“We’d joked for years about doing [Bohemian Rhapsody], we put it in the same category as everyone else that it was untouchable and no one could ever go near it,” Cromack says. “We just laughed at the prospect of playing it at a show because we knew if people did hear it they’d be like ‘Holy shit, this is terrible and I have six-and-a-half minutes of judging to do’. When we got booked for Splendour we thought we’d just start to see if we could do it and, not to blow our own trumpet, but luckily our band just has the perfect assets to play the song. Paul [Furness] got the sheet music, he’s such a wunderkind, and he basically directed us in rehearsals and we navigated through the crazy fucking composition that it is.”
While he does make it clear that it may never appear in the set again, the whole process is a testament to the band’s technical skill. They released their third album, Puddinghead, earlier this year – a self-produced affair that saw the band return to a more organic recording environment. “The latest recording process reminded me that the strength of this band is to play live together,” he says while discussing their upcoming tour. “When we have these puzzle-piece recordings where it’s all constructed in the studio and then we have to relearn the songs before we go out on the road to play them isn’t perhaps the best way for us. It’s sacrificing some vibe that we have when we all play them together. But they do get appropriated by the audience and they will all become as meaningless as anything else. It’s a beautiful thing and a weird thing as an artist when you lose ownership of what you’ve created. You always end up in this state of self-loathing, hating everything you’ve ever done, because you can’t relate to those happy moments you had when you first created that.”
For a band who’s had such anthemic pop hits, audience appropriation has been a struggle for Cromack, and he and the band are working hard to reign in creative control (at least in the live format) so that their passion for the stage remains. “Don’t get me wrong, I still love performing live and even with the songs I’m sick of, I’m not fussed about having to perform them live,” he says. “Having the audience sing them back at you kind of gives you a sense of worth. I think a lot of artists have that crisis that you’re not contributing to society in the most meaningful way so it’s good to see people just blatantly enjoying something.
“I think for a long time we saw ourselves as just a band for the people who play sing-a-longs and we kept ourselves out of it, but we’re now allowing ourselves to play things that we actually enjoy and we’re trying to indulge our own artistic desires.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
