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Maximo Park
 Speaking from Portland, Oregon USA, in the middle of their three-month world tour, guitarist Duncan Lloyd is in a good mood. "We haven't been here for two years. We knew our following had grown here but we didn't know how much it had grown; it's been great. We played in Vancouver last night and that was almost like being back in the UK. Perhaps slightly like the earlier days. It was a smaller venue but the crowd was great," he enthuses.
"We had a few problems crossing the border because our driver has got... erm, previous convictions. So getting out of Canada has been a bit of a hard task. But in general it's been great. The following of the band has grown over the time we've been away; a lot of people have said they've been waiting this long to see us live again. It's great to have a following and the fact that they all know the words to the second album, more so than the first one. I think the second one is more popular here than the first one, it's great that it's getting that response."
Lloyd started playing saxophone then switched to guitar when he was 14 years old after realising it wasn't the instrument to be writing songs with. He also looked further afield for musical inspiration than his contemporaries. "I had a few bands on the go, punk bands and experimental bands, it all sort of started around fourteen or fifteen. I got into grunge a lot when I was a teenager. I liked Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr, stuff like that. I liked it more than the British stuff, I didn't mind The Stone Roses and a bit of Oasis or whatever but it's not really what I'm into. I didn't like all the flag waving stuff; I wasn't into the Brit thing. I liked bands like The Smiths that were just a band rather than being a movement or anything, so I have a lot of time for bands like that just because of the melodicism and words and the way they work together. It's something that we try and do quite a lot."
On the verge of splitting up in 2001, the band decided to try one more time with Paul Smith as vocalist. Lloyd gets very excited on this development. "We just clicked; he hadn't sung before, you know, he was a bit nervous but by the second session we knew we had something. From there we just wrote songs because we had more purpose. It was like 'we've got the lineup now, we've got the missing piece and now we can kind of go full steam ahead'. It was a bit of a realisation you know - we have something, we have the melody thing, we have Paul with the lyrics and him being a frontman, even from the early days he was a bit of a wild card. It made us a complete band really, rather than a mix of things, which we were. We kind of confused people originally because we were doing all sorts of things," he says. "We were looking at a different style of music that was quite expressive but perhaps hadn't been done for a while. The thing with music is it's all repeating itself but you've gotta do something new with it every time. We felt very much alone because a lot of the bands in Newcastle were literally trying to do the Oasis thing, a lot of Oasis haircuts, a lot wanted to look and sound like Liam Gallagher. It just felt like it had been done for five years so we wanted to be different and it didn't feel like we were part of anything.
"I suppose it's all creatively minded and you try and detach yourself from anything so you're not influenced by a scene or whatever, and scenes sort of come up and go away so quickly it's better I think to be independent and think independently outside of what's going on. We've always concentrated on doing our own thing, whether it's fashionable or not, it comes in cycles."
Maximo Park's two albums, 'A Certain Trigger' (2005) and their latest offering 'Our Earthly Pleasures' have both received critical acclaim across the board, having been picked up by Warp Records (home to Aphex Twin among others). Since then they've spent a lot of time away from home. "It's kind of good to be away from England sometimes because it can be quite suffocating there because the way they look at music there is in very weird way in a way, 'cause its very fickle and the way they analyse it. It's just music really. It's just built up into something that's a lot bigger than it really is.
"It feels like we're getting closer and closer to the sound that we're after, especially with this record. We're closer to the sound we've got in our heads. Really we just want to make really good music and essentially play it live. I mean, the root of our band is that we're a live band and that's where the most exciting element of the band is - it's seeing it live. When all five of us pull together, it really becomes a Maximo Park thing."
Blake Lewis
dB is proud to co-present Maximo Park on Sat 18 Aug at Fowler's Live. 'Our Earthly Pleasures' out now on Warp/Inertia.
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