A conversation with Interpol's Paul Banks and Carlos D from 2004
Prior to the release of Antics, the dapper duo spoke about their relationship with the media, mid-tour meltdowns, and why The Cure are better than The Beatles
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!
THE OPENERS
Around the time I started writing my Broken Social Scene book in 2007, I was also helping my filmmaker friend Stephen Chung sift through the hundreds of hours of BSS footage he had shot in the early 2000s—the formative gigs at Ted’s Wrecking Yard, the in-stores at Soundscapes, the recording sessions that produced You Forgot It in People, and so much more. His plan was to make a documentary about this special moment in Toronto indie-rock lore, however, for a variety of reasons, the film never materialized and his tapes collected dust for over a decade. But with the band recently celebrating its 20th anniversary, Stephen rallied the resources and crew (including yours truly in a research/consultant/talking-head capacity) to push the film over the finish line. Now, nearly 20 years after we first started cataloging his tapes on his FinalCut Pro, It’s All Gonna Break is set to premiere Oct. 16 at the Woodstock Film Festival (before hopefully screening at a theatre near you at some point in the future).
This past Monday, Canada observed the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a moment for the nation to reckon with its history of subjagating Indigenous people and commemorate the thousands of children who perished in its abusive residential-school system between 1831-1996. For CBC Radio’s Commotion, I had the great privilege of producing a special panel discussion with nehiyaw musician Marek Tyler (aka ASKO), Anishnaabe author Waubgeshig Rice, and Anishinaabe visual artist Susan Blight about the growing popularity of Indigenous Futurism, which is transforming Indigenous music, art, and literature as profoundly as Afrofuturism did for Black culture. Listen here:
If you live in Hamilton, Ontario, or plan on visiting anytime soon, or you just like to live vicariously by scanning the show announcements in faraway cities you can’t possibly visit, you should know that I’ve just launched another newsletter—#hamontlive—dedicated to local concert listings. Subscribe here.
This week’s additions to the stübermania 2024 playlist:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “GREY RUBBLE - GREEN SHOOTS”: Thirty years on from their formation, Godspeed remain a band committed to crafting multi-sectional movements that can fill up an entire side of vinyl, so it’s been interesting to see them adapt to the realities of the post-streaming world. For their last couple of records, they made the individual sections of their suites available as discrete, playlist-friendly tracks, while the closing piece on their new record, NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD (out tomorrow), condenses the slow-climb/crescendo/comedown playbook of so many 20-minute Godspeed epics into a relatively brief 6:57 runtime. By Godspeed standards, this almost feels like a pop single (especially when you realize its central melody kinda sounds like “Chopsticks”).
Tauro, “Great Minds”: Brendan Canning of the aforementioned Broken Social Scene has launched a new project whilst out waiting out the now five-year break since the Let’s Try the After EPs. Tauro is named for his principal partner in this endeavour—jazz-schooled singer/pianist Cynthia Tauro—and their first single together feels like a logical extension of Canning’s work with his previous side project, Cookie Duster, by bridging early-2000s indie aesthetics with late-’90s downtempo club textures.
Shirley Hurt, “Hell of a Life”: I missed out on seeing PJ Harvey’s two Toronto shows last week (tickets went on sale at a time when my concert budget was maxed out), but I’m alleviating my FOMO with this Toronto art-pop chameleon’s new single, a cool, frisky, streetwise strut that sounds like it could’ve sashayed in from side two of Uh Huh Her…
Sprints, “Feast”: …whereas this ravenous rocker from the Dublin quartet channels PJ in her primal Rid of Me prime.
The Smile, “Zero Sum”: Answers the question: “What if Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood remixed !!!’s ‘Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard’?”
Click here for the Apple Music version.
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Paul Banks and Carlos D
The date: August 10, 2004
Location: Metropolitan Hotel, Toronto
Album being promoted: Antics
The context: As one of Interpol’s famous fellow New Yorkers once quipped, this conversation was a case of déjà vu all over again. For this Eye Weekly cover-story interview, I sat down with singer/ guitarist Paul Banks and bassist Carlos D at the very same table, in the very same lounge, in the very same hotel where we first conversed almost exactly two years prior.
Upon our first meeting in the summer of 2002, Interpol were simply a very well-dressed group of unknowns in town to shoot their very first video, "PDA," with Toronto director Chris Mills (who would go on to develop that video's collage aesthetic with Broken Social Scene's "Stars and Sons" and Modest Mouse's heavily rotated "Float On" clip). Twenty-four hours before this second conversation, the band was playing the Molson Amphitheatre to a crowd of 10,000 at The Cure-curated Curiosa Festival.
But while their circumstances had changed dramatically, Paul and Carlos were still the same affable and effortlessly stylish dudes as they were before they had sold half a million records. The only real difference was that Carlos was brandishing a black pork-pie hat and dossier that made him look less like someone who walked off the cover of Kraftwerk's The Man Machine and more like someone on his way to a marketing meeting at a ska label.
How’s the Curiosa tour been going for you?
Paul Banks: feel like we’ve been getting a great audience response, as has every band… but no matter how good of a show you have, you’re still not the Cure. When The Cure are on, there’s 10,000 people screaming in the middle of songs, let alone between songs. Something about the whole thing just feels very right to me, because they’re fucking amazing.
[I accidentally spill a flower vase on Carlos’ dossier]
Oh shit…
Paul Banks: It’s cool, it’s waterproof!
Carlos D: That’s amazing. I was actually leaving my room and I was embarrassed to bring this thing with me.
Paul Banks: It’s actually fairly handsome
Carlos D: Yeah, but waking up hungover from the night before carrying your Trapper Keeper to the interview… Paul wanted a notebook and he actually got this instead. He said that it reeked of me, so he gave it to me, and he was right. He’s a good friend.
What’s it been like to see The Cure up close every night?
Carlos D: It’s inspiring to see how they actually do it. They have two guitar techs—one guy tunes, and then one takes it to the musician. And their lighting set-up is so legit and professional… but then at the same time they’re such nice people and all the people in their camp are so nice, too. And it’s good because, all of a sudden, I find myself feeling totally comfortable around them, and I keep forgetting that they’re The Cure. It takes away the surreal aspect of it, which is great—it’s relaxing.
Paul Banks: In some ways, some of them are nicer than we might even know yet. You see them and they might be quiet, and it’s not because they’re being rock stars, it’s because they’re quiet people, and they all seem to be authentically nice people.
Is this experience going to affect the way you listen to them?
Paul Banks: No, because I’ve had a couple of conversations with Robert Smith, and he has not lost one iota of mystique, even though he doesn’t seem to be faking it when you talk to him. He seems to be utterly sincere, but his charisma, or the power of who he is, is in him—even when you talk to him, nothing is lost… we’re ass-kissing!
Carlos D: You could call him our boss, but he is becoming a bud in a way.
Is Robert still doing that thing where he wears the hockey jersey of the city he’s playing in?
Carlos D: They actually wear the same thing on stage every night. They have a Cure wardrobe room. What is in there? They’re wearing the same thing every night, and what they’re wearing is really simple stuff. We’re the ones who need a fucking wardrobe room!
I saw you rocking the holster last night…
Carlos D: I need a holster room!
Do you have a gun for it?
Carlos D: The actual holster itself couldn’t fit a gun even if you tried to fit it in there.
Paul Banks: It could fit a Beretta.
Do you guys watch The Office?
Paul Banks: [laughs]
Carlos D: Look! No one wants to be compared to Gareth, but I was rocking the holster before I saw that episode, and then when I saw that episode, it was painful to watch—”please tell me I’m not him!”
So at this point, how has the band adapted to the surreality of touring?
Paul Banks: I think we’re still working on it. It’s not so hard for me… being away from home is hard, but the constant movement, I can kinda adjust. But I readjusted everything about myself to be able to do a little more maintenance. I had one tour early on that I got so frustrated by all the inconveniences of it that I freaked out.
Carlos D: Was that the Europe tour? It was a really bad bus.
Paul Banks: Yeah. I literally freaked out. It was our second European tour, it was five weeks long, you couldn’t call the US anywhere, no payphones would ever work, you had to change currency every day. You’d wake up in some place with no way to do anything because you don’t have the right money… just all these things added up. So then after that, my way of adjusting is that I literally don’t know anything that’s happening until it starts happening, and for someone else that would be a more stressful way to live. For me, I’m here to do stuff—if I occupy any mental thought with the logistics of touring, then it’s too much for me and I can’t do it.
Carlos D: I unfortunately don’t let go enough. I wish I could be able to admit, “I’m in a moving vehicle all the time!” I try to maintain some kind of stability that can only be gotten if you’re living in one place at one time. My email needs and phone needs are really high—if I don’t get my phone and email time in a day, I start freaking out. I check my voicemail everyday.
Do you ever reach a point on tour where you don’t know what city you’re in?
Paul Banks: When I wake up I never know.
Carlos D: What, are you for real?
Paul Banks: Sometimes. I don’t look in the tour book. It’s how I stay calm… as long as it’s not a wartorn area and I’m not dodging mortar shells.
Carlos D: I always get off when I see setlists of major bands and they need to have the name of the city in front of their monitors, in huge letters.
Paul Banks: I have to ask you whether I’ve said certain things onstage. I get paranoid that I’ve already said it at the beginning—like, if I’ve thanked The Cure.
Carlos D: You can’t lose doing it more than once. It’s crazy how people respond just because you’re saying something. Like, what’s the big deal, I just thanked The Cure. There’s this whole crowd-spirituality ethos. It almost feels like the performer is giving them something.
Where were you for the blackout?
Paul Banks: We were in New York City, thank god.
Carlos D: I had a panic attack when it first started because I thought it might be a terrorist attack.
Paul Banks: I think people’s initial reaction was “it’s a terrorist attack!” but then it was a beautiful summer’s day, and when everyone found out it was just a fuck-up, all that nervous energy everyone had initially got converted into jubilance and, all over Manhattan, it was the best party I’ve ever been to. I was sitting outside a bar on Ludlow, and there was a girl with no shirt on, just her tits hanging out, and with her is a guy in underwear singing “Jealous Guy” into a bullhorn. What a night!
Let’s talk about Antics. How would you say it compares to the first one? It feels like the bright lights were actually turned on for this one…
Paul Banks: The sound is a little more upbeat at times—it’s less murky, there’s more melody in the vocals, it’s more audible vocally, the production’s a little clean and crisp, because that’s what worked for this one. A low-end rumble wouldn’t have functioned with these songs. The basslines needed to be heard a little better because we made it a little more agile this time.
Carlos D: A lot of the lighter, more optimistic aspects people are talking about are really the result of those kind of production things you hear more, so it’s given this sprightly feeling. If “NYC” or “Say Hello to the Angels” were on this album with the production we used, they would have the same qualities too.
The first album was a notoriously challenging experience for you—how did the experience of making this one compare?
Paul Banks: We’re better producers now, but that’s the way you make records: you have to isolate the guitars, isolate the drums… what was a surprise to me was singing without the band. This time, I’ve knew from making Turn on the Bright Lights, that’s how you make records, plus I got to skip past a lot of things—like, I learned on the first record that I sing a lot better with the hand-held mic, so I can walk around the room and it’s a lot more natural that way for me. If it sounds more like a band on this record, it’s because we’re better producers and we’ve done this once before.
The NME painted a pretty dramatic picture of the recording sessions…
Carlos D: That piece is getting some notoriety. I was like, “that’s about right.”
Paul Banks: I got sick at the end because I was working too hard for too many months, and with the deadline approaching, there were all these loose ends—I wasn’t committing to the writing. It was a big thing to get done. There were little lyrical changes, one song I rewrote entirely in the studio—things kind of happening late in the game, and then also the months prior, where I was writing and worrying about it. I was spending a number of months where, 24 hours a day, there’s no point where you feel comfortable relaxing, because I literally wouldn’t let myself relax, because at every moment I could be making our record better, and at some point this is going to end and then I can relax. So that worked out, because I worked really fucking hard and feel really good about the record. But towards the end, I was nauseous.
Carlos D: I hadn’t been there for a week and went there to visit to touch up keyboard parts and I walked out of there just going, “it’s pretty depressing!’ There was an aura of darkness in that studio.
Why did you do the record in Connecticut again? Do you need to remove yourselves from the distractions of the city?
Paul Banks: No, I don’t think that’s necessarily so—that serves a purpose to a degree. We went back primarily to be in the same studio again. We’re putting this record out in fairly good time from the release of the first album, and that was the intent: to not get too experimental or too absorbed in it—we have the songs, let’s go record them. We’re a rock band, we wanted to just do it quick and we’re not going to hire the orchestra for this record, we’re not going to get the flute section… which I wouldn’t mind. I mean that. But we decided in advance we’re not going to try and pull anything wacky off, we’re going to write and record our songs, and so the best possible way to make sure they sounded good was to go back where we know the gear, we know the engineer, we know how it feels to work there. We’re not going to spend three weeks in the studio and realize we hated the engineer or it’s just not working. We knew it could work and then, on top of that, we could stand on our own shoulders in terms of using the gear.
Carlos D: It’s funny, because The Strokes started out doing Room on Fire with the guy who does Radiohead, and for whatever reason it wasn’t working out and they went back to Gordon Raphael. I’m not going to say that we saw them do it and were like “oh yeah, we should do that,” but historically it’s a little telling: You should stick with your guns, especially for a second album, it makes a lot of sense. It’s not surprising that happened.
It seems like certain bands are allowed to be experimental, whereas others have to stick to a signature sound. People don’t want The Strokes to hire a string section, but a band like The Flaming Lips can mutate with each record…
Paul Banks: We’re allowed to mutate, it’s just that right now we didn’t want to. The Flaming Lips have been around for so long…
Carlos D: That second Strokes album is so underrated. We were listening to it last night, and every single song…
Paul Banks: I haven’t heard a bad Strokes song. I just think they’re all good songs, in my opinion. At that party last night, I wanted to hear the Strokes.
Carlos D: People actually apologized for playing The Strokes in our presence last night, and I was just like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Do you feel like the New York hype has died down a bit?
Paul Banks: I want to be “New York! New York! New York!”, but people at the beginning did have to nerve to say to us, “maybe it’s not going to work out for you guys once the New York hype dies down,” and I’m like, “No, actually—there’s New York hype and we just made a record that I think will outlive any cachet the city has right now.” The cool thing about New York is that I feel all the bands that have come out of the city the past couple of years and have gotten all this attention are very legitimately good bands that will be considered legitimately good bands for a long time, so I feel really happy about the New York association.
Carlos D: The New York thing is an afterthought; I think people back then were listening to groups just for themselves and that’s it—they weren’t thinking, “is this a New York band or not” just yet, and then after a while they were just finding out that so many of these bands they loved were from New York, so they decided, “okay, there’s a New York thing happening.” First and foremost, people just loved the music in and of itself, which is what makes it really special.
Has your relationship with the city changed?
Carlos D: I savour it so much more. When I’m home, it just feels so good. I DJ less now [in New York] because I know I’m going to DJ on tour and that’s stressful enough, and being at home, the last thing I want to do is commit myself to DJing somewhere. I want it to be completely spontaneous.
Carlos, are you still DJing a lot of afterparties?
Carlos D: It’s not every night… a lot of bands just do it once in a while, but I try to make it happen as often as it’s feasible.
Paul Banks: If you start doing it at strip clubs, we’d hang out a lot more.
Are you still out late every night?
Paul Banks: I hate going to sleep with the daylight pouring in, and all these people going to work, and you’re going home regretting everything you’ve just spent the last six hours doing.
Carlos D: Did you notice the construction workers last night walking out of the loft? There was a whole team of construction workers just getting ready for their day with their hats on, and they were just leering at us while we were walking by. You could not get a more culturally dissimilar group of people: They’re in one world, we’re in another. We’re about to sleep; they just woke up. They have their values; we have ours. It’s amazing, and it happens a lot.
So looking back at Turn on the Bright Lights, what would you say was the major turning point in this band’s trajectory?
Paul Banks: I always deep down had the hope and expectation that it would be massive… but it grew very gradually. It wasn’t really like one day to the next, like, “bam!” It always felt like, when we played a bigger venue, it was like, “Oh yeah, because we played at that venue that was a little smaller and it was sold out, so now we’re playing this place that’s a little bigger.” We never stopped working, so for us, it felt like, “yeah, this is where we should be playing now.” For other people, it’s like, “Wow, in a year, they went from that to that.”
Carlos D: I definitely agree with that statement, but you look at Darwinian evolution, and there’s this concept of evolutionary leaps—evolution occurs gradually, but there’ll be a section of time where suddenly there’s this huge evolution that goes on… so it was kind of like that for me. There was a moment we just got back from Europe doing a bunch of promo shows, and we had heard in Europe that our Bowery Ballroom show in New York sold out, and we were like, “Whoa, we sold out the Bowery Ballroom—holy fucking shit!” And then we actually got in, we got greeted by our publicist and he was saying, “So you guys have become kinda popular while you’ve been away,” and he told us how many copies he’d sold in the first week. And then he was taking us to this Teen People shoot, right off the plane. At that moment, for me at least, that’s when the whole notion of what my life was going to be like in this project kinda crystallized.
Your records could be as important for kids today as The Cure were to you…
Carlos D: It’s taboo to say stuff like that!
Paul Banks: Honestly, my respect for them is so immense, it’s a joke to me almost. “Love Cats,” “A Forest,” “Close to Me”... the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on…
Carlos D: It’s unbelievable.
Paul Banks: The more I think about it, and the more I’m aware of exactly what they’ve done, they’re of the calibre of The Beatles as far as pop sensibility and the classic-ness of the songs. It’s indisputable; I think they still might be very underrated.
Carlos D: Their melodies are so… they’re almost on par with Mozart, in the sense that Mozart was heralded as this composer who wrote the most brilliant melodies in the world, and I think The Cure deserve that title, maybe even more than The Beatles in a way, because they’ll have a keyboard melodies and you’ll sing to that. In “Love Song,” you’ll sing along to “whenever I’m alone with you” just as emphatically as you will sing to the guitar part that comes right after it—it’s this amalgam of all these elements that meant so much to you equally on this level. I look at their front row and they still have 16, 17-year-old cute girls going crazy, mouthing all their lyrics—and these guys are 45! So many bands that are not even their age have lost the young demographic, and when they play their shows, it’s just the people that saw them when they were putting out their first album.
Would you say this record is a reflection of the past two years of your life?
Paul Banks: It’s impossible to say. There’s no direct way of saying how New York City translates into the record or how anyone’s personal experiences in the last two years translates in the music. Those are concepts, and this is music, and there’s no way to describe it. As four individuals, as musicians, we all have changed the last couple of years as people, and then how we write our parts in Interpol has probably changed as a result in ways I could never describe. It’s an impossible question—it seems like it could be easy, but it’s totally impossible.
Do you feel like you’ve had to reveal too much of yourselves in the press in order to exist at this level?
Carlos D: We’ve been burned.
Paul Banks: I don’t want to talk about anything.
Carlos D: It’s weird… it’s actually very fascinating to me, the culture of journalism towards the rock artist. Someone could write a book on it. It’s an art, it’s a science, it’s a culture, it’s a world—I love it, I love the whole idea of it, and I’ve been burned so many times, but I’ve also loved it so many times.
Paul Banks: I’m very spontaneous, so I’ve often said really stupid shit, whereas Daniel [Kessler] is very studied and I don't think he’s ever said anything dramatically dumb in an interview.
Carlos D: It’s fascinating, because it’s a thing… for instance, what we’re doing right now means a lot to us currently, because we’re actually having a conversation and we’re interacting on a very conscious level and enjoying it immediately for what it is, but ultimately the true meaning of this encounter renders the personal experience currently as nothing, it doesn’t mean shit—because you’re going to write whatever you want.
Paul Banks: If the questions are prepared, I don’t mind. But when you have an interview where you answer something, and because the question is written on their page, they ask you something that you answered already because they’re just asking you the questions that they have.
ENCORES
To mark Antics’ 20th anniversary, Interpol have just released a deluxe edition of the record, which includes a bonus-disc document of the band’s 2005 performance at Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City. The band’s love affair with the city has only grown more intense over the past two decades—earlier this year, Interpol played the biggest headlining show of their career there, for a staggering 160,000 people.
Carlos D left Interpol in 2010 and effectively disappeared from the limelight, until he resurfaced in this 2015 interview where he detailed his post-Interpol immersion into the New York theatre scene as an actor and playwright. Last year, he wrote a fascinating essay for Jewish publication Tablet where he came to terms with his Interpol-era predeliction for Nazi-inspired fashion.
Bonus Interpol/Toronto crossover content! The video for “Games for Days,” the 2009 single from Banks’ solo alter-ego Julien Plenti, was filmed at the infamous Hotel Waverly (RIP) and features Metric’s Emily Haines in the role of his femme-fatale foil, plus a cameo from The Deadly Snakes’ Andre Ethier as concierge.
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!