1990-06-23 Melody Maker
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They Might Be Giants: Ghost Buskers
By Dave Jennings, Melody Maker, June 23 1990
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/35743380545/in/album-72157685943248135
They Might Be Giants is the most improbable best-seller of them all. The duo enjoyed a sizeable hit with the surrealist pop of "Birdhouse In Your Soul", swiftly followed by a chart album. They now find themselves playing to audiences of thousands rather than dozens. But the stage show they're taking to the major venues of Britain still consists of little more than exceptionally inventive busking. There's no band, and no elaborate backing tapes — just the two Giants themselves, an extensive collection of instruments and some of the strangest, most dreamlike songs you'll hear anywhere.
SO how did they do it? John Linnell, the owner of the dry, nasal voice that has become so familiar to daytime radio listeners, confesses that he's not at all sure.
"We always had this fantasy about making it in England," he says. "Around the time we were starting, a lot of American bands that couldn't make it big in America went to England, made a huge splash there, and then rode the wave back across the Atlantic. We thought we'd do that too — but it didn't happen. We had a much bigger response in LA initially than anywhere else — which was very disconcerting."
"Embarrassing, in fact, since we're from New York!" adds his bespectacled partner John Flansburgh. "But we kept coming over here and it seemed to have no great effect. After the last time we toured, I personally had written it off. I just thought, 'Well, we're really American, they're English, and maybe they'll just never get it'. But then 'Birdhouse' just took off!"
They acknowledge that their British breakthrough may have been made easier by the musical atmosphere created by Madchester and all that. But Flansburgh reckons he's seen such local heroics before.
"The Manchester thing will probably not get any bigger," he declares. "The second people start noticing a town scene is when it dies, because everything becomes real self-conscious. More people will get signed — all the second-string people who probably shouldn't get signed anyway will get the really good record deals.
"But some things will endure. I've heard The Stone Roses' record, and I really think they're pretty good. We're suckers for backward sounds, and there's tons of backwards stuff on that record. I'm aware of the fashion aspect of it all, but 'I Wanna Be Adored' and 'Made Of Stone' are really good songs. So it doesn't really matter how they got their success."
The same can be said about TMBG themselves. They're on the radio every other hour once again. To quote their eponymous theme song, it's probably time for "tabloid footprints in your hair".
"Yeah!" says Linnell happily. "It's time for those phone calls from The Sun asking if we're sill beating our wives."
AT one point, the Giants stopped WEA releasing the song that's now their new single — "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", a hit in the Fifties for The Four Lads and the only non-original number among the 19 tracks on TMBG's "Flood" LP. The problem was that "Istanbul" is a sample of their music at its most whimsical, and it's TMBG's whimsy that annoys their detractors most.
"We said to Elektra that we didn't want to put it out unless some other record took off beforehand," says Linnell. "It's a wonderful song and I like it for all its ridiculousness. It was just that if that was the only hit we had, we'd be tagged as a novelty act for all time.
"And that would be both a career problem and a personal problem. We don't want to be considered novelty or silly — we're too old and too full of ourselves for that. Sometimes maybe we take ourselves too seriously, but we don't want to become a clown show."
Flansburgh emphasises the point. "I think 'Birdhouse' being a hit definitely helps people understand that we're a versatile band. There's a big difference between writing weird, unusual material and being a novelty act. They're really distinctly different things. We do havea a of left-of-centre ideas about how to present ourselves, and I think our big problem is that we don't fit easily into any of the categories that music is put in. We're not part of a trend, and so we tend to get pushed between two extremes.
"If we deny the obvious humour in what we're doing too much, then people start thinking that it's this highly ironic intellectual exercise. Then there's the obvious, crass response of, 'Oh, they're just nutty guys'. So there's these two polar opposites that we're pushed between — and it should be very clear to anyone who's exposed to a lot of our material that it really is something in between. It's thoughtful music, but it's. entertaining. It's not so stuffy that you can't just enjoy it at face value."
ON the "Flood" LP, TMBG often load peculiar musical ideas and/or lyrical notions on to their songs until they're left with something very bizarre indeed. In that respect, "Birdhouse" is a typical Giants song.
Linnell: "I think we'd get bored if we were trying to be any more straightforward," says Linnell. "Also, I think it's one of the functions of art that you get to do things that are strictly in the realm of imagination. You're not limited to painting a strictly representational picture of the world."
"We'd think about it a lot more if it left people cold," adds Flansburgh. "I've never really got the impression that what we're doing is too difficult for people to understand. Some of the ideas in what we do are unusual when you compare it with standard rock but not when it's compared to most people's imaginations!
"Everyone can relate to what we're talking about. If you get to the detail of any one song you can say, 'Well, this is complete madness, how can you make sense of this?' But it's not like everyone's at our shows scratching their heads! People really enjoy hearing something that's a bit more challenging."
HOWEVER, one song on "Flood" stands out by virtue of its directness and its serious intent. "Your Racist Friend" is a straightforward story about a party that's spoiled for the song's narrator by "some bullet-head and the madness that he's saying". Does this suggest a more straight-faced side to They Might Be Giants? Now that they're pop stars, will they be available for the next Mandela Day?
"We've always done benefits," Flansburgh points out. "We organised AIDS benefits years ago. There's something great about being able to do something that isn't a big effort on your part but has great ramifications for others. There was a toxic waste dump in our neighbourhood, and we raised a couple of thousand dollars to help contain and regulate it. It was nice to be a local, neighbourhood band and to be able to effect this immediate change in our community's lives.
"But," he adds, "we have a healthy suspicion of rock stars' attitudes and posturings. Belinda Carlisle is now on the cutting edge of the anti-fur movement in the United States, and you can't help but think that it's for the sake of a press release. She's married to one of the leading Republican campaign organisers, who was involved in moulding Reagan and Bush's campaigns and figuring out how best to manipulate the media for them. So you start to feel that the whole thing is a manipulation. It's very hard to argue against someone who's anti-fur—but it does have a certain cachet to it. It seems very politically correct.
"We're not so preoccupied with keeping ourselves in the public that we're prepared to latch on to some political movement that doesn't have any profound meaning to us. We have strong opinions about most political issues, but we're musicians and we don't necessarily want to get involved in politics any more than any private person would.
"A lot of it is very confusing. I really don't know how I feel about the IRA. These people are killing children, and that's a horrible thing, but at the same time I sympathise with anybody, anywhere who wants independence. Things are complicated, and the sad part is that rock people tend to want to put the world into slogans."
Linnell agrees. "It's very dangerous. You end up with people like Ronald Reagan who are just manipulators, who convince people to swallow ideas not because they like the ideas, but because they like the man. There is a lot of good you can do increasing public awareness, but it's very tricky. "Your Racist Friend' is not a doctrinaire song — it's more a personal song, about personal politics."
"It doesn't answer any question," says Flansburgh. "It's just observing something that I think everyone is aware of, which is how difficult it is to keep yourself on the straight and narrow. Everyone, I think, is guilty of a certain amount of racism."
AT present, They Might Be Giants seem strangely keen to play down their own potential importance. They've already been tipped elsewhere as the band to shake up the complacent US mainstream, but Flansburgh doesn't see it that way.
"We don't want to lead people to a better dance craze," he says. There are a lot of things about American culture that are really boring, but I think there could be a dozen intensely interesting bands in the American chart and the bulk of it would still be horrible. Ninety per cent of what's going on at any given time is really bad — even at the height of great musical movements."
So TMBG won't be spending vast amounts of WEA's money on extravagant videos or stage shows just yet (though Linnell concedes "it would be nice to have a spaceship"). In classic indie fashion, they prefer to keep things small so that they don't owe anyone anything. That way, they keep control. Right now, the strategy is working wonderfully well, but they're still impatiently waiting for one last dream to be fulfilled.
"We're expecting to win the World Cup," insists Flansburgh. "We have to get ready for 1994, and only Number 1 is good enough for the American soccer team."
Truly, their imagination knows no bounds.