Tom Gray and his innovative rock band, Gomez, are in the midst of a U.S. tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of the group’s groundbreaking debut album, Bring It On. A Mercury Prize winner in Great Britain, the album was both highly acclaimed by critics and beloved by fans upon its release, and continues to find new audiences as it ages. After a smashingly successful European run for the anniversary, Gomez is back in the States, performing the album in its entirety as well as a selection of favorites. We spoke to Gray from a stop in Chicago, midway through their American trek.
How does it feel to present the album again to an audience 20 years after making it?
It doesn’t feel like it’s dated so much. It just feels kind of different. I can still remember the person that I was that made it. It’s kind of funny, when we first came to America and played it no one was interested, really, in it. Things are a lot better now than then.
Any sense of what has changed?
People didn’t really catch on to Gomez over here. It took a few records to kind of really connect with it. It’s fun to be able to bring the record over here and play it, especially for people who are hard-core; who were into this in the very beginning. And, of course, the people who worked their way back to it and found out about it through other things. I’ve met people on this tour who say, ‘I first heard the album in, like, 2005.’ Or five years ago. And fell in love with it. I think the whole life of this record hasn’t been particularly straight-forward.
For those songs on the album that didn’t become staples of the live repertoire, have they taken on new momentum being played in the context of the entire record?
We never really intended to take any songs out of circulation. However, just by nature—some songs being quite tough or quite weird or so distinctive—sometimes they wouldn’t make it in the set. We always wanted to make albums where every song would justify itself on there. We’ve stuck to that throughout our career. There’s a song on there called “Bubble Gum Years” that I sing, that was never a song we played live. It’s almost like coming back to it 20 years later as a sort of forgotten orphan. It’s a world-weary song; quite strange. Obviously, me, age 21, trying to do sort of Randy Newman, Tom Waits kind of thing from a slightly more psychedelic point of view. It’s got a strange poignancy to it now that I didn’t have when I was 20. It feels very different playing that as somebody who feels like he’s lived a little and can inhabit what’s being said in the song a lot more than when I was a kid. Lots of things take on poignancy that you didn’t see coming, really.
Are there ones that stay as reflections of that time?
Playing things like “Whippin’ Piccadilly,” a song about an actual day out when we were kids. It’s more than just a nostalgia fest for everyone in the audience. That’s very nostalgic for all of us as well. We were there; that kind of postcard from our youth, as it were.
Has technology caught up with the live performance, allowing you to do things now you couldn’t 20 years ago?
We definitely weren’t able to put it all together when we first started. It would have been incredibly difficult. As time moved on, I remember getting huge sampler racks, doing it all that way. Now I just need one little computer and I can kind of program all of the beats and get all of the samples off of the original record. We were quite lucky when we went back to the original tape for the (making of the) box set, we had access to the original sounds, isolated. So, we made good use of that. We’re actually playing the record closer to the album than we ever have.
And no elaborate light show or background visuals evoking the album or the time period?
No, absolutely not. We were never much of a band for messing around with productions too much. We kind of just wanted to present ourselves, not hide in any way. We’ve always felt that there’s so much happening onstage with Gomez that trying to distract people would be counterproductive.
Do you feel pressure to represent the record in an exacting way for those that cherish it so, or is it more important for you to be Gomez as the live band that you’ve always been and do it that way?
It’s a hard question. It’s important that we do what we’ve always done, but what we’ve always done is to sort of have a mind on giving people a kind of sense of creative energy in the band rather than a simple, straight-forward performance thing. We’ll often take the more difficult route to performing a song because we find that more exciting, ourselves. It’s more interesting. It’s not an either/or (situation).
But you do have people that know every groove.
People at the gigs sing every single word. Every bassline, even. It’s definitely a little bit different because we’re older, and we sound a bit different and we play different guitars now. What we’ve done is we’ve rearranged a lot of songs from how we used to play them live to make them closer to the record, but sometimes we say this song would would’ve been better if we’d done ‘this’ instead of ‘that.’ And when we hit upon those things, we’ve done it because it gives us a little bit of something else. They’re not big changes; little subtle changes.
In previous interviews the band has cited The Beatles’ Revolver as an inspiration, which is interesting because they made that album at the same they were giving up performing live. Did you consider as you were making this record the thought of having to perform it live?
This album, when we started it, we did not think the world was going to hear it. It was music made for ourselves and our friends. There was no intention of getting it to the world. We were holed up together with a 4-track machine. We’d hang out with loads of friends, go record some stuff, come back to the party, go record some stuff, come back to the party. That’s how it was when we were kids. It was just what we did for fun. When we started playing it live, we were terrified. Half the guys would be sick every night having to be performers, as opposed to these musos mucking around.
That’s why I found it an interesting parallel. Could you imagine The Beatles trying to perform Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band live?
They would’ve been fucked. (Laughs.) Yeah, we were fucked originally. We didn’t realize we were fucking ourselves.
