The Wombats: “Landfill indie? Indie sleaze? We’ve risen above any media tags”
The Wombats’ first, Japan-only LP, ‘Girls, Boys and Marsupials’, was released in 2006. But which four tracks on that record don’t also appear on your 2007 proper debut album ‘A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation’?
Murph: “Er, ‘Caravan in Wales’, ‘Derail & Crash’… oh fuck! ‘Happily Screwed’? ‘The Barman’s Fault’? ‘Ostrich Song’?”
WRONG. Apart from ‘Caravan in Wales’ and ‘Derail & Crash’, you missed ‘Metro Song’ and ‘Sunday TV’. How do you look back on that album?
“Not with great clarity, obviously! We received a MySpace message from the label Cooking Vinyl, in Japan, who wanted to give us two grand to record an album – that was a big old cheque to us in our early twenties! We went into a studio and recorded the whole album in about 10 days and it came out – to rapturous applause! When our true first album, ‘A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation’, came out a year later everywhere, which contained a lot of those songs, it massively confused the Japanese market. That’s one of the main reasons why we never took off there.”
An easy one: in 2019, which Wombats track did Mick Jagger post footage of himself dancing to?
“‘Techno Fan’”.
CORRECT.
“He’d had heart surgery and that post was his first calling to the world that he’d gotten better and over it, and it culminated in us supporting The Rolling Stones at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey that year, which is one of the biggest shows we’ve ever done. Mick invited us backstage to hang out with him, and Keith Richards stroked my daughter’s hair, like he was blessing her! It was a very cool day.”
From the Stones to The Beatles, Paul McCartney claimed in 2008 that he wanted to produce The Wombats. Did you ever chase it up?
“There was an email that was sent going, ‘OK, let’s put this into practice and figure it out’, but he’s a very busy guy. He was toying with the idea of doing some production, but at some point, thought otherwise. He’s giving us an award soon from our old university [the McCartney-founded Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts], and he’s always been very supportive of us.”
Who’s been the most unexpected fan of The Wombats?
“The oddest one is Addison Rae. It was completely her doing that ‘Greek Tragedy’ kicked off again. She posted a TikTok dance of her miming to its opening verse and chorus. I’d never heard of her – nor had I heard the remix that she’d used, so that was the weirdest celebrity moment considering I didn’t even realise she was a celebrity, nor what TikTok was capable of.”
Were you tempted to ask Mick Jagger to don a furry Wombats mascot costume during your set?
“No, I don’t think Mick Jagger would get into one of those – you can’t see anything and they’re hazardous! I’ve had friends who’ve fallen off the stage in them. For the next album, I had the idea of building something huge like a Giganticbat. Maybe we can get Mick Jagger in there operating it!”
— Mick Jagger (@MickJagger) May 15, 2019
In 2008, The Wombats won an NME Award for Best Dancefloor filler for ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’. Can you name any two bands you beat to the accolade?
“Oh god! I was sitting next to Franz Ferdinand, so I’ll say them and erm, Dizzee Rascal?”
WRONG. You triumphed over: ‘Flux’ by Bloc Party, ‘D.A.N.C.E’ by Justice, ‘Atlantis To Interzone’ by Klaxons, ‘Hummer’ by Foals, and ‘Teenagers’ by My Chemical Romance.
“I’m surprised we beat Justice! I remember being extremely drunk at those NME Awards and having to get on a flight to Japan the next day, with my doctor telling me to disembark because I had some kind of virus. We had to do press on the night and I couldn’t form coherent sentences. It was ridiculous.”
That same year, you ended up performing with an actual member of Joy Division, iconic bassist Peter Hook, on ‘Backfire at the Disco’.
“Of all the Wombats songs to have a member of Joy Division play on, that is the oddest choice! He was lovely and made it sound 20 per cent cooler. He was nervous before it, despite us only performing to 300 people in The Cluny in Newcastle. He’s similar to me: the smaller the crowd, the more nervous we are. With a bigger crowd, it becomes easier.”
What is the collective noun for a group of wombats?
“Arrrggh, I know this! I’m going to say a pride, but I don’t think it is.”
WRONG. A wisdom.
“The other two Wombats members [bassist Tord Øverland Knudsen and drummer Dan Haggis] are going to be very upset that I got that wrong! A pride is lions, right?”
Yes, or a coalition.
The average lifespan of a wombat is 15 years which means you’ve outlasted your namesakes. What’s the secret to your longevity?
“Some might think that we were just more insane than our counterparts who came up at the same time, and we bridged the gap between the alternative and pop realms. This might be wishful thinking, but I’d compare us to bands like the Pixies who are still drawing in new fans, because they have something different to say. The way they say things is odd. Similarly, lyrically, we set ourselves apart from the other bands who were coming up in 2007/2008, before the gates closed on guitar music. Ours wasn’t ambiguous, stock lyricism; it had something weirder to it.”
Which two acts did The Wombats play between on the Other stage at Glastonbury 2008?
“Reverend and the Makers? Noisettes? I’ve got absolutely no idea!”
“I never would have got that! I remember playing Glastonbury later in 2011 better, because we’d taken a big hiatus after the first album. Our second album, ‘This Modern Glitch’ was a bit of a ‘Chinese Democracy’ in itself – I’m referring to the long-delayed Guns N’ Roses album – and we worried: ‘Fuck, it’s been four years, is anyone going to be there?’. But, as we walked out to a huge audience with flags everywhere, it was an amazing moment for us to know that people still wanted to hear what we were doing. Certainly, that’s one of my core festival memories due to the amount of anxiety prior to walking onstage, then the relief once we got going.”
Which Wombats song reached Number 27 on VICE’s controversial Indie Landfill List in 2020?
“It’s probably ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’?”
WRONG. It was ‘Moving to New York’ – sandwiched between ‘Daddy’s Gone’ by Glasvegas at 28 and ‘For Lovers’ by Wolfman featuring Pete Doherty at 26. Did it annoy you when the term ‘landfill indie’ started being applied to The Wombats?
“It certainly didn’t piss us off. It was just another ridiculous pigeonhole that the media landscape likes to create. In fact, we own it now and call ourselves the Kings of Indie Landfill. When we finally got that Number One with our fifth album [2022’s] ‘Fix Yourself, Not the World’, we posted an image of a cake [on social media] and said ‘Here’s to making ‘indie landfill’ great again!’ – and I think we are.”
“There were a lot of good songs and songwriting happening at that time. I feel the more positive version of indie landfill is indie sleaze, which seems to be coming back now. But we’ve risen above any media tags – our search as a band has always been for the next song. Anything that gets in the way of our creativity gets rudely thrust into the background.”
Name the Neighbours bar that The Wombats performed two songs in.
“Was it Charlie’s Bar?”
CORRECT. You cameoed in the Aussie soap in 2008.
“We met Toadfish [played by actor Ryan Moloney] and a couple of other actors. We were told a new actor was hanging around and wanting to meet us, but filming overran, and she had to go to a meeting in Sydney. It later turned out it was Margot Robbie!”
Complete the following Wombats lyrics: “Kenneth Clarke’s beard’s a wonderous place…?”
“‘There are thousands of people who live on his face.’”
CORRECT. From the mid-2000s Wombats campfire song, ‘Kenneth Clarke’s Beard’, named after the – admittedly perennially clean-shaven – Conservative peer Lord Clarke.
“For the record, that’s Dan Haggis’ lyric. He gets all the publishing on that one! I had lost my voice at the [2009] NME Awards, and Dan and Tord went out and played some acoustic songs to the fans – ‘Kenneth Clarke’s Beard’ was one of them, and his go-to at the time. I can’t remember the story behind it, but Dan was particularly taken with the idea of Tory MP Kenneth Clarke with facial hair at the time!”
Surely it’s a track that’s ripe for a TikTok remix?
“Exactly. Bring it on Addison Rae! [Laughs]”
The full lyrics are: ‘Kenneth Clarke’s beard’s a wonderous place /There are thousands of people who live on his face / There are schools for the children and homes for the old / When you live in a beard, you never get cold / There’s a theme park, a circus, a lake and a zoo…on Kenneth Clarke’s beard there’s just so much to do / I live in a place that’s never been sheared / Yes, I live in Kenneth Clarke’s beard’.
Talking of theme parks…
In 2008, ‘Kill the Director’ and ‘Moving to New York’ were used in an episode of E4 sitcom The Inbetweeners involving the schoolboys visiting which Surrey theme park?
“Well, the only theme park I can think of around there is Thorpe Park, maybe?”
CORRECT.
“Great! I didn’t watch The Inbetweeners until years after it came out, but I know they were hammering a lot of those songs from our first album.”
What is track eight on The Wombats’ latest album ‘Oh! The Ocean’?
“[Murph starts listing all its tracks in order]… Is it ‘Reality is a Wild Ride’ or ‘Grim Reaper’?
WRONG. It’s ‘The World’s Not Out To Get Me, I Am’.
“FOR FUCK’S SAKE! [Laughs]”
“It seems to be a weird time to be releasing full-length albums, and we went into ‘Oh! The Ocean’ with the idea of making the most organic, band-sounding version of The Wombats we could with as many mistakes on it as possible. We wanted it to have a raw quality and dismantle the illusion of perfectionism. People might have expected us to make a much more commercial album geared towards radio and playlists, but we worked with a different producer, John Congleton, to make the album we needed to at this point in our career and show what we’re capable of. Although I sound like I’m summoning the dark clouds around this album, it’s the one I’m the proudest of – and the only one of our six albums that I’ve listened to into double figures.”
The verdict: 4/10
“That’s pretty bad! [Laughs] I’m impressed that I was that poor at this game!”
The Wombats are touring in December. ‘Oh! The Ocean’ is available now.
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Gary Ryan
NME
