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The Spinto Band Interview |
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Words: Stevie Chick
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Photography: Simon Fernandez
A chilly winter morning in London’s Hyde Park.
Enjoying their first visit to our shores, six young,
scruffy Americans clamber upon venerated tourist
trap Speaker’s Corner, honouring a grand tradition
in a rather puzzling manner. Their unkempt hair
writhing in the breeze, the group split into two
warring factions, snarling and barking at each other,
and thrusting home-printed signs, one proudly
reading ‘Pro-Skub!’, the other preaching ‘Anti-
Skub!’, the word ‘Skub’ with a cross through it.
Skub?
Your correspondent, profiling said rambunctious
noiseniks for Another Organ, is befuddled. The
sketchy explanation offered by Nick Krill, The
Spinto Band’s dry-humoured, caterpillar-browed
frontman, hardly clears matters up.
“This whole ‘Skub’ issue is tearing the group
apart,” he grumbled later, picking at some breaded
cod with his fork in a nearby pub. “Half of us are
‘pro’, half of us are ‘anti’. It can cause conflicts.”
Skub??!?
Fast forward a couple of weeks later. Your
correspondent is killing time, checking out the latest
installment of the Perry Bible Fellowship, a viciously
acidic cartoon strip that makes out like Gary Larson’s
Far Side with LSD rubbed on its irises – the same
violently lateral attack Larson excelled at, before
the licensed greetings cards dulled his subversion
with over-exposure. (Perry Bible Fellowship is now
syndicated in the Guardian, and can be found online
at www.pbfcomics.com.) I began to scan the site’s
voluminous archive of strips, revisiting some of
my favourites. Scrolling down the index, that word
stared back at me again.
‘Skub’.
It’s the title of a strip that embodies PBF’s gift for
the pointedly brilliant non sequitur. A faceless white
figure stands frame-left, dressed in a yellow T-shirt
reading ‘Pro-Skub’; his opposite number, standing
opposite him, wears a similar T screaming ‘Anti-
Skub’. A brawl breaks out between the two over the
first three frames; the fourth and final frame depicts
a tub of expensive moisturising cream. The brand?
‘Skub’.
Some web-searching soon tracks PBF cartoonist
Nick Gurewitz back to Spintonic.net, a virtual
community of creative friends: writers, filmmakers,
artists, cartoonists, musicians. It is also home to The
Spinto Band.
The Spinto Band aren’t like all those other faux
indie college-rockers currently flooding the market,
the faceless, Pitchfork-favoured slew of scratchy
guitarrorists who all sound like Pavement with all
the loose ends tied, as if they’re forever auditioning
for their spot on the OC soundtrack.
They’re the sort of group you’d imagine six kids
who’ve known each other since primary school
would form, if they’d been raised on a steady diet
of The Beatles, The Residents and The Flaming Lips.
A group bonded by the fact all their dads play in the
same local Americana bar band. A group inspired by
Krill’s discovery of songs written by his eccentric
grandpa, Roy Spinto. Spinto, a guitarist, would
scribble song ideas onto crackerboxes whenever
inspiration grabbed him. Fittingly, Krill runs his own
record label in his spare time, called Crackerbox.
“I didn’t know him well,” explains Krill. “He died
when I was little…He didn’t make recordings so
much as write down notations. We messed around
with some of his songs in the early days.”
Krill was 15 when he formed The Spinto Band,
with some of his closest friends (the line-up numbers
two sets of brothers – drummer Jeff and guitarist
Joe Hobson, and bassist/singer Thomas and organist
Sam Hughes – along with guitarist Jon Eaton). That
slow summer was spent doodling on their dads’
rickety four-track gear, making up nonsense songs
and joke songs, songs that pondered what Puff
Daddy got up to when he was lonely. They loved
Ween, and it shows: in the wonky songcraft, in
the dopey lyrics, in the playschool-Zappa sense of
anarchy. They eventually concocted eight albums
of this juvenilia, available via the internet.
“It was a fun thing to do,” grins Krill. “We had
a trampoline, our music, video games and the TV,
and we’d invariably be doing one of these four
things at any given time.”
At some point, they stepped things up a gear.
Krill is talking to me from the hospitality area
of a grand amphitheatre in Nice, France. The
Mediterranean is nearby, the sun is shining, and
in a minute, they’ll be stepping onstage to shake
through their charming songs for an audience of
Strokes fans with breaths bated for their heroes’
headlining appearance. Their first show, at a high
school talent contest many years ago was, they
gleefully admit, an unmitigated disaster. Now,
they teeter sweatily, enthusiastically towards
some strange new shape of professionalism.
“We’ve gotten to the point of being able to
circumnavigate the technical difficulties,” he grins,
talking excitedly about the thrill of playing festival
shows in the daytime, to audiences getting soaked
by unseasonably wet weather. “We have songs
we play when certain instruments need fixing or
restringing, to avert from certain disasters.”
It’s their ‘proper’ debut album, Nice And
Nicely Done, that’s somehow flung this lovingly
homemade concoction of pop into the rarefied
airspace of yer Strokes et al. Thirty-one minutes
of fractured but cherishable pop that waltzes to
its own peculiar step, its hypermelodic scribble
ensnares Television’s screeching poetics,
Pavement’s slanted-spectacle cool and ELO’s
swooning whistlableness to deliver perhaps
the least objectionable noise currently earning
transmission on Xfm. Which is damning with faint
praise, of course; remember those days before
a slew of so-so pretenders extinguished your love
for lo-fi indie-rock like GbV and Superchunk?
The Spinto Band are like some undiscovered
relic of those times, capturing the era’s naďve
fascination with spindly, addictive pop and
delicious subterranean textures.
“We’re not control freaks, but we like to have
a hand in pretty much everything related to the
band,” explains Krill. “Radio ads, sleeve designs,
little promo stickers – we like to write or design
those ourselves. They’re like these new media for
promoting bands, but we just look upon them as
creative mediums we’ve not experimented with
before. It’s a fun thing for us to mess around with.”
They’re creative kids. Tom is an accomplished
visual artist, while Jon’s “a great writer, always
doing his writing thing”. When not producing
other bands from their home state of Delaware,
Krill indulges his passion for film making.
“We’re making a tour movie,” he laughs. “It’s
like a treasure hunt movie. Tom and I are mercenary
thieves, and we’ve stolen a treasure map from Jon,
who’s a high-society crime boss, and Joe, who plays
a down-and-dirty mobster. Sam’s the police chief,
and Jeff’s a double agent. We were editing some
footage last night, and getting worried that nobody
but us will get a kick out of it! But it’s fun…”
And that’s a large part of the Spintos’ appeal
– that the music is only part of a bigger thing, the
viral creative hub that is Spintopia. It’s not the latest
fractional variation on the blazer’n’jeans blueprint,
it’s something real and messy and loveable and
fallible, an art happening you can be a part of.
“We’ve been discussing the Spintopia site a lot
recently, all of us contributors and these friends of
ours,” reflects Krill. “No one has had time to update
it. Of the core group, one or two were saying, with
all these new people on there it’s not the same as it
was. Someone else said we should start up a private
messageboard so it’s just us guys who know each
other. But, that’s not the point! I don’t just write
music for myself, I want to share this stuff,
otherwise I wouldn’t tour.
“It’s not the point to be an exclusive thing,”
he concludes. “I get a kick out of seeing it grow.
Hopefully, I don’t know…The in-jokes won’t be
in-jokes anymore. They’ll just be jokes.”
‘We had a trampoline, our music,
video games and the TV’ |
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