New Tides Coming In: Gomez

After seeing Gomez at the recent Falls Festival, they looked like a band very comfortable in their own liquid skins; extremely familiar with their songs and each other. It is then somewhat curious then they are a band separated geographically. Although all originally from England, Olly Peacock now lives in Brooklyn, Ian Ball in LA and Paul Blackburn in Michigan. Still in the mother country is singer/guitarist/keyboardist Tom Gray who lives in Brighton with his wife and newly born child. The Dwarf spoke with him as he and his young family were visiting his mother in the north of England. This disparity and family become the unwitting themes of the laconic discussion.

"We just keep going," he says of the dozen plus years of Gomez union. "There have been plenty of opportunities for us to split up over the years; we just never have. It's bigger than that. It doesn't feel like something to me that I would know how to break up. It would be like divorcing your parents." Perhaps even more suprising is that Tom considers that this spread across the planet makes it "easier for Gomez to stay together". "We spend so much of our time together. We've kind of lived in each others pockets for 13, 14 years so a bit of distance is good thing. It's like a family more than anything else but if you're in close proximity to them all the time it can make things harder." Despite this spatial tyranny the band still tours regularly and yet another album is "done and dusted", to be released, the 7th (depending how you count) after How We Operate in 2006. And the name? "Naming something is harder than writing. If you're writing a story you just knowing the character but being able to name it is one of the biggest problems." But Tom says it will be something like New Tide. Though this sounds like the band are following along with the zeitgeist of Obama's "Hope"; Tom says the name "kind of arrived [and] nobody really had a problem with it."

With all the members of Gomez contributing to the chasonic canon, Tom half-jokingly describes the song writing as "pluralist". "I definitely wouldn't say it was democratic because that makes it sound like there's some kind of process involved or message. It definitely doesn't fall to one person to say what we should or shouldn't be doing." Songs come to being by the majority of the band getting behind an idea and thus gets over the finish line. Tom penned songs even before joining the band and still does this every day "to stay sharp". "There's a song on the last record called See the World which took me about 5 years to write. It never just happened. I just kept gleaning parts of it over a very long period of time. Some songs you write in 5 minutes."

If the set list at Falls was an indication, it seemed like Gomez may be a band dwelling too much in the success of the past, but Tom says this reinvention of old material is a necessity, not because some planned process to undertake this but that it comes from a place of "Oh my god, if we don't change this I'm going to go mental". "Earlier in the year we did a tour of Bring it On in the UK. What was kind of fun about doing that was we were listening to the record again and we haven't been playing the songs anything like the album. Over the course of 10 years it became completely different animals live so we tried to take them back to the record which is kind of the opposite of what you're supposed to do when you play a song live."

So how do Gomez keep a balance? "It's not easy leaving small babies and wives and saying 'bye bye!' I've got to go play a rock tour now. But there's harder jobs."

GOMEZ play the Espy Gershwin room on Jan 13 (tonight!) in Melbourne.

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