1992-02-15 NME
More Novelty, Vicar?
By David Quantick, NME, February 15, 1992
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/33891529391
"Hey! It's those wacky, zany, quirky, irritating THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS! "F-off!" say the two Johns, it's just pop music. And, to prove the point, DAVID QUANTICK plays them a selection of novelty discs, from Devo to Morrissey, in an attempt to find out what gave their birdhouse soul."
They Might Be Giants are relaxing over cappuccinos in a big record company boardroom. In the corner is a posh stereo. This is handy, because the NME task for today is to play lots of records to the "quirky", "zany", "novelty", "off-the-wall" duo who were last seen going Top Ten with "Birdhouse In Your Soul" and are now back with a new LP, amusingly entitled 'Apollo 18'.
"Oh no!" screams "wacky" Giant John Linnell.
"We have music!" squeals his "crazee" cohort John Flansburgh. Relax, They Might Be Giants. It's time to appear on Novelty Island Discs...
"WHAT'S ALL this for?" asks Linnell, who has more hair than Flansburgh and is smaller. What all this is for is this—to test the popular theory that TMBG are, in some people's eyes, devotees of the art of vexing people with self-indulgence and deliberate off the-wallness, we are going to take a voyage through the work of some fellow victims of the same accusation and, along the way, see if TMBG can, indeed, Expect To Be Taken Seriously.
First up is "That Summer Feeling" by the King Of Zany Jonathan Richman. Flansburgh beams.
"Jonathan..." he says correctly. "Now, he's someone we can firmly stand behind and say, he's not a novelty act. He's a West Boston suburban boy like us." "He's our homeboy," adds Linnell. "I know somebody who thinks that Jonathan Richman is utterly sarcastic. I was surprised. I think he's as sincere as you can possibly be. He's almost like a fragile character."
Like TMBG, Jonathan Richman has been accused of tweeness. Who could forget such joys as "I'm A Little Dinosaur" and "Vincent Van Gogh"? Flansburgh concedes, "I dunno if he's developed from his initial shift from the Velvet Underground thing to being this innocent rocker... but I've always had a soft spot in my head for Jonathan Richman."
TMBG sometimes suffer from a peculiar daffiness themselves, albeit a more 'intellectual' one. 'Apollo 18' features a track called "Fingertips", which is, according to Linnell, "20 different choruses of songs and they're all at different tempos and in different keys and basically what it sounds like is one of those TV ads where they have all these songs of different periods and they just cut all the choruses together and the titles scroll up scroll up the screen, so that's kind of the inspiration for it."
Bloody hell. Linnell continues. "We've also indexed each little snip separately on the CD so if put your CD in shuffle mode you can completely rearrange the order and you can get a full-length then maybe a couple of very short songs and then a full-length song."
Will that not drive listeners to tears? Flansburgh shakes his head. "Well, we tried it ourselves and there were no tears. Some will cry."
The same some who claim that TMBG contain a high irritant factor, perhaps.
Flansburgh rests his head on the table and chortles. "Yeah, well... f— them!"
The thing is, They Might Be Giants are a top admirable band in many ways, unusual exponents of music from the fringes of rock that avoids hundreds of clichés—but, in bulk, their several 20-track LPs can drive the sane to major irritation. From their wild arrangements, odd lyrics and frighteningly unconventional subject matter, TMBG are eminently the kind of band who wind people up.
"That seemed kinda true when we were first starting, there were some people who were bugged by what we did," agrees Linnell, "but it seems like we've recruited enough of an audience now that maybe we don't get enough criticism..."
OK. NEXT up is 'Satisfaction' by Devo. Younger readers may have missed the flowerpot wearing, pretending-to-be-space-people, devolving Akron art at were Devo. They Might Be Giants didn't.
"The thing about Devo is they actually had a moment when they transcended the the veneer they had created for themselves," declares Flansburgh, "and that veneer has now worn very thin."
"They had a comeback with 'Whip It'," recalls Linnell. "I always kind of hated 'Whip It'."
Devo are on our playlist because, more than anyone else, they summed up post-punk contrivance and wilful wanking about. Flansburgh is keen to distance himself.
"At that time, there were bands like Devo and The B-52's and I much preferred Jonathan Richman and Pere Ubu and all the people who were much more street clothes oriented. Devo were contrived, but... getting onstage is contrivance. I mean, nobody asks you to get onstage."
"We used to have things like conical hats when we went onstage," reminisces Linnell, embarrassingly. "It was too much work, though."
TMBG don't regret much of what makes them the idiosyncratic combo of today. From 'Dead'—a song about being reincarnated as a bag of groceries—to Apollo 18's 'The Statue Got Me High'—about a statue getting someone he high, apparently—they are always writing songs which make no sense to anyone. Clearly, they are not, like some, writing for the good of the world.
"None of it is," says Linnell. "It's just something we do."
"I'm much more irritated by musicians who are writing for the good of the world," snorts Flansburgh. "If I never hear another song written for the good of the world, it'll be too soon..."
"I'm willing to grant that some of our songs have got a level of incomprehensibility," says Linnell, graciously. "But it's in between something that makes sense and pure expressionism. It's not at all clear why abstract painters do what they do, it has no verbally meaningful basis, but people like it and that gives it meaning. It isn't nonsense to me at all."
So, time for some nonsense, namely Frank Sidebottom's personal view of The Beatles' 'Mr Kite'.
"Who is this?" asks Flansburgh. "This sounds... very useless."
"Yeah, agrees Linnell, "the word 'irritating' definitely popped into my head."
Frank Sidebottom is explained, to no great joy. "Are we gonna be on a TV show with him next week?" worries Flansburgh. "This gets a D minus. It seems like a Britain-only thing, because Britain is a slightly smaller market and it can support this kind of eccentric, good-natured stuff. It's a double-edged sword. Like "Roadrunner' was a hit here for Jonathan Richman and it definitely fits into the same slot as this does and 'O Superman' did and Birdhouse In Your Soul' did... just the fact that the chart here is open to a certain kind of song is a good thing."
TMBG don't mind fitting into a world where punters can take them as a jolly-up weird band and people who appreciate 'challenging' stuff can be, well, challenged. And others can be irritated.
"I'm not saying we're so damn meaningful," says Flansburgh. "When you talk about it being a little bit irritating, it is... Anything that makes you pay more attention can be an irritant."
TALKING OF irritants, the next tune is "Ouija Board, Ouija Board' by Morrissey.
"Now here's our favourite guy," says Flansburgh happily.
Linnell also taps a happy toe. "We were very interested in Morrissey from the first time we heard The Smiths. We both went through a very serious Smiths phase in the mid-'80s," he confesses. "Morrissey was speaking so plainly and in this melodramatic way, it seemed on the one hand to be reflecting something very real and also aware of the absurd melancholy of doing a song where you say She doesn't really like me/I know because she told me. It's the exact opposite of what do, but it had a really great quality to it."
As Linnell struggles for breath after his speech, Flansburgh muses, "It's really self-reflective, it's really getting caught in the house of mirrors Everywhere you look it's crazy pompadours coming back at you! I just think he's great."
The prime exponent of singing songs that say nothing to anyone about their life has not dimmed his light in the eyes of the Giants. Even 'Ouija Board' prompts kind words from Flansburgh.
"I've never heard anyone who writes songs like that," he smiles. "I don't know this song but I would give Moz straight A's."
Time moves on. Linnell talks about art a lot. Flansburgh claims to be rock 'n' roll. "We do rock 'n' roll things like... doing concerts and making records," he asserts, weedily. One cannot but like They Might Be Giants. Their records may be annoying at times—and yet who can deny the batty greatness of a line like new song 'The Guitar's In the spaceship/The silver spaceship/The lion takes control? They are part of pop, like Nirvana, SexKylie and even the Senseless Things, which is OK.
Linnell declares, "We're in the sphere of popular music... I hope it shows that we like pop music. It would be terrible for us to do something like this and not like the idiom."
"It would be sick," says Flansburgh.
"I think also you'd be really bad at what you were doing," says Linnell. "If you raced cars and were not interested in racing cars, you know... you'd crash."
THE LAST record is 'Right Said Fred' by artpunk Bernard Cribbins. Although impressed by the title—"I heard that song 'I'm Too Sexy'," confesses Flansburgh. "It was really startling. It's... appalling"—they confess that it is "horrible".
Flansburgh is respectful of the Mozzer's heritage. "I think I'd like this more if I'd grown up listening to it. It's kind of bothering me now, but if it was part of your childhood you'd feel affectionate toward it."
I put it on to point out the vaudevillan aspects of TMBG. TMBG are not impressed.
"I think we have to reassess our work," grimaces Flansburgh. "I don't like vaudeville."
"We sound a little old fashioned in our melodies so people associate us with goofiness, but I don't think of us as goofy," says Linnell.
Good old misunderstanding. TMBG don't want to be misunderstood. Probably.
"My feeling about what we do the best part of its usefulness, is that it's a little bit indefensible!" raves Linnell. "It's very difficult when we're writing, we don't get to the stage of 'what's this we writing about?', we're just writing something that we like and then later on we're called on to defend it, and that's when the trouble begins."
And where there is trouble, entertainment often follows.