties retro band, and since we don't do that I guess it's a valid thing to just say we're a pop band.'

We ask how they would classify themselves without using the 'retro' word, and for the first time, there's a pause. Everyone seems deep in contemplation before trusty Marty chirps in and breaks the silence

'It's psychedelic guitar pop! But then to throw psychedelic in there suggests retro... I would just say psychedelic because I know what it means; so many bands can be considered psychedelic that don't necessarily have trip out songs or whatever... Trip out!'

Naturally, those last two words are part of that 'shouting in to the Dictaphone' custom we documented previously. James continues.

'I think we are influenced by a lot of late new-wave, neo-psychedelic stuff though: The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Jesus & Mary Chain - we love all that. Then, there's country and western because we live in the states and it's everywhere, then there's Sixties Motown, R&B stuff too, The Beatles... Because we're not conscious of an image or style that we want to portray, a song will just be treated like it needs to be treated. Sometimes, that means it's a f**king 1960s country and western hit; sometimes, it's like doing a Wire song.'

Dave: 'I like to reference The Pretenders a lot, all the 4AD shit as well; I have tonnes of Cocteau Twins. But then, I love Slayer.'

Marty: 'As everyone should.'

Dave: 'I'm very picky. I hate more bands than I like, that's true.'

So, is there ever a desire to put down the jangles of the acoustic guitar and crack out some Slayer or Cocteau Twins covers?

James: 'Well, if for some reason a song sounded like it needed to have flange all over the vocals, we probably would do it, yeah, do a Cocteau Twins song.'

Marty: 'Do you remember in the f**king studio, the song we scrapped? It sounded like the Cocteau Twins!'

Dave: 'Which song?'

James: 'That's right! What was it called, 'Mild Child'?'

Marty: 'It did start to sound like the Cocteau Twins exactly when I put my keyboard thing on it.'

James: 'It was hilarious. That's perfect, though - being open-minded about music means you're inevitably going to have some strange discrepancies. I mean, I was always surprised when we started getting compared to the Beach Boys.'

Dave: 'We need to find the first guy who said that, we need to find him.'

James: 'I mean, there was never the whole 'Pet Sounds' approach that everyone always expects of us. I didn't even own that record at the time.'

It is, admittedly, a ridiculous comparison. The Shins are far too subversive musically, far too different structurally, far too caustic lyrically to be reduced to such a saccharine sweet description. James himself always pictured them being likened to 'someone like the Apples In Stereo - a little bit of a retro sound but with some vitality.' Possibly other equally fair touchstones would be the likes of Pavement, Beck, Yo La Tengo and The Lemonheads, perhaps even a New Mexico Super Furry Animals, but one thing's for sure - The Beach Boys just doesn't cut it.

Perhaps then it is that flexible, wide-eyed optimism with which The Shins soak up and are constantly influenced by all music around them which means that, despite its reputation as the quintessential 1990s grunge label of choice, the somewhat legendary Sub Pop is more than comfortable with having their sweet harmonies sit cosily aside the more abrasive acts on the roster. Marty sums it up dreamily.

'We're the 'pop' in Sub Pop.'

But still, hardly typical Sub Pop fodder - something which Marty has a sneaking suspicion about.

Marty: 'They were actually reluctant at first to do the full signing.'

James, not for the last time, adopts a record-company mocking, fat-cat style voice:

''We'd like to do a single with you guys, maybe.' Our tape sat with them for a while and I think eventually they just fell in love with the songs or something.'

Marty: 'The reason they had our tape in the first place was because of some young people working in the mail-rooms; somebody was transplanted to Seattle, who knew somebody from Albuquerque, who knew of The Shins, who gave them a cassette-tape, just like that. That's exactly how it happened. Some kid was hired as a mailroom-guy who knew David's old band, who played with The Shins in the beginning, and that tape, which was like a live-show and the first EP which James recorded with (ex-bass player) Jesse, was part of the thing that went to Sub Pop. Then we got a phone-call. We didn't even know the tape was going to them.'

Dave: 'It was this fan who just genuinely wanted people to hear The Shins, he played it for the right people, some maniacs, and Isaac Brock (from Modest Mouse) also had a bit of a hand.'

James: 'They were huge for us, at one point we were almost not really a band, when Dave had recently left town and we had a different member then. We ended up getting our old bass-player from Flake back in The Shins because Modest Mouse said, 'Come play these shows with us,' and we were like, 'We're going to f**king play these shows in front of 1,600 people!' It was a big deal; we had never played in front of more than 300 people. The other thing was, right at that time, Napster was just peaking.'

We're unsure whether this last part is surprising because there hadn't been any apparent 'punk-rock ethic' to the band glaring us in the face at all times up 'til now, or just because it came completely unprovoked and out of the blue. Either way, The Shins are vigorous advocates of the entire file-sharing culture.

James: 'It made us. It exposed us to hundreds of people.'

Have you changed your view on it since you've got a record-deal?

James: 'No, I'm still for it.'

Marty: 'It got us to a point then that we couldn't have achieved without it.'

James: 'Spreading music is a great thing.'

Marty: 'Today, we've got a label doing that for us, so it doesn't matter now. But it really, really helped before we had that.'

Dave: 'It's a stupid thing to worry about; I mean, I steal music, everyone here steals music, and it's not ever going to f**king stop.'

Marty: 'I just stole your wallet.'

Dave: 'You stole my heart!'

The two continue their playful bickering whilst we ponder why Dave referred to it as 'stealing music', and James goes on with his train of thought.

James: 'Things like licensing and all this, there are much more important things. It's different now, the record-industry is suffering really badly because of these things, but it's the way technology has always worked, things have to change.'

With such a lenient stance on something that can make many musicians at whatever stage in their career utterly irate, comes a further twist in the tale. We told you we didn't see evidence of much of a punk-rock ethic at play. Especially not in a band that has provided the soundtrack to a stateside advert for the Gap. Immediately, James looks slightly embarrassed.

James: 'There was a period of time when I think we were kind of like, short on money...'

Marty: '... Wanting to be advertised!'

James: 'And the Gap called me up, it was this executive-type person. It was a huge amount of money, they were like (and here the fat-cat voice returns), 'We'll give you $3,000 if you just simply come up with three, 30-second little pieces of shit and just send it to us.' I could have farted for 30 seconds, three times in a row, and sent it off and I would have got three-thousand bucks, so I did it. I went down and recorded some stuff, watched their commercial...'

Marty: 'With Ashton Kucher in it, right!?'

James: 'Yeah, yeah! So I did that, sent it off and two weeks later they were like, 'We hate this, it's no good at all... goodbye.' So, I was like, whatever, I have three-thousand bucks...'

Marty: 'And then they called back and said they changed their minds.'

James: 'They called back!'

(Cue Marty's own fat-cat voice) 'One of them's OK...'

James: 'They were like, 'We kinda like the third one...''

Martin Crandall laughs like a child who has just been told the one about the stripper who ran past a convent (ask your Dad).

James: '... which was like the weirdest, little, quietest one, and they took it and I was like, 'OK, seriously, give me the money...'

Marty: 'Show me what's in your f**king wallet!'

James: 'They were the weirdest people, New York executives, coffee, coffee, coffee. You could tell their ass was on the line all the time.'

Marty: "What are we going to do, this kid isn't working... what do we think about that Shins kid, huh?!''

Dave: 'You mean there were meetings about you?!'

James: 'I'm sure there were! There were like four people on the line at one once, and I'd be there going, 'OK, I'll be right there!''

Marty: 'Khakis are cool!'

When we first found out about it, it has to be said it came as something of a surprise.

James: 'What, because we'd be politically against it?'

Not necessarily...

James: 'Because we don't look like models? You know Blonde Redhead posed in an advert for the Gap? They actually dressed up in the khakis.'

Marty: 'And if they're hot enough to be the models...'

Is that going to be the next step, then: The Shins in the Gap Autumn Catalogue?

James: 'Yeah! Actually, we're hoping to be in the 'Gilmore Girls', which is a pretty cool TV show in the States; they put bands in once in a while. They put a song of ours on one of their shows, but we're hoping to actually be on the show playing in the background.'

Marty: 'Kinda spring break, bunch of cute girls dancing...'

James: 'We're hoping to meet famous girlfriends.'

It's almost as if, at this point in time, The Shins are torn between being overconfident and woefully shy, Marty admitting that it had been 'really surprising to sell out anything in London' as they know next to nothing of their UK following, but in contrast, when pressed about expectations for the new record over here, as James succinctly puts it - 'well, we expect you all to love it, very much.' Marty continues that 'Chutes Too Narrow' 'might even translate better over here, just because we have obvious British influences... I mean, you like that, right?'

Well, Mr Crandall, that all depends on who they are.

Marty: 'Well, 'Mine's Not A High Horse' is very much Echo & The Bunnymen, 'Fighting In A Sack' is very much Housemartins. I think a lot of it is very British in the delivery.'

James then asks if he can move the band over to Britain and live in Primrose Hill. Marty grants him permission.

So Britain might be theirs for the taking, or the shows might be completely empty, they don't know. Hopefully their rapturously received show at the Barfly immediately following this interview has calmed some the nerves there - people have travelled from all over the country to catch this band's rare visit, and the communal atmosphere brought about by the entire audience coming together to admire a band who they haven't been force-fed, a band for whom it requires a distinct degree of effort to even hunt down a record, let alone get to a show, is something to behold. They're right; we are going to love that record. Just by the lengthy list provoked by asking what the band hold themselves as their favourite Shins compositions; it's clear they love it too.

Marty: 'I still like 'Caring is Creepy', the first song from the first record a bunch.'

Dave: "Caring is Creepy' still gives me goosebumps. Also 'Saint Simon', 'Mine's Not a High Horse'...'

James: 'I like '... High Horse' too, and I love 'Turn A Square' a lot, I love the way it sounds on the record.'

Dave: 'My all-time favourite song isn't on any record, it's a song called 'We Built a Raft and We Floated' - it's on the first four-song single that James made. It's my all-time favourite song. It sounds like '... High Horse' in the rhythm, but way more Bowie, this f**ked-up creepy keyboard...'

Marty and James break into a chorus of 'f**ked-up creepy keyboard' for a good thirty seconds, hands-in-the-air, playing like a demented church organist and wailing as if something ungodly is about to land. Dave stares at them for a little while and smiles, before reassuring us - 'It's the most amazing song.'

As perhaps this continued love of early material has pointed out, there hasn't really been anything by way of a meteoric development in The Shins from the first record to the current one. Rather, they seem to have realised that tampering with, rather than abandoning, convention can be just as vital. By the sounds of things, from Mercer's point-of-view at least, the main difference between the two LPs is the situations in which they were written.

'In both the recording and writing process, I was conscious of people waiting. This was the first time we'd had any real audience, so we all felt, 'Shit, everybody's waiting for us to f**k up,' y'know! We just worked harder, I think.'

Do you think you've escaped f**king up?

'In the States, yeah, but, here, it's too early to say. I don't think we've f**ked up. It's a better record.'

And that, apart from Marty grabbing the Dictaphone one last time for the sly proclamation of 'Marty is the sexiest member of The Shins', is it. Now, it's up to you. The Shins return to the UK soon for yet more live dates. Go to see them. The British full release for the 'Chutes Too Narrow' LP is imminent. Get to hear it. And why? It'll all make the world seem a much, much friendlier place.

Artists in this article: The Shins

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