“We’ve got a lot of material from over those years,” he says, speaking to me on the telephone from his hometown of Brighton, England. “People who’ve stuck with us and the like, it’s kind of a way of giving them the opportunity to hear what they want to hear. It keeps us on our toes as well. Each day we’re always waiting for what the tracks people have picked are going to be; we usually get them around sound check time.” That doesn’t give the five-piece, whose lineup has not changed since the band’s inception in 1996, much room if there’s an unexpected pick. “Sometimes there might be the odd two or three songs that throw a spanner in the works and then you’re suddenly like, ‘Uh, right, how’re we going to figure this out?’ But it’s actually quite exciting as well.”
Gomez’s last album, Whatever’s On Your Mind, received much press around the manner in which the band wrote its tracks. Blackburn, Tom Gray and Ben Ottewell all reside in Brighton while Ian Ball and Olly Peacock are denizens of Los Angeles and New York, respectively. Using a kind of online ‘hub’ where tracks could be uploaded, the band members each added or removed or augmented their way through a slew of ideas, eventually whittling them into a small collection which they then finally took into the studio. “The point where we were all apart and just sending things through was the initial idea-generating stage,” Blackie says in his distinctly polite accent. “We ended up with 50 or 60 ideas, and then most of that stuff got put aside: binned, pretty well. So you end up with about 10 ideas, from all that, that you decide to work on. Basically when we went into the studio there was a sense of agreement.” Playing with ideas online seems to have its drawbacks, though: there’s no way to immediately address a difference in opinion, so weird feuds like those that nerds on Wikipedia have, where a contested date is viciously changed back and forth forever, seem unavoidable. “Passive aggression instead of just straight forward confrontation? I’m just not going to say anything about that,” Blackie chuckles. “It’s a weird dynamic being involved in a creative process with a number of people who have different ideas about things, and everybody does have different ideas about things. Generally, it’s not so much a diplomatic process. If there’s songs that people really aren’t agreeing on then [they get] binned for the time being. Because if it becomes compromised, it becomes watered down.”
Aside from that, the seemingly difficult situation of being spread out across the globe doesn’t really get in the way of anything. When I question whether logistics have ever prompted the band to consider – heaven forfend – packing it in, Blackie gives a little laugh in the negative. “I think we might switch to hologramatic touring, just send our holograms to do it,” he jokes. “After this tour, we’re actually taking a break and it’ll be the first time we’ve done that. This time, it’s just been so long on the road we’ve decided to take a break and then we’ll just regroup.” The presser truly isn’t lying where it says that Gomez won’t be back for a while after these shows. “It will be a long time, yes,” Blackie confirms. “Even if we were going straight into another record it would be like, a number of years anyway. I think it’s going to be quite a while before we get back into making another record.”
As our allocated time dwindles, I decide to ask Blackie whether he remembers a certain incident during the band’s 2004 Melbourne show, at The Forum. A young lady threw a pair of tiny, pink, polka-dotted undies at singer Ian Ball, which hit him on the leg. Blackie then picked the knickers up and stretched them across the two points of a keyboard stand so that they were distorted to the size of a whale’s arse, and warped the message of ‘LOVE ZOE’ written across the fabric into a rather terrifying memo of devotion. “I don’t recall that,” Blackie says, sounding extremely uncomfortable but gracious. “Are you sure it was me? I think that might have been Tom because he’s over by the keyboard. Well, thank you very much, it’s greatly appreciated.” With so many dedicated fans in Melbourne, Gomez’s two dates here are going to be a treat for all who managed to grab tickets. I myself am looking forward to what promises to be one of the gigs of the year. “Great,” Blackie says warmly. “We’ll look out for the pants.”
BY ZOË RADAS
