Words by Cameron Cook

It’s a furnace inside Tonic. The venue is packed with everything from frazzled industry types to rubber-necking hipsters salivating over the latest U.K. pop export-in this case, Newcastle fivesome Maximo Park. I know what you’re thinking, in fact, I know what everyone is thinking: yet another indie-guitar-pop-something-or-other Brit band? Haven’t our brains been beaten to enough of a pulp by various Franzheads and Nine Black Rakes? The simple answer to this question would be, well, “no”, and the best band to pound that simple answer into your thick skull would be none other than Maximo. You see, frontman Paul Smith has a pretty disconcerting obsession about getting his music out there, and I don’t mean in the “sending-unsolicited-demos-to-labels” sense of the expression. No, he’d much rather trot onstage on one of the hottest nights of the year wearing jeans, red sneakers, a shirt, a tie and a fucking cardigan sweater, the whole ensemble topped by Paul’s signature perfectly curled comb-over, and tower over the crowd belting out song after song about lost love and stinging lust. Over and over again in our interview, Paul states his concern about his band’s music getting “lost”, swept under the rug, forgotten as many a great band before his time have found themselves. Upon giving Maximo’s debut album, A Certain Trigger, a stout listen, I can wholly confirm that nobody will be forgetting this album anytime soon. Packed to the brim with addictive hooks and freak-out choruses, the band have effortlessly bridged the gap between Orange Juice and Pulp, wonderfully mixed with a dash of the Futureheads’ quirkiness. What first felt like a Britpop-by-numbers ordeal has asserted itself as one of the better opuses of the nu-Brit class of ‘05.

Paul and I, earlier in the day, ran into a bar adjacent to Tonic (he in pink T-shirt and battered blue baseball cap-to the side) to talk Morrissey, Joy Division and that all-uniting human desire to get the hell out of your hometown.

There is an enormous number of British guitar-based pop bands coming out at the moment. How do you make people interested in Maximo Park?
I think that if you’re music’s decent, it should have that individuality built into it. We’ve always done what we’ve done. We were quite isolated, living in Newcastle, away from the London scene. I’d never listened to a Libertines record. When Franz Ferdinand came along it was like ‘Oh, here’s a band that came out of nowhere and doing guitar music as well.’ We never thought it was exactly the same or anything. I admired their backwards, Russian typography (laughs). Apart from that, it was like, ‘They’re doing the wrong thing, and sooner or later someone will take notice of what we’re doing.’ We’ve always aimed to be as individual as possible anyway, in the songwriting to start off with, and then when we appear onstage. The rest of the band picked me as the front man because I was jumping around in another band playing guitar, just wearing a suit and looking a bit different from other people. It’s not like I looked cool or anything, that’s clearly not the case. I don’t mind standing out. It’s something that will draw attention to the band, and when people hear the music they’ll understand that that’s different as well. If you express yourself and come up with an individual form of expression, then that’s all you can do, and all you can hope for is that it translates to people. Your record company can push you in a certain way, and that can be the main problem with people’s perception of you, and the way you approach things. You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, it just ends up taking off the corners if you did. I have no idea how people perceive us anymore (laughs). I just feel like we ask like ourselves.

That’s funny, because frankly, when the first single came out, and everyone was like ‘NEW BRIT BAND!’, there was this sense of ‘Oh God, again…’ But listening to it, there is definitely a sense of individuality. I think that reaction played in your favor, the ‘urgh…’ followed by an ‘ooh!’
I think it’s been the same in our country as well. Everyone seems to be like: ‘Not another guitar band, how many more guitar bands can we take?’ There shouldn’t be an embargo on how many are let into the charts. Is it good or isn’t it? Unfortunately, a lot of stuff that isn’t so great get into the charts, and do well. There shouldn’t be a cut-off point where people say ‘OK, no more guitar bands.’ If it’s good it’s good. Good music transcends all of these little categories as far as I’m concerned. I enjoy all sorts of different types of music. It makes no difference to me, I just wish that people’s iTunes reflected that. But as I said before, we stick to our guns, and we have too much faith in the music to let it die out. We keep coming back, despite it being very tough for us to breakthrough because of that success, the success that allowed other [guitar] bands to get through a little gate into the charts, and now, we’re going to leave nothing at the door because we’re not like those other bands.

You said your songwriting sets you apart firstly. It kind of reminds me of Pulp, that frustrated-yet-vaguely-sexual vibe.
(Laughs)

It’s true! What attracted me to the band first and foremost were the lyrics.
I think that’s true. Pulp themselves didn’t really inspire me as a musician or anything. I liked the singles and stuff, but when I heard the albums I was kind of disappointed, I probably only listened to them once through. But a song like “Babies” is classic. “This Is Hardcore” is a great song I think, but I dip in and out of that sort of thing. Again, if you’re honest about yourself, people will connect with that. They’ll understand that you’re not faking. If you listen to music, you know, I would like to think that people know it’s a three-dimensional expression rather than someone saying ‘I’m great’ or ‘I’m bad’ or ‘I’m depressed.’ There’s enough darkness in music to reflect the way most people think about the world. There’s lots of frustration, but then again not just sexual frustration in the sense that I’m a loser in love or anything (laughs). I think people win and lose in life, and the songs reflect that. It’s a reflection of life, and that’s where I get my inspiration from; everyday circumstances and things I can connect to, and I feel like everyone else can. When I grew up I listened to the Smiths (points at my Morrissey T-shirt)-nice T-shirt -and it was like, finally someone knew what I was talking about and knew how I felt, I listened to the Tindersticks and Joy Division, people not afraid to express themselves. It was like there was a stigma attached to depression or whatever, and I don’t feel like any of those bands were purely about depression, so it didn’t make sense to me that they were cast aside. ‘Oh, you like the Smiths, why don’t you just got mope in the corner,’ you know? (Yes, I know- Ed.) Some of the Smiths’ lyrics are some of the funniest lyrics in the world! I’d like to think that people can see the humor in a song like “Acrobat”, there’s a sort of resigned humor in parts of it. That’s life. I don’t understand why people sideline it and say it’s this sort of music. How can people say that and not feel the same way? I think I read a review in England that said [A Certain Trigger] is obsessed with very British concerns like the sea, and people being separated by motorways. There’s not really a motorway song on the album! But who doesn’t yearn to travel and see things, and enjoy the romance of the world?

It seems to be a basic human desire to not stay cloistered in the same place. Speaking of, I’d like you to tell me about my favorite song on the album, “Going Missing”.
There were a number of imaged I had floating around in my head. I’ve always enjoyed, again, the romance of just disappearing completely and saying ‘I don’t need this. I don’t need to be in this situation,’ and just jumping into the sea, leaving your clothes behind, swimming to the other shore and starting a new life. It’s a nice image; you’ve got nothing to lose. There are a few things… (pauses) like, leading somebody on. I wasn’t very thoughtful of someone’s feelings and it ended up being a nasty situation. You end up being the bad person involved. You know, “I lay with my arms across my chest/And I dream of you with someone else”, there’s this conflict in a relationship where you always want to know what the other person is doing or thinking. Nobody can ever tell what someone else is thinking, that’s what the verses are about, really. You’re feeling very strongly about somebody, but on the other hand, you’re not telling them the entire truth about something. It’s this conflict, which I think the music reflects. It gave the urge to sing those lines in that chorus.

OK, you have the hair and the suit, you look really good: how important is style in a band?
It’s important, otherwise, as we said earlier, the music would be lost. If it’s just another bunch of guys in jeans it’s just like, anybody can do that. It’s not like it’s a dis on them, but ultimately we care too much about the music for it to be lost. It needs to be driven home. Our individuality has to speak to people, and one of those ways is through image. Look at your favorite pop stars: there’s an image there, something very constructed. They understand that you’re on a stage. Whether it’s Bryan Ferry or Morrissey, they were aware of themselves and the stage, and in a way that’s more honest to me than somebody who totters on and says: ‘I’m going to sing you a song about how I feel now.’ There’s this recycling of what it is to be normal and what it is to be authentic. For me, you’ve just got to engage with the stage, I suppose. Once you get up there you’ve got to perform. In a soundcheck and walking down the street I’ll be myself, but when it comes to actually tapping into the emotions of the songs, I have an hour a night to do that. I have an hour a night to present myself in a certain way, so I will strike that person at the back. It really helped that our music was quite sharp in the beginning. I used to wear suits with T-shirts, and now it’s like, ‘Why not really hammer it home and be as smart as I possibly can with my limited body?’ You can only do so much. It’s just an extremity, something that would suit the stage. In Britain, obviously, people go to work everyday in suits, and in a way I felt like I was going to work to do my thing and express myself. I like that it’s quite a restraining thing as well. I sweat buckets onstage and everyone’s thinking, ‘Why is he in that suit?’, and if they’re thinking that, they’re thinking about what I look like. Whether they approve or disapprove of what I look like, they’re already hooked into what we look like, and if they have any sense they’ll make decisions about the music.

It’s weird, I’ve never been to Britain but here, when I talk to people who maybe don’t know that much about pop music, lots of the suit-and-tie image is lost on them. So many people are closed-minded when it comes to music. Lots of people here think rock stars have to be like Bob Dylan: jeans, cowboy-ish.
It’s strange. I think it’s a class thing as well. I mean, I’m not rich. I wore a suit to try to look smart, and I guess that’s sort of an aspiration thing. If you’re playing really upbeat, punkish music, and you’re wearing something very straight and down-the-line, people are going to wonder why you’re doing that. For people to question something is more important than for them to just let it pass by. I mean, Bob Dylan, he got on a train and made up his name and decided he was going to be a wandering hobo. It’s just a construct. Luckily he had the guts and the tunes to back it up (laughs).

You played a few dates in NYC back in March, and then did SXSW and some west coast dates. How have the American crowds differed from your usual British ones?
I think it’s pretty similar. There’s a pretty young crowd in the U.K. right now. They’re like, 14 and 15-year-olds coming to shows, which is amazing. The other day we played the Merriweather Pavillion supporting the Killers, and it was kids down the front because it wasn’t a bar. That’s the bad thing about America, that over 21 age restriction. Kids should be defining themselves from the age of 12 or whatever. There shouldn’t be a limit on when you should define yourself and have fun.

I have four months until I turn 21. I tried seeing you at the Mercury Lounge, and they weren’t having it.
Music’s a universal thing, I’ve always said that, and [age restriction] just puts people off. I think we’re at the stage where, in the U.K., people are coming because they love the band, and there’s a big excitement about us. But here it’s about the same, there are a couple of hardcore people who are really into it, then there are people chin-stroking in the back, clapping sometimes and sometimes not (laughs). It’s like starting again. But to be honest with you, the responses are quite similar I suppose, just at different stages.