The Drums : Interview

Full of nostalgic charm, The Drums have taken the music scene by surprise in one of the most unlikeliest success stories this year. Harking back to a golden age of music, their surf-tinged indie pop has seen them rise from quirky new act to relative household name.

From a place on the BBC's Sound Of 2010 to an opening slot in the NME Awards Tour line up, the quartet have developed a strong following thanks to tracks like the quirky “I Felt Stupid” and the massive “Let's Go Surfing”.

Yet far from being a contrived retro act, guitarist Jacob Graham insists The Drums are 100% organic. Discussing everything from European tours to the evergreen Michael Eavis, it seems The Drums are just as surprised by their success as everyone else.

4or The Record: You've had a fantastic year so far, what do you think has been the reason for your successes?

Jacob Graham: I don't know. When we started the band, none of this was really our intention, we just wanted to make music that was really gratifying to ourselves, and we actually thought no one else would like it. We thought we were making the most self indulgent music in the world. We thought that maybe an Indie label could put us out on a 7” record or something, so this is all kind of shocking to us. But I think when you do something to please yourself you are your own worse critic, so it forces you to do something that you're really proud of. So I think that has a lot to do with it, we're not trying to be anything, we're trying to be ourselves, and maybe people find that refreshing in this world of robotic pop stars.

4TR: As you say you're making music for yourselves and you have a very distinctive sound and style, what was the initial reaction to it when you first started putting music out?

Jacob: It's always seemed that people either love what we're doing, or just flat out hate it, which to us is actually the best thing. If people are just indifferent about something, then that's kinda boring. So if you have a lot of people hating on you, there's there that's potent enough to make people waste their time hating it. So to us it's almost as much of a compliment for people to really hate us as it is to love us. But of course we are very grateful to the people that do love our music.

4TR: What influenced such a creative (and evidently divisive) sound?

Jacob: I don't know, I think the main thing we really care about in The Drums is just writing really good, well, as good as we can, classic pop songs. That's our only real goal, so everything else is really secondary to that. When the four of us got together, we all just clicked and the whole thing just snapped into place, because we all understood what we wanted to do without even talking about it really. It seems like so many bands these days say things like “it's all about the music”, but have to go and grow a beard because of it,  especially in New York. But it can be all about the music, like in the past you had bands such as The Zombies and The Ramones and they had their own look, and we don't think that's a bad thing because it enhances the music, in a way it helps explain the music. But i think we just want to be a band that is, just a band. It seems everyone is having a contest to see who can be their weirdest, or have the most original ideas. But if you're so concerned with having original ideas, you're going to throw away all the old, great ideas of catchy pop songs. We're not trying to be retro or anything, we're just trying to keep the old ideas that we think are good. It's all opinion I guess.

4TR: You've got your album out early next month, and it's already been very highly tipped in several publications. How does it feel to have praise for it already?

Jacob: It's really exciting because I feel the album completes the picture of The Drums that the EP had started. I feel that the EP was missing some elements for people to completely understand who we are, so it's going to be really exciting for that to come out, and maybe people won't think that  “The Drums are just this summery, surf band”, and appreciate the other elements of our music.

4TR: As you said, the music you're making is just for yourselves, so do you feel very proud that your efforts are being so highly lauded?

Jacob: It's a very hopeful thing. It's like there's a good climate for music these days, there's a lot of up and coming bands; The Smith Westerns, Veronica Falls and bands like that, who I feel that just a few years ago no one would have paid attention to. We've always been the type of people that hate all modern music and anything that gets attention, but that's not just because we want to listen to music just because it's Indie. All of my favourite little bands that no one's heard of, I wish that everyone has heard of them and would love them, I don't want to keep them to myself. So for me it's very exciting and makes us a little delusional, to wish that the world was like that. In the fifties, you could jump in your car, turn on the radio and listen to an amazing song, but now you do that and you have someone screaming in your face. We just wish you could turn on the radio and listen to a band that write great songs.

4TR: You have a European tour coming up very soon, taking in lots of festivals. Is that something that you as a band enjoy doing?

Jacob: We haven't actually really done it yet. We played SXSW in Texas a month or two ago, but I don't think that's quite the same as festivals here, so it's going to be a really new experience for us, we don't really know what we're in for just yet, but we're excited to do it. We went down to Glastonbury a couple of weeks ago to record a song for a live radio broadcast, and we met the organiser (Michael Eavis) and it seems really cool. He seems like a really nice guy, he's still excited about everything that's going on, he's not jaded at all, so I think it's going to be really fun.

4TR: As well as Glastonbury you're playing the likes of Reading and Leeds and T in the Park, which are all stalwart British festivals. What does it mean to play such important venues so early on in your career?

Jacob: Yeah. There's a lot of things that we've done that, being from America, we really don't understand the relevance of until we get that. We'd never seen Jonathan Ross before we played there, so our management would tell us “oh you're playing Jonathan Ross” and we'd just say “oh that's awesome, what is that?!” But it's all definitely an experience.

4TR: Finally, you've been so successful so far, what can we expect from The Drums for the rest of this year and beyond?

Jacob: Well, as with our music and our image and everything we do, we just want to keep things simple. We don't have any tricks up our sleeve really, we're just going to play as many shows as we can, and hopefully start working on the second record which will probably sound the same as the first one. 

Words: Dan Grose

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