| THE CRIBS stick to their guns. |
| Written by Luke Oram |
| Monday, 15 February 2010 22:35 |
 THE CRIBS gunslinger RYAN JARMAN answers the phone. He’s hungry and on the arse-end of an afternoon of interviews; his thick, West Yorkshire drawl is punctuated by mouthfuls of a hastily-downed apple. “I don’t mind interviews, as long as people ask good questions.” Jarman says - “I’m kinda into it. It’s just talking to someone on the phone, innit?” What are the uninteresting questions, so I can skip them? “What’s it like being in a band with your brothers?” - he fires back in mocking tones. Within seconds my Moleskine is a bad map of hasty scribbles and struck questions. One can imagine that interview material for The Cribs, would revolve around the same old holy trinity: 1. You are all brothers? (Ryan Jarman, identical twin Gary and kid brother Ross.) 2. JOHNNY MARR! (The long-time collaborator and ex-'Smiths guitarist has been confirmed as a permanent 'Crib.) 3. You are at war with the 'Mainstream'? (Quote: "The mainstream attitude of indie bands today is a bigger problem than global warming".) With concern to the last two of these, Jarman is happy to preach with conviction. The thrill of Marr’s recruitment has yet to wear off. “When we started playing together and it worked straightaway, we didn’t really have a chance to think about how people were gonna respond to it. Obviously you get a lot of attention when someone from such a famous band joins your band - but it just worked out, so who cares?”  Currently touted as the saviour of British Indie (Q Magazine called them - “The biggest cult band in the UK”), the band of brothers hardly needed a celebrity leg-up. The announcement of Marr as a permanent member was about as far from a publicity stunt as possible. “It’s kind of like he’s always been in there” - says Jarman between mouthfuls. “He’s playing a lot more classic Johnny Marr sounds and riffs, and it just works with the way that our band is. That was one of those things - no matter how well we got on, no matter how much we wanted him to be in the band, you could never plan for it to work out like that. We didn’t have to wrestle with it to get it to work, it just worked straightaway.” Jarman seems, in fact, a little perplexed at the reaction to Johnny Marr’s recruitment. “You get a lot of people who are cynical - they think Johnny should be locked in a glass case in a museum somewhere.” - He says with a laugh.  In a lot of ways, getting Marr on-board is merely a sub-plot to the little band that could. The Cribs are a true indie success story, in a scene awash with fakes. As far as the outspoken Jarmans are concerned, the word 'indie' has become a fashionably marketed tag - rather than an indication of independent success through blood, sweat, and tears of a self-made band. The boys are passionate about it too; they speak as if the purity of an ethic has been stolen and misaligned. Given an opportunity, Ryan transforms into a hellfire-evangelist on the topic too. The above quote, the one about Mainstreaming being worse than Global Warming? It’s all verbatim. He spat it from the stage at Glastonbury in 2007. “Indie music or any kind of guitar music in the last few years in the UK has been such a mainstream style of music - it’s all over the radio; there’s no subversiveness to it. It’s not a cultural thing anymore, it became a full-on mainstream style of music, with big production and expensive videos. I just find that to be so distasteful.” He’s got a point. I can’t help but get caught up in the diatribe. I mean, how often have you been sold an “Indie Success Story” just to discover the suspicious shadow and strings of a major label looming in the near distance? “Absolutely!" - enthuses Jarman “It’s completely standard. There’s nothing alternative about these bands - it’s just mainstream. And that’s what people should accept. It comes back to the way the record sounds - ultra-produced and very radio friendly... Most times it’s not something that’s happened organically, it’s just a decision that was made in some major label drawing board - ‘yeah, we’re just gonna put a whole lot of money on this band’- it’s completely wrong, it’s not independent.” The Cribs claim they can be so outspoken because they are at pains to revive the Indie ethic; an ethic that has steered them away from bigwig marketing, auto-tune and studio polish. Jarman says it’s a matter of principles. “I think the most important thing a band can do is have morals and stick to them and just do things organically - don’t depend on the hype machine and the mass exposure... All that stuff’s very vapid anyway.”  Do your research on The Cribs back-story and you find the indie flagship comes up pretty clean. The Jarman brothers used to split their time between their day-jobs at a toilet-paper factory and gruelling touring. They bought a shitty van and played up and down the country, promoting their debut album before finding an ear with Squirrel Records. Of course, that was before they blew up. Nowadays, there are those who would accuse The Cribs of being as mainstream as the next guy - their website forums are weighed down with feisty criticism over their recent stadium shows. Jarman makes note of the irony - The Cribs are now the indie band caught in the same hype machine as the imposters, but he maintains it’s about the context of it all. “The only reason we ever got big was because we were playing all the time. We bought our own van and just toured and toured. Then it got to the point where the radio was playing us because we were big - we didn’t get big because the radio was playing us... The main reason I am in a band is because I love playing live and I love writing songs. Everything else is just a by-product and I’m not that concerned with it.” And thus concludes the sermon. Ryan Jarman needs to go hunt for a substantial meal. We joke about the early days, when Jarman and his brother used to save up a week’s worth of lunch money to buy records - the success of this little indie band means that these days, while on tour - he can eat and afford a few “crappy, unofficial bootlegs” - which are his current flavour. He’s got to exercise restraint in record stores these days though - because no matter how big his indie band gets, his suitcase ain’t getting any bigger. THE CRIBS - February 2010
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