Martyn was recently interviewed by NE:MM blog, ahead of the Inspirals gig at Middlesbrough Empire on 11th December. Inspiral Carpets released their first album in 20 years last week and ahead of their forthcoming tour, which includes a gig at Middlesbrough Empire on 11 December, I spoke to Martyn Walsh about recording, touring and working with legendary punk poet, John Cooper Clarke. I started by asking Martyn if he was experiencing any nervousness about the album’s release. “You get a little bit blasé about it because we’ve been working on it from the inside. I think because it’s been such a long wait there’s a little bit of…” at this point he hesitates slightly “not nervousness, there’s an excitement maybe tinged with a little bit of ‘ooh, what’s going to ‘appen?’. I think with this album in particular we’ve made it because we just wanted to make it, whereas with the previous albums once you get signed up to a record label you get sucked into the machine of album, tour and it becomes like an inevitability. Whereas we didn’t have to do this, we’ve chosen to do it so it’s almost like a statement of intent from us that maybe we didn’t have to do but we felt we needed to do. So in that way there’s probably a little bit of trepidation.” When I ask if the band are making plans for the future, Martyn tells me “I think because of the way that we operate now it almost comes down to the fact of ‘what do we want to do?’ Personally I think it would be good if we get to play the album maybe further afield. I’d love to be able to get back over to America and maybe to Japan, but I don’t know whether or not that will happen. One of the things that we have got now is that we’re 100% in control so we could even go and start writing a new album on 1 January or….. or not! We’ll just have to take it as it comes and hopefully build on all the positivity that’s around at the moment which is great. There is no master plan and in some ways that again is quite refreshing.” I mention that the new album has received universally good reviews and suggest that it sounds like the songs were recorded while the band were very much still in love with them. “Definitely” Martyn replies, “and if we do decide to go and record something again I think we almost need to take that on board. The positivity is something that’s been running through the whole album in that way. Some of the reviews are saying that it was just like the band making the music at the end of the street purely because they wanted to do it and I think that probably comes through and it’s something that we maybe need to keep hold of, that excitement.” John Cooper Clarke features prominently one of the album’s many stand-out tracks, ‘Let You Down’ so I ask Martyn how he came to be involved. “It was weird really, I think when we started playing the track ‘Let You Down’ we needed a track that was quite an elastic sort of song, quite loose in that respect and I think we were very aware that nowadays you need angles to sell songs, not gimmicks, but just something to throw into the mix. It was one of those weird bizarre moments where, like when we’d used Mark E. Smith, I think names sort of crop up and it’s always really, really sort of organic. I remember one evening when rehearsing ‘Let You Down’ we just put something in one verse where it’s very free and easy and I went home and the BBC documentary, ‘Evidently, John Cooper Clarke’ was repeated at stupid o’clock in the morning. It was weird because Clint’s even on the programme talking about how John Cooper Clarke had influenced him and it was like that was an omen! And we just got word out to him and he really liked the idea and it just took on a life of its own. Again I think a lot of those things happen quite organically and it makes sense and I think that’s one of the big things about it because John Cooper Clarke makes sense to us and makes sense to our fans in the same way that Mark E. Smith did. We’ve not tried to get Justin Bieber! And because it’s organic I think it adds another vibe to the album that sounds really good. I’m glad we did it.” I finish by asking how long it is since the band last played in the North East. “Bloody ‘ell” comes the response, but then Martyn remembers “When we played with The Mondays we played at Newcastle, at The O2 Academy. I think that was the last time we played in the North East. We’re playing Middlesbrough Empire this time. I can’t for the life of me remember the last time we played Middlesbrough but I’m looking forward to going back because I did some work there a few years ago as a mentor for Digital City and I met up with some really good people there and it was quite a vibrant sort of place. The North East has always been a good place for us and obviously there’s going to be some tracks off the album played but people still want to hear ‘This is how it feels’ and ‘Saturn 5’.” “We’ve got people coming for the first time because they’ve heard the album and we’ve got those who want to come along because it’s getting near Christmas and they want to sing and dance to ‘She comes in the fall’.” nemmblog/2014/10/26/martyn-walsh-of-inspiral-carpets-talks-to-nemm-ahead-of-their-gig-at-middlesbrough-empire-on-11th-december/
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 08:30:00 +0000
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