A conversation with Jimi Goodwin of Doves from 2002
The Mancunian band's singing bassist talks about touring with The Strokes, falling in love with The Rapture, and subconsciously ripping off King Crimson
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 (and the occasional classic-rock icon). 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).
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THE OPENERS
It’s a shitshow out there, so cleanse your proverbial timeline with this video of Owen Pallett covering “Pink Moon” at Mills Hardware in Hamilton last weekend.
Now back to your regularly scheduled doomscroll. This week in sad news: David Johansen of the New York Dolls has Stage 4 cancer and needs your help—here’s how you give it.
I watched the 50 Years of SNL Music doc, and while it’s fun in a disjointed, falling-down-a-YouTube-rabbit-hole kinda way, I was a bit bummed it didn’t include the greatest song ever performed on the show:
Notes on this week’s new additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
mclusky, “the unpopular parts of a pig”: The cantankerous Cardiff crew are set to release their first album in 20 years, the world is still here and so are we, on May 9 via Ipacec, and their band is still better than your band—sing it.
Consumables, “Infinite Games”: This upcoming debut album from this New York band features production and songwriting assists from Bodega’s Ben Hozie, with whom they share a flair for melodic sing-speak and cheeky cultural critique. The title track begins as a steady post-Pavement jam before slowly snowballing into something more epic and anthemic, with a wayward saxophone attempting to broker a peace treaty between art-punk angularity and soft-rock accessibility before surrendering to the squall.
Cross Record, “Charred Grass”: For a song that begins with visions of burning fields, this single from American-born/UK-based Emily Cross is an oddly uplifting art-folk ode to feeling alive on a dying planet.
The Weather Station, “Window”: Speaking of artful singer/songwriters with eco-apocalypse on their mind—this highlight from the recently released Humanhood channels Tamara Lindeman’s existential panic attack into a dizzying psychedelic-pop swirl worthy of Andorra-era Caribou.
Doves, “Renegade”: Did you hear about the Manchester rock band formed by two brothers in the ‘90s that’s reemerging in 2025 after a long absence? That’s right, Doves are back! The group’s first album in five years, Constellations for the Lonely, is out Feb. 28, and this lead-off track finds them once again hitting the sweet spot between grandiose space-rock and down-to-earth storytelling.
And speaking of Doves…
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Jimi Goodwin
Date: June 8, 2002
Location: Phoner—Jimi was calling in from Los Angeles; I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto
Publication: Eye Weekly
Album being promoted: The Last Broadcast
The context: In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the first time I saw The Strokes, when they opened for Guided by Voices at New York’s Bowery Ballroom in February 2001. A few weeks later, I’d see them again playing their first-ever Toronto show at the Opera House opening for another band I was semi-obsessed with at the time: Doves, whose 2000 debut Lost Souls provided a headier post-Britpop alternative to both the unabashed sentimentality of Coldplay and the aggressive experimentation of Radiohead.
To me, Doves were like a more adventurous, less egotistical Oasis—i.e., another Mancunian band of brothers (twins Andy and Jez Williams, plus their mate Jimi Goodwin) wholly capable of writing anthems that could hit the back rows of Wembley, but who replaced the Gallaghers’ lager-lout hedonism with a psychedelic art-school sensibility and a finely tuned sense of rhythm (inherited from their previous incarnation as ‘90s rave crew Sub Sub).
I spoke to Jimi Goodwin prior to Doves’ June 2002 Toronto stop at the Palais Royale in support of their excellent second album, The Last Broadcast, which hit No. 1 on the UK charts. Coincidentally, before heading to their show, I went to an early-evening gig at a Kensington Market community centre called KYTES headlined by another emergent New York band that Doves were scheduled to take on tour later that summer: The Rapture.
How are you doing today?
I’ve just caught a stinkin’ cold, so I just woke up feeling phlegmy. I’ve got a stinkin’ fuckin’ headache, and my bones are aching!
Well, thank you for speaking with me today from your deathbed. So does it feel like all the success you’re having in the UK at the moment is spilling over to North America? Do you feel like you’re hitting a new level over here?
I think it’s kind of the same size crowds as Lost Souls was—just a nice sort of funky funbase. We’re chuffed at the crowds that come out to see us. It never ceases to amaze us.
Has reaching No. 1 on the UK charts changed your life in any significant way?
No, because we’ve been there before. Back when we were Sub Sub, in 1992, we had a Top 20 hit with a single. Your life doesn’t change overnight. We’re extremely grounded people. We were thrilled [to go to No. 1], and it’s quite surreal, but you stay the same. We have not stopped since the album was mastered—we just went straight out on tour.
Well, when I was given instructions to call you at your hotel, I was told to ask for the room under your name, so you haven’t reached the stage where you have to check-in under aliases…
Yeah, with us, it’s not about personalities, it’s about the music. It’s just nice to get props for your music, and not what your haircut looks like.
You’re from Manchester, but I don’t feel like Doves come up in the conversation when people talk about “Manchester music.”
I think we’re definitely independent of that. This fabled Manchester sound is just a crock of shit. None of those bands sound the same. One thing maybe we do share in common, coming from our part of the world, is individuality. We’re our own gang. I don’t really see myself as a Mancunian in the world. None of us do.
So the last time you were in Toronto, you had brought this little opening band called The Strokes with you. I’m wondering if seeing them blow up made you worry that the tides were shifting back toward three-chord garage rock, and away from the more epic, cosmic music that Doves create…
No, never. They’re a great band. What can you say about them? They’re unbelievable live, they’re fucking ferocious. And they’re great songwriters, man. In England, we’ve always had great support bands. We choose who we want to play with us, and the problem is they just seem to exceed and succeed us in the success stakes! We just have a laugh about it. But you know: We’ve had Starsailor, Turin Brakes, The Strokes, Elbow…
You’ve got the magic touch.
All I can say is we’ve got excellent taste!
And I noticed you’ve got The Rapture opening for you this summer. How did you get turned onto them?
That first EP is fucking filthy, man—it’s great. I heard it on XFM on the radio while I was in there doing an interview and had my headphones on, and it just came out of the radio sounding wicked.
You two might not seem like the most obvious pairing, but there’s a connection in that you’ve both crossed the dance/rock divide.
They do it tastefully. It’s like a Todd Terry record to me. You’ve got a weird cowbell thing in there, it’s like a breakbeat. It’s like, ‘whoa!’ It’s dead interesting, because I love Pere Ubu and Pigbag and ’80s white-boy funk—which we really shouldn’t do, but they do it really well. We’ve invited them to play the Eden Project in Cornwall. It’s basically like a glass biodome, like an indoor ecosystem with a rainforest vibe. It’s a pretty stunning place around the coast of Cornwall, a beautiful part of the country. So it’s us, The Rapture, and I think we just finalized Soundtrack of Our Lives. They’re good. The thing is, that guy [Ebbot Lundberg] wears that shit all day—he doesn’t just put the smock on for the gig. He’s wearing his sandals and smock all day long, and I admire that—he’s real. Very Stonesy, but it’s a good vibe to it. We’re playing outside on a stage in front, but we’re going to project all our lights and stuff onto the glass and use them as reflectors. I’ve never been, but Andy our drummer has been, he says it’s a wild building.
Do they grow any hydro-weed in there?
I’m sure the staff have got their own side chronic corner.
The Last Broadcast feels like a real leap forward from Lost Souls. Is that confidence the result of the good reviews and record sales you enjoyed with the first record?
It’s not as simple as that. I think there’s something more than that at work. It’s very deep and beautiful and complex. It doesn’t push you away, I hope. It’s fucking incredibly dense, this album—we’re only still making sense of it. But it’s not dense where it freaks you out. It’s really musical and it’s got a lot of mood swings that are pretty wild. That’s what we set out to do: make a great hour and five minutes. It’s not about singles. Some things you shouldn’t explain and just leave as it is…
“There Goes the Fear” feels like a real mission statement for the album—at seven minutes long, it’s a pretty fearless single!
It’s a difficult single. We had to edit it for radio, which we never really like doing…
But “Hey Jude” and “Like a Rolling Stone” were just as long…
Yeah, but you’re talking Dylan and The Beatles—it’s suicide to start comparing ourselves to those cats! But yeah… going number three [on the U.K. charts] with the single, we really did not expect it. We just wanted to show people who already know about us where we’re going, maybe.
How did that extended batucada-band-style fadeout come to be?
That was Jez who pretty much came up with that idea. A friend of mine goes to Brazil every year, buying instruments—he’s just mad into Brazilian rhythms. So we got all our mates together and I was playing snare and stuff. That’s how we use the studio, just to fuckin’ experiment and try these things—there’s no guarantee it’s going to work. On the demo, it just had a sort of rockin’ spiffy snare drum. But then we added cowbells and all this stuff—it’s quite an ambitious track.
The tracklist of guest players on this record is pretty long.
There’s a lot of strings and horns and clarinets… when we were making it, it was like, “Fuck, Jesus—how many people are playing on the album?” Whatever it takes—fuck it. We’re not paranoid about that. If it wants bells and whistles, we do it, but it’s never for the sake of it, I hope.
Lost Souls was a really atmospheric record, whereas it feels like your vocals are more front and centre on The Last Broadcast. Were you paying more attention to the lyric-writing this time?
I think they’re more direct this time. Like you asked before—what’s this new confidence all about?I think it’s just more outward-looking. It’s still the same theme of escape and restlessness and where are we going and what are we going to do. People keep asking, “what’s the ‘fear’ about”, and it’s like, “Would you fucking just listen?” It’s painfully obvious: It’s about letting go and moving on. “Words” is about that as well. The songs are quite direct and aren’t as oblique. But then there’s always the throwaway stuff—not every line has to be fucking profound. It’s a feeling thing: Here comes the melody, so you have to find words to fit the melody. As long as it’s pleasing to the ear, then whatever.
“M62 Song” features a songwriting credit for King Crimson, because of its melodic similarity to “Moonchild.” Who’s the Crimson head in the band?
Well, none of us to a massive degree. I liked Discipline in the ’80s—I must admit that record, with Adrian Belew, did fucking blow my head off in like ’85 and ’86. I’ve played Discipline a lot and it hasn’t really dated to my mind that much. We did that track “M62” and memory is a weird thing, man, with melodies. I think Andy sort of heard the melody in that Vincent Gallo movie, Buffalo 66, in the tap-dancing scene.
Then, two years ago, we were putting together the arrangement on acoustic guitar—and then someone played us the [King Crimson] record, which we didn’t know, and it was like, “Oh, right—the fucking melody’s pretty similar isn’t it?’ Whatever, so we credited them. I’m getting a weird sort of feeling about progressive rock. People are like, “You must be massive fans of King Crimson.” Well, actually, not really. A good song is a good song, it can come from fucking anywhere.
You’ve got pretty good bullshit detectors by this point, I imagine…
We’re our own barometer. We’re Mancunian. It’s like Canadians, you’re kinda similar: you’re not as naïve as some American people can be.
Lost Souls had this really long gestation period where you were trying to reinvent yourselves and figure out your sound… and then you had to deal with your manager passing away and your studio burning down. But with The Last Broadcast, it feels like you’ve dropped all the baggage of the past and you’re free to be the band you always wanted to be…
It feels like we’ve just moved on. You can’t stay in the same place. The way we work together and the way we write together is not as conscious as many people want to think it is. Lost Souls was your classic debut-album thing where people were like, “Wow, it took such a long time to make,” and that’s because no one fucking knew who we were. If it takes you five years to develop a sound, then whatever. But, obviously this one took us 10 months, and that’s really quick for us. We’re in the position that we wanted to be eight years ago: recording albums, writing, going to tour them, and when that gets too much, you go home, have a break and do the same thing again… and get fucking horrible colds!
ENCORES
Though I spent a chunk of my interview with Jimi talking about “There Goes the Fear” and “M62 Song,” my favourite Last Broadcast track by far is the Joshua Tree-toppling triumph “Pounding”…
…and while The Last Broadcast’s 2005 follow-up Some Cities wasn’t quite on the same level, it does boast Doves’ all-time greatest single, the northern soul-kissed “Black and White Town,” a song I will never tire of hearing:
And if you want more of that “Black and White Town” vibe, here’s a playlist I made of indie-northern-soul knockoffs and alternative Fauxtown favourites:
Click here for the Apple Music version
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!