THE CRIBS
Interview by Cameron Cook
Images by Abbey Braden
There’s no way to describe my relationship with the Cribs – the band of now-famous brothers from Wakefield, England – as anything less than a complete musical love affair. There’s a reason why the Cribs are adored by so many, from bands like the Kaiser Chiefs to Franz Ferdinand to every journalist who took to their notebooks and lauded their new record Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever [Universal/Wichita]. It’s not because they’re trendy, or necessarily cool, or on the covers of magazines or in the tabloids. It’s because their brash, brackish, hook-laden punk songs are utterly undeniable, like the first time you heard the Damned, Beat Happening or Orange Juice. Their brilliance lies within their simplicity. The Cribs sing about girls, brotherhood and getting wasted: themes that more than a few people can relate to. They defy a media obsessed with separating and categorizing, just by virtue of being themselves and not possessing the shadow of a gimmick or angle.
Men’s Needs takes the template of the Cribs’ first two albums (2004’s The Cribs and 2005’s The New Fellas) and expands on it with the help of producer Alex Kapranos (yes, from Franz) to create a blend of the band’s signature sound with a harder, wiser, more intense aesthetic. Songs like “Our Bovine Public” definitely take the “pop” over the “punk” but on the flipside “Ancient History” sounds like a Clash song dragged through the gutter and propped up in someone’s doorway at 5AM.
This interview took place during a week where I saw the Cribs perform three times in four days; a period which has been reduced in my inner eye to a total blur of pounding crowds and liquor. ‘Sup was able to corner the brothers in the press tent at this year’s Lollapalooza to get the scoop on their musical ethos.

At your show earlier this summer at the Mercury Lounge, I’m pretty sure I heard Ryan drunkenly declare onstage that you guys were the only UK punk band…
Gary: That’s all we seem to talk about these days, things that Ryan has said whilst drunk.
Ryan: Saying stuff like that and then discussing it in an important way, especially back home, is actually kind of embarrassing to talk about. [In America] people are very aware of the fact that there’s a different UK band coming out every week. We’re not really coming over here in that context. We’ve been going on for a long time in a truly do it yourself kind of way. There are a lot of bands that have maybe got the same kind of sound and ride on a wave of hype. I just want to differentiate us from that. I feel like the way we’ve conducted the band in the past has always been on a DIY level. A lot of bands that became punk rock are actually very dependent on being signed to a major label. We’ve been around for years and have never depended on anything like that. So maybe what I said on stage was me saying all that in the broadest possible terms whilst drunk, you know what I mean [laughs].
What is your definition of a punk band?
Gary: It’s a band that does whatever they want and don’t worry about trends or fads, and can break on their own steam. Then – and I don’t know if it’s defined by this but it’s something that I feel is important – you start off with a very grassroots fanbase.
Ryan: It’s a band that doesn’t have a particular ego, and isn’t scared of working hard, just getting in
a van and touring.
Gary: Just not affected by the trappings that a lot of other bands are, you know? To operate outside
of that sphere.
Ross: It’s got more to do with your attitude than your style.
Gary: There are a million punk bands, from the Sex Pistols to Beat Happening that sound nothing like each other. Or even Sonic Youth. I would define all of those bands as being punk.
Since I’m American I’ve always considered you to be a very “UK” band, just based on the sound and aesthetic you guys have, but I find that Men’s Needs has a very “American” sound to it. I know you guys are big fans of Kill Rock Stars and those kinds of American indie labels. Was this album inspired more so by specifically American artists than British ones?
Gary: Well, we weren’t trying to be particularly British for any reason apart from the fact that we were trying to be honest, and that’s why we sounded like that. For one thing we’ve spent a lot of time in America, so that might have had something to do with it. Also, we’ve just become really fed up with the UK indie scene a bit recently. Maybe we just subconsciously decided to drift away from that.
Ryan: The second record was written very much on the road and on the fly whereas with Men’s Needs we had more time to sort of absorb other influences and bring that out in the music. With songs like “Be Safe”
we were able to do that more, be more influenced by sort of spoken word stuff you’d find on K Records. That had a chance to come through because we actually had time to consider what we were writing. The New Fellas was just bashed out, as much as I really like that record.
Gary: Some of the songs I wrote were written in America. So maybe it was by the process of osmosis.
I was living in Portland so that could have affected it.
Ryan: Lyrically, I think the album is still very English. Maybe the music has taken on a slightly more American feel, I dunno. As I was saying, it’s not really something that we consciously do. I don’t listen to a great deal
of American music now, but I definitely used to when I was younger, so maybe that’s just coming through.
Gary: I just don’t think we have that much in common with a lot of the big bands in the UK right now. Well, maybe some of them, but it seems that a few bands that have come up are influenced by our first and second records, and it’s kind of difficult to feel like they’re your peers, when it’s not really like that.
When you read the British music press, there are so many big bands like Franz Ferdinand or the Kaiser Chiefs who champion you, yet you sound nothing like them.
Gary: But then there are bands that have come out in the last year or so who started after we had our first couple of releases. It’s just difficult to try and operate in that sort of environment, you feel so apart from it.
Ryan: Indie rock is such a big business now that major labels are offering kids a lot of money to sign. We end up a bit disillusioned, like, ‘Well, these kids say they’re influenced by us but are doing things that we wouldn’t do’. We just don’t feel that much of an affinity with what’s going on.
Gary: It’s just difficult to consider your people your peers when you were around so long before. Three albums is a lot these days. It shouldn’t be, but in the fickle world we live in, it’s a lot.
That’s true, but then you look at like, Bob Dylan or Elton John, who used to release two albums a year in the ‘60s and ‘70s. So I guess this is just a new era.
Gary: Well, we’ve pretty much released an album a year since 2004 – The first one in 2004 and the second in 2005. This one is 2007, but in 2006 we released an EP in Japan. We only put seven songs on it but we could have easily put 15.
Ryan: Within three years we’ve written about 60 songs, and that’s what important to us. I think that proves we’re mainly in a band for more artistic reasons than commercial reasons. We never viewed the band as like, a business opportunity, or anything like that.
Gary: In America I’ve read some of the press and sometimes people will be like, ‘It’s so weird that the Cribs are against commerciality and stuff like that when they’ve got so many pop songs.’ It’s easy to say that if you think this is our debut record or whatever, but if people could understand what the environment was like when we first started out as a band, and the circuit we were on, compared to the way we’ve seen indie music get commoditized in the UK, they’d understand why we say some of the things we say.
Ryan: A lot of bands aspire to be pop bands these days – and I mean “pop bands” as in chart bands. That’s just something we never aspired to be. It’s a situation we’ve found ourselves in, you know what I mean.
Gary: It’s tangible for kids with guitars to get signed and be in the charts really quickly, so you can understand why these bands want to do that. You’re some 17-year-old kid from the midlands and all of a sudden you can be a pop star. That wasn’t appealing to us but you can understand why other people would do it.
I recently saw you play in the UK and I thought a riot was going to break out or something. Everyone was so into it. I’ve always considered you guys a cult band, but with your rising popularity do you feel you still have that cult status?
Gary: Sure. It’s really exciting because we played at the Empty Bottle [in Chicago] last night and it kind of felt
like some of those UK gigs. It’s really exciting that we can transfer over here in the same way. We find ourselves in a more overground position now, because more people have heard the songs on the radio or whatnot, but we still very much feel like a cult band. Certainly our fans are still exactly the same.
Ryan: The reason that I feel like we’re a cult band is that we don’t have casual fans, at all. Everyone who’s into our band, as you saw at the UK shows, are very much hardcore fans. I guess that’s what makes you a cult band. Even if you’re doing well in the mainstream, which back at home we are, people aren’t pissed off about it. A lot of our fans are kind of like super protective about the band, but [as our popularity grows] there are just more and more hardcore fans, and that’s exactly how I want it, you know what I mean? It takes a lot longer to build up a fanbase that way – and you certainly can’t buy it through adverts. Even though
it has taken us much longer, I’m happy to just keep expanding and expanding with a hardcore fanbase. When you don’t have a record out, casual fans are just going to move on to the next new band. I don’t want that situation. We have a lot of people that get tattoos with the band name on them, which I don’t really condone [laughs]. Well, it’s not that I don’t condone it, but I don’t endorse it. I like the fact that it happens.
It definitely proves a certain mentality, or a certain attitude.
Would you ever get a tattoo of a band?
Ryan: Never! I don’t think I’d ever even get a tattoo.

artist=The Cribs
interviewer=Cameron Cook