Feeling Foolish
Gomez
ain’t no fools. All five, not a fool
amongst ‘em. One of many reasons why
they’ve lasted as long as they have.
When these ebullient Englishmen grace our shores once again this month,
it’ll be to celebrate 15 years since they first formed, 15 years of playing
live, 15 years of spreading their musical effervescence the world over. Nothing foolish about that.
“I
think there are a few different elements to it,” muses vocalist/guitarist Tom
Gray on what the secret truly is to the success of Gomez. “One is we grew up together, so the
relationship goes much deeper than, say, a professional band who met in their
20s in order to form a band… we were friends first, and a band second.
“That
plays a huge part, I mean, even if we did split up, I don’t think we’d really
split up if you know what I mean. It’d
be like splitting up with your mum.”
There’s to be no splitting up here, of that there’s no doubt, although
after their Australian tour, the band will be taking a break for a while,
recharge the batteries and all that sort of thing.
Back
to the secret to the success and longevity of the band – to my mind, one of the
reasons Gomez have bloomed this past decade and a half, is because no one has
been able to put them into any one musical box, and as such, they have this
mass appeal, this mass reach, that other groups just don’t possess. “Yeah, I think that’s it, I mean, our
greatest weaknesses are our greatest strengths,” Gray reasons.
“The
difficulty of a band that’s unmarketable because it doesn’t have a singular
audience or demographic, the difficulty of a band that doesn’t have one lead
singer or songwriter… so all of these things which are perceived as weaknesses,
I think are our strengths. It’s a very
naturalistic thing, and I think in that respect, we don’t have any peers. So whether you like us or not, or give us any
credence for that, I think it’s
true.”
It’s
something which has seen the band survive to this day, never once releasing the
same album twice, utilising their three-vocalist attack to the best of its
ability, multiple songwriters contributing to what can only be described as the
Gomez Sound, in that it doesn’t sound like anyone else. Or perhaps it sounds like everyone else, just
all at once. Regardless, it’s served
them well, it ain’t broke, no one’s looking to fix it.
Meanwhile,
on the aforementioned celebratory tour, there’s a bit of a twist – the band
won’t be writing set-lists, leaving that task to their fans instead, who vote
via the band’s website for their favourite track, the songs with the most votes
making the cut. “Well, we were just
wondering what we could do,” says Gray on where this idea came from. “We’d been touring for 15 years, we knew we
were taking a short break [after this tour], and we thought that if you’re not
putting oxygen into the show, people are just coming to see the same old show
over and again.
“You
have to keep giving people something, and this was it… what can we do to make
the shows interesting? Give people a
choice.” I venture that there’d be a lot of rehearsal going on, as no doubt
some obscure back-catalogue choices would pop up. “Well we can’t rehearse because we don’t know
what we’re going to play, we only shut down the voting the night before,” Gray
laughs. “So we wake up in the morning,
look at what we’ve got, what songs there are, and figure out if we can play
them. And it creates an excitement for
us as well, and it has the capacity to produce really spontaneous feeling gigs,
which is really the lifeblood of performance anyway.”
Not
only the lifeblood of performing, but of the band itself, as that spontaneity
has been with them their entire career – not so much other people choosing what
they’ll play, but the free-for-all ‘anything could happen and probably will’
nature of their music and live show.
It’s a fair bet that, despite the fact they’ll be taking a break,
there’s another 15 years in this lot yet.
They certainly ain’t no fools, believe that.
Samuel J. Fell
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