1997-03-20 Sydney Daily Telegraph
Joining the Might-club
By Dino Scatena, Sydney Daily Telegraph, 20 March 1997
THEY Might Be Giants have just got bigger and bigger, if not in stature, then definitely in terms of tour entourage. The first time the Giants came to Australia in the spring of 1990, it was just the two Johns - Linnell and Flansburgh. Backed by tapes, the New York duo gave a memorable series of energetic shows, punctuated by little theatrical tricks like Flansburgh playing two saxophones at once.
John Linnell remembers that tour with fondness. "We hadn't gone through the process of building up an audience in Australia," he said. "We just arrived and people were primed. It was kind of surprising to us because we didn't feel intimately acquainted with the country so we didn't know what people did or what they were like. And we came out and the crowd was totally going wild. It was really exciting to come out and play for people who were so into it. People were singing football songs and during the gig they started chanting: 'Good one John, good one John!' That whole tour opened our eyes up."
Then at the start of 1993, They Might Be Giants suddenly became a real band. "It was pretty abrupt," said Linnell. "We spent about nine years as a two-piece and we had the same sort of show for that whole time - it was me and John and tapes. Then we very abruptly decided to hire other musicians."
The resulting album, 1994's John Henry, was a marked stylistic departure for TMBG and the outfit that travelled out here early last year bore little resemblance to the act we saw back at the turn of the decade. "The most obvious and dramatic change is that it got a lot louder right away and we started wearing earplugs," recalled Linnell. "After that, this other thing happened that wasn't planned out - we started doing a lot of improvisational stuff; often people will just start playing whatever pops into their heads. It's very different to the show John and I used to do which was entirely planned out. So it's kind of exciting to develop the band in that direction because we used to be very uptight about that sort of thing."
A couple of weeks back, the Giants - who have since released a new album, Factory Showroom - grew once again, this time somewhat more laterally. John Linnell got himself hitched, married. Of course, partner John Flansburgh was there as best man. Now, a They Might Be Giant's bucks' night - there's a concept to make the mind wonder.
"We didn't have a stag party, if that's what you mean," Linnell was quick to point out. "We basically had a dinner. Mr Flansburgh organised a little dinner in downtown New York but there was no cake with a girl in it or anything like that." The wedding took place only a week before this interview and Linnell has spent the last few days on a short honeymoon, the newlyweds cruising around South Carolina.
Linnell says his new partnership is unlikely to affect the old one - Flansburgh is married too so there's unlikely to be any on-stage tiffs fuelled by jealousy. "In some ways, I feel that John and I have the same relationship we had when we were 15," said Linnell. "Which is we each encourage the other person to go further with their ideas and then we try to rip each other off."
They Might Be Giants play the Metro on Saturday and Sunday nights.