Join one of music’s most original alternative rock acts THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS for an “Evening With” as they perform their breakthrough album Flood in its entirety. With seventy plus sold-out shows so far in the US, and by overwhelming demand, it’s Australia’s turn this October!
How will Flood be presented? Hard to say, as the show evolves every night, but needless to say, this is a once-in-a-lifetime tour. TMBG will play two full sets that span the band’s entire career from early favourites to brand new favourites from their current Grammy-nominated album BOOK, as well as the spontaneous and improvised moments that have made They Might Be Giants shows legendary.
Joined by their incomparable live band, now featuring the show-stopping Tricerachops Horns, this is an evening guaranteed to delight the most dedicated TMBG fan as well as brand-new participants. John Linnell talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.
Great to be talking to you, finally the Australian tour is going to happen.
Absolutely, I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve postponed it, but yes, we will be there very soon.
There’s quite a bit of anticipation with this tour. Is Australia your one of your favourite places to tour?
I would say that I like every all the different places for various reasons, but we’ve gotten such a warm reception on your shores that it’s high on the list, let’s put it that way.
What is exciting is hearing the classic album Flood in its entirety. Do you play it in order start to end or a different order?
We do in fact, not only do we play it in a different order, but we had a whole discussion about how to perform it and somebody in the band pointed out that we know the whole album backwards and forwards. This suddenly led us in a very weird direction, which is that we decided to learn to play one of the songs off of Flood in reverse, as if it were a reverse recording. So, we will be doing that rendition of one of our Flood songs in Australia, on this upcoming tour and as a kind of proof of concept, we will be at each show videotaping that performance and then viewing it in reverse as a kind of proof of concept, so the audience can see whether we did a good job.
How hard is that to learn a song in reverse?
I would say if you ask anyone in our band, it was one of the hardest things we have ever done. Probably one of the most ill advised things we’ve ever done and one of the hardest things we’ve ever had to do. But it is a lot of fun.
Were you able to keep a straight face during it?
Oh yeah. We’ve done it enough times now and we’re really focusing on trying to do it correctly, we’ve got furrowed brows actually while we’re while we’re performing it.
Are you going as far to say that it will be a different song each night performed in reverse?
We need a lot more rehearsal. We did actually discuss doing another song, but that is not going to happen before this leg of the tour.
How does it feel to have an album like Flood that’s continually loved by fans and even thirty years on, still stacks up there with the best of them?
This is what it feels like now is that John and I made that record so long ago that I think we have this feeling that’s like we’re covering another band at this point. That’s how far in the past it was. I mean, obviously we feel very proud of it. We feel very close to it in one sense, but also it’s like we were much younger when we wrote those songs. We were still starting out and it is a bit like we’re covering a different band.
Are some of those songs a real challenge to play live?
Yes and in fact they were recorded without a live band originally, so we’re doing versions obviously with our live band, with a horn section. Some of the renditions are really, pointedly different. We’re doing a completely different sounding version of the songs out of necessity, but also I think that’s a that’s a good approach. I like the idea of not trying to reproduce the recording exactly.
Are there any stories or moments from the Flood recording sessions that still stick out for you, even now?
It was a very exciting year for us. That summer of 1989 in the fall was when we were in New York and we were working with the producers, Clive Langer and Allen Winstanley who had done all this other terrific stuff that we were excited about. It was fun and the other thing that I remember about that year was that was when communism fell in the Soviet Union which collapsed that fall while we were in the studio. It seemed like there was a lot of history going on at that moment. In terms of in the studio, I think we had a very pleasant rapport with those two British guys. We worked with them again ten years later on Mink Car, so I think that that there was a feeling of being very pleasant and easy relationship with the two of them.
Is there a secret to longevity and keeping They Might Giants going even stronger than ever before?
If there’s a secret, we don’t know what it is, I would say that because John and I don’t have anything to compare it to. I know that other bands generally don’t last as long. A lot of bands break up, in particular after they have their big hit. That seems often be a thing that there’s a there’s an arc where they have a massive hit, and then there’s a sense of disappointment after, that they can’t match the initial hit. Sometimes bands get demoralised by that, and then the other thing is that egos get in the way when you have multiple people with conflicting ideas. John and I have not had that. We generally agree about stuff and we’re OK with the kinds of disagreements that we have. We have ways to work them out and we value the project enough that we don’t let disagreements destroy the whole partnership.
With back to back shows in most cities on this tour will both nights be uniquely different?
Yes, everywhere where we’re playing multiple shows, it will be a different show from one night to the next because we’re well aware that some people are coming to more than one show. So yeah, we’ll be mixing it up. We did a lot of rehearsing this year and we’ve worked up a pretty big catalogue of stuff to play with that idea in mind that we were going to try and do multiple nights and not just repeat ourselves. There will be some repetition, but there will be a lot of variety from one night to the next.
Is the second set generally a little bit more spur of the moment and wherever the mood takes you?
The show itself has two parts. There’s a little break in the middle, but all of it is worked out in advance. We have a set list and we make use of the record of whatever we played the last time we were in the same town. It’s all pretty carefully thought out and I should say pretty carefully thought out by Mr. John Flansburgh, who writes the set list night after night.
Beyond the tour, are there plans for another album? I’ve heard there’s probably about ten or so songs already worked up.
Yes, more than ten now. Actually, we have a pretty big pile at this point of stuff that we’ve recorded. John Flansburgh has sent me a suggested sequence for it. It looks like about eighteen of the songs that we’ve recorded. So, this is going to be like a very They Might Be Giants length of album, where there’s a lot of tracks and I’m pretty happy with what we’ve got. I think it sounds good, so that will come out probably at the very end of this year. We’ll probably do a little promotion next year on the on the heels of that, but not before we come and see you guys.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch They Might Be Giants at the following shows, tickets from Metropolis Touring…
