Olly Peacock from Gomez on Self-Producing, London Riots, and Giving Love Back to Everybody: ACL Interview

Brit alt-rockers Gomez stop by our town fairly frequently, and will be playing Sunday evening, Sept. 18, at the Austin City Limits festival. This is part of their tour for their new album, Whatever's On Your Mind, which has received mixed reviews, but is still a must-own for any loyal Gomez fan. While in town for the festival, they will also tape an episode of Austin City Limits. A couple weeks ago, drummer Olly Peacock took a break from his schedule to chat with us, and despite a not-so-terrific cellphone connection, we got the main gist of what he was talking about.

I was wondering if you could talk a little about the evolution of the
band's sound, from the more raucous songs of the late nineties to this new album which seems much more poppy...

I think, yes, its always interesting to detract from the -- evaluate what you’ve done. I don’t know if we evolve, or we’re just constantly kind of changing somewhat the music and the way we do our stuff.

The reason the record ended up being more poppy, I think probably you could attribute that to the fact that we wanted, I don’t know -- everybody's kind of keeping things more uptempo, bold... and I think it’s just a cycle, through where some of us just were coming up with new kind of styles of songs, and we kind of wanted to . . . we weren't looking, we weren’t passing through previous tunes as such, but there's songs available in the big pile of songs that we had.

And we sort of go and take it forward, make it even more appealing, a little more different than we’ve done, and just as you see, fun. It's interesting there for us to be on a -- have a different sound for this record.

As veteran musicians, how does it feel to be seen as adult in what could be seen as, as
Destroyer's Dan Bejar puts it, "a young person's game"?

This is different. Yeah, I don't have an anything to add to that one, really. I think in order to evaluate others, being, maybe, more senior -- I was going to say that we've matured a little bit in how we go about recording this album, and perhaps that’s a big part of -- maybe there's some thinking, “Oh, weak tunes.” You know, public opinion on the record is for making music, and not necessarily kicking others around. And maybe all the words [are set] before we gotta go to the studio, and just the song's awesome. Now that's the kind of thing when we were kids, we would definitely be happy to do. We'd be, “OK, we'll produce this song. Just record it and let's get it down. It'll be easy.” It'd be easy to fine tune that stuff, but there are different times when we couldn't get this. A lot's going on, I think.

So I think that's -- certainly that’s kind of the key thing, is that over the years, at least, we’ve got ... an idea of what we can produce ourselves, and this way, it’s probably more of a mental kind of -- touring definitely helps, I think.

And do you think that since the band has been around for a while that there are higher expectations for your work?

I think that some people would say that, yeah. If our sort of [goal] was that we wanted to be a real ... we wanted to mature as songwriters, producers, then our goal is certainly to keep growing. And hopefully -- actually, some people think that our fourth album, it’s wonderful, and the fifth one, it’s a big pile of shit, and then the second one... It’s like sometimes people think it at different times, some people think, they’re going the wrong way. But ...I’d like to think that we have been bettering ourselves, and that’s the whole point of why we still keep on going out.

At least three of the members of Gomez have done solo projects in recent years; did that make it more of challenge to collaborate on Whatever’s on Your Mind?

Not really, makes it a little different really. You know Ian, his was quite a while ago. I think it's healthy, I mean it's really healthy. Distance in our relationships is definitely a very valuable thing, I think. You've gone touring together over the course of a year and a half to two years, then you live with each other and you get inside each others' pockets. To have the separation ...

I think then the band adheres... I think it's a healthy approach, that you need it because it’s good for themselves, and I think it falls together.

What was the production process like? You discussed it a little earlier, but could you go into it in a little more detail, about this recent album?

Yeah. Because we all live thousands of miles apart from each other, one would think we would get in a room together and make music. Then you go on tour, et cetera, et cetera. We did a new style with a process in Chicago... I think it was something like five days long, and it ended up with all five of us being in the same room and not listening to each other, in our own little worlds. Which is fun times.

We all have our little studios at home. [So instead] we would set ourselves a time frame: 7 weeks, 8 weeks. And each week everybody in the band had to come up with a few songs, or a few song ideas. That following week you dig what you liked, what you didn’t like, and you get back to each other... you keep developing, several times over. It worked well because it meant the emergence of a more finished version than we could --I've got these chords. If you can't get a thing set up OK, you try to explain what you imagined. It could have, you know, virtually failed.

So, it was a really good process. It seemed to be really healthy and we were really productive in doing it. There was a lot that didn't need to be said because of it, a lot. And we went back [and forth] in this process last year for a long time, until we thought we were 100% ready, we knew what we were doing. So after the demo, we then went right to the studio and refined it some more with our friend, and co-producer, Sam Farrar. Then we recorded May 1st, and that was that.

What are your thoughts on the recent riots in London? Because I read via your Twitter feed that your British label was affected.

Yeah, it was frightening. I mean, I wasn’t in the country at the time. That was kind of a nightmare. I used to live in Brixton, and the shops were literally one minute away from around where I used to live, where I was living then. It was a very, very surreal experience in terms of it escalating so much and then spreading through the country. And, yeah, there was the initial causes, but why everybody just sort of jumped on, as it were, the bandwagon... everything seemed to be really frustrating.

And, you know, everybody was just mystified by it. There's a real shame that it got to the scale of people going out and causing so much damage. Not really any cause or reason, it wasn't like -- I don’t think there was a collective reason for why everybody was doing it. It was a little scary and uncalled for.

You play in Austin fairly often. Do you have any favorite spots to visit in town?

A lot of times we’re in Austin, we’re sort of in and out...sometimes it’s been accompanied by SxSW, the SxSW experience. Most of the time you were walking around town, and some places you have no idea where you are, or you’re drunk!

But there’s a couple of places -- I mean, as a whole, Austin is lovely. We like Stubb’s, to play. Stubb’s has always been good for us to play. I'm trying to think of a restaurant we went to, I can't remember what it's called -- Lombardi's or something like that [ed. note: perhaps he means this place?]. But yeah, we have a really good mutual appreciation for Austin. It's really nice. Really excited to get back there, to be honest -- Austin's really a great show. You know, I think I'm definitely going to have to do more venturing and see what's going on.

And how do you feel about your upcoming Austin City Limits show taping?

Excited. Again, Austin seems to be one of the places where we -- it seems to be logical for us to kind of give some some sort of love back for everybody. It seems to make sense. There’s a certain weight there in the city where we just kinda of gravitate to and … we get good vibes back. You know, we’re there for a good while, so we’re just really excited to see everybody.