The Cribs Get a Warm Reception

Move aside, Oasis. Indie darlings The Cribs are fast becoming the U.K.'s new favourite brother act. The no-nonsense threesome from Yorkshire seem poised to finally sail into the mainstream with Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever, the Jarman siblings' newly-minted third album.

Exuding the raw post-punk catchiness of other Brit bands like The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, Ryan, Gary and Ross tried a new approach to breaking into America: sneaking in through Vancouver with Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand and befriending a Canadian treasure.

ChartAttack: How did you go from being tourmates with Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand to having him produce your album?
Gary: Well, we got on really well on tour... we found we have a lot in common, and we'd just signed to Warner at the time. Alex heard a lot of the new songs at soundcheck, and he said he'd like to produce. We were really excited, but we thought that people would tend to really only focus on that — that's the only thing we were skeptical about.
Ross: We spent seven weeks on the road with Alex, [so he] knew what our sound was. He knew what we were about and where we wanted to go and what we wanted to translate — and that's the main thing about producing.

And you feel the end product reflects that?
Gary: Definitely. More so than any other record. We thought that if you wanted "live" to get across, you had to record it live, but the irony is that we spent so much time doing it, and we experimented so much, and he, Alex, translated the live energy onto this record.

People are still talking about the Mint Records Christmas party and your performance with Alex and Nardwuar's band The Evaporators.
Ross: Such a random night! We're friends with Nardwuar — he showed us Vancouver and looked after us while we were there recording — and he invited us to the Mint Records party. During the set he said, "Special guests, come forward please!" and he got everyone to sit down and we were hiding. We really didn't want to go. We were embarrassed. We knew they wanted to play "Take Me Out" because we kinda heard them playing the riffs, and [Nardwuar] walked around for five minutes looking down the audience and finally spotted us and he came over and dragged us on stage. There's a video on YouTube. You can see Alex and he's like, "I'm not playing, I really don't wanna." He looks really pissed off, and then all of a sudden he finally just goes, "Oh, the fuck with it," and it ended up being really cool. We didn't really want to let Alex down as a friend.
Gary: I mean, he was doing a really good thing, I understand why he did it, but man, we were press-ganged into that.

What's Nardwuar like as a friend?
Gary: He's a really thoughtful guy, actually.
Ross: Personality-wise, he's exactly like what he's like on TV, really. He's not an actor. He wears the same shirt every time.
Gary: His knowledge of punk rock is insane. You really gotta take it off for him. His credibility is completely solid. When some bands don't get him, it's nothing about provoking, it's just got to do with them being uptight. He asks questions that are relevant, you know. It's not like he ever talks shit to people. He knows so many things that you don't think he'd know — and I know how he does it, 'cause he emailed me recently asking for info on a certain band, and I gave him some insider scoop that no one knows. They're gonna freak out when he asks them these questions!

One of the standout tracks on the record is "Be Safe," with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth contributing spoken word prose. Was that improvised?
Gary: We came up with the backing, maybe like five or six years ago... and we always wanted to do, like, spoken word, but none of us were particularly comfortable with our own voices. We'd been in touch with Lee, so we sent him a rough cut of the track and he loved it, so we booked a session in New York. The first day we just talked about what we wanted to do, and he brought out his books and these writings that he'd done, and the next day we kind of improvised. And he did about five or six different cuts and we sort of made a collage of them.
Ross: We were definitely happy with the way it came out. It's one of our most favourite on the record.

Do you think too many British bands are preoccupied with "breaking America"?
Ross: Totally — just really preoccupied with being a commercial band... like all of these "indie bands" nowadays wouldn't exist if they weren't signed to a major label.
Gary: We feel weird that we get lumped in with a lot of these bands even though we've been around. We did a lot of stuff on our own for the first two records, like in a DIY kind of way, and it just seems that some bands are trying to pass themselves off as independent but they're just corporate bands that play punk-style music, you know? We feel like what we're trying to do is a little bit more organic. We're not trying to break America. If only we can sell out a 300-people club, like last night [at Toronto's El Mocambo], that's cool. We can build on that and think "good" and have that be a progression rather than just trying to play on our own hype. People don't have any respect for that. And I'm kinda glad. I don't believe you should be able to just pull it off like that, or at least you should do something to justify it.