TNT saw Gomez at Glastonbury in 1998, do you remember much about it? We did two of them. A hole appeared in the schedule and Michael Eavis asked us to play again. We were very lucky. No one really knew who we were and I think that performance really got us started. We’d sold about 10,000 records before Glastonbury and literally the week after we sold another 30,000 records. It was like: “Wow, that’s amazing!” After that it built up and gathered speed until we won the Mercury Music prize and then it just went completely stupid. I remember that gig so fondly. We were all wearing macs and wellies. We came on after a band called My Life Story. [The singer] was wearing white suede shoes and a white glittery suit and had to be literally carried onto the stage. And of course people flung mud at him.
Bring It On came out 10 years ago. How has the band changed in that time? Oh gosh. We’re all in our 30s now. When we made that album we were all like 19 and 20. I suppose I was just incredibly naive – I was probably stoned 24 hours a day – I didn’t really know what was going on. Life catches up; we’re all married men these days; more than half of us have kids; we live all over the world. We were just a bunch of mates having a laugh. Now we’re kind of like, this thing. It’s big. It’s bigger than itself, if you know what I mean. If someone had told me in 1996 that we would still be doing it into 2009, I would have been like, “you are fucking kidding me”, haha.
Are you still a bunch of mates? Oh, of course. It’s more like a family now. In the way that all families are, you know, just about functioning, hahaha. Some days it’s the best thing in the world and some days it’s like, “Christ on a bike, what the hell’s this?” But you get on with it. Nobody really gets too big for their boots and we still get to do what we love. At the beginning, we said: “What do we want to achieve?” Everybody said: “The only measure of success is longevity.” Even as idiotic, naive, stoned children, we knew that was it.
Singer Ian Ball said that in the beginning Gomez were a “bit shit”. Seems a bit harsh… Hahaha. I think we were a bit shit. When we played our first shows we’d never played together. The stuff we’d recorded, we’d just recorded on the hoof… we sound so ragged, sometimes we’re playing out of time and it just sounds like people having fun. There’s no finesse whatsoever. But it somehow managed to come off as relaxed. But it was pure naivety and not being good enough musicians. It’s hilarious. What’s so counter-intuitive is you’re constantly getting better and of course that isn’t necessarily what people want.
You’re coming to Australia shortly… Australia’s been incredibly good to us. What we do, if I can sound a bit wanky for a second, resonates with Australians more than with English people. I think it’s because our music’s so rooted in roots and rock, traditions that we don’t really have in Britain, not en masse. In Australia there’s that strong culture of the pub rock band and the blues singer and stuff… In England you have a very fast moving media; you have one or two albums in the sunshine and that’s it. So we’ve sort of devoted ourselves to touring in Australia and America for the past five, six years. We didn’t want to be victims of that nonsense. We’ve seen people come and go since we’ve started.
You have a new album due next year, What’s it like? It’s very tuneful and… cool, in a kind of… it’s interesting. There’s lots of texture. It’s very different to the last one. It’s a little less poppy and a little more cerebral. But also very poppy, haha.
In another 10 years where will you be? Christ only knows, I think is the short and simple answer to that one.
Gomez play The Metro, Sydney, on 10 January and The Espy, Melbourne, on 13 January.
