1992-04 Q Magazine
ODDBALL - They Might Be Giants: Too Clever for Their Clogs?
By Andy Gill, Q Magazine, April 1992
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/35574725882/
MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, Feburary 1, 1992: John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, that most droll of duos, albeit one with a serious undertow, is anxious. This gig is only their second in around 18 months, and some of the new material from their new album, Apollo 18, has yet to sink itself into their system. It's hardly surprising, for their are 38 tracks listed on Apollo 18, a daunting task to set even the fittest of memories. Flansburgh helpfully explains that 21 of those tracks are actually fragments of the same song, The Fingertips Suite, which is virtually impossible to play live anyway, switching as it does so drastically from style to style. It sounds like a lucky bag of hooks and half-developed riffs they haven't managed to expand into individual songs.
"That's pretty accurate," admits John Linnell, the Giants' other half, "except that they were written for this project, written to sound like one of those television ads for greatest hits compilations, where they just play you little bits."
It's a typically oddball conception, the kind of thing almost expected from the group who gave us the unbearably catchy Top 10 hit Birdhouse In Your Soul, the minimal Minimum Wage, the mighty Particle Man, and who picked up a 1990 Q Award for Best New Act.
It comes as little surprise to learn that their biggest influence was San Fransisco art-pop weirdos The Residents, though in many ways they're more English, in a Flanders & Swann, university revue way, with songs that bulge with wit and eccentric structures; not so much too sexy for their shirts as too clever for their clogs. A university audience, probably, is exactly right for them, though they bridle at the term "sophomoric" and Flansburgh claim that their reputation as a college band came quite late on in their career.
"When we started playing, it was in clubs where everyone had to be over 21, so it was a more adult crowd," he explains. "Then, as we've gotten older, the crowds have gotten younger, and we've started playing theatres and places where all ages can go. And we've started having our videos played on MTV, which definitely attracts a younger audience. We're often defined as a college band, but that's really only describing the format on which the music gets played, college radio; but we don't have any similarity to Depeche Mode at all. I think we have much more in common with the Beau Brummels than we do with Depeche Mode."
Both Johns did, however, attend college. "I ended up at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn," says Flansburgh.
"A name that brings a smile to every pair of lips in the UK," chips in his partner, "I myself went to the Twat Institute..."
Tonight, they're at Manchester University. It's TMBG's kind of crowd: enthusiastic bordering on rowdy, with a weather-ear open for wit and wordplay.
Right from the start, when Flansburgh jabbers an introduction like an auctioneer, they're up for a good time. Furious pogo-style terpsichore greets old faves like Twisting and the more up-tempo of the new numbers, such as Dig My Grave; clenched fists attest to solidarity with the sentiments of Your Racist Friend. On stage, Linnell sticks mainly to accordion, it's big sound is a useful tool when there's only two in the band, while Flansburgh dashes between guitar — a custom-built squarish job that looks like the bastard son of Bo Diddley's axe — and a drum kit consisting of snare and cymbal. Occasionally, Linnell switches to bass clarinet, having learned his lesson on the last tour, when the six foot case of the much more unwieldy bass saxophone posed tiresome transport problems.
Of the new songs, the best received are the more instantly more memorable: the single The Statue Got Me High, the early Beatles pastiche Narrow Your Eyes, and the obvious choice for follow-up single, I Palindrome I, which according to Linnell does in fact contain a palindrome, the rather convoluted "Egad, a base tone denotes a bad age". It's doubtful if any of the audience caught it, to be honest, though they seemed to enjoy it nonetheless. As with earlier albums, the songs on Apollo 18 seem to cover all manner of bizarre and banal subject matter — there's even one they play tonight, Mammal, that simply muses on mammalian characteristics: hair, warm blood, and a four-chambered heart. Fascinating to be sure, but why?
"We've got a growing pile of songs that are just informative songs on subjects that are essentially just written to be informative," explains Linnell somewhat confusingly. "They're melodic and catchy, and stick in your head, so you can actually remember a thing you'd otherwise forget. The B-side to Istanbul, for instance, was a song about James K. Polk, who's a sort of lesser-known American president. Mammal is in the same vein, just a lot of facts gathered together and set to music. It's educational."
In its wit, intelligence, sing-song melody and the sense that maybe too many words are jostling for space in the lines, Mammal is a fairly typical Giants song. Do they work hard at their craft or do these songs just pop into their heads?
"Oh sure," says Flansburgh. "Someone the other day said, How many of these are throwaways? I really felt like leaping across the table. No, if anything I think we could do with loosening up and jamming a bit more; we've gotten very focused on this crafted songwriting thing, everything is scrutinised to the nth degree. We're the epitome of the uncarefree band; we define uptightness when it comes to writing songs."
And it's hard to say, once we're finished working, what it was that we were being so incredibly uptight about," adds Linnell, "because it comes across as a lot more free-form than it actually is."
"Part of it is being a two-man band," reckons Flansburgh. "We've got to do the Ringo part as well as the George and Paul parts. And, of course, the John part."
That, one imagines, must be the hardest part. But whatever it is they do, it seems to work. The most unusual thing about a They Might Be Giants gig is the sheer reckless enthusiasm of the audience, a slam-dancing, pogoing mass of flailing arms and legs by the time the Johns climax their set with Birdhouse in Your Soul. Somehow, these two studious-looking, faintly geeky kind of guys with their tinpot instrumentation and their quirky little songs have managed to top into the same spirit of abandon that is present at an Anthrax of Nirvana gig. Though nobody flies tonight, there have been instances of stagediving at Giants gigs, which seems anomalous, to say the least.
"It's a drag," says Linnell, "because it looks like it's a lot of fun to me, and the painful thing is we spend a lot of the show trying to get people to stop. We feel like we've become the parents of these bad children that are actually doing something we'd like to do ourselves! It's partly that someone could get injured and also that they don't seem to be paying that much attention to us!"
"Not even the parents," qualifies Flansburgh, "more like the crazy high-school custodian: Settle down, kids!
"We've become the vice-principals of rock!"