Philadelphia Theater of Living Arts
24 June 2001

Your favorite indie S&M show hosts dropped by Philadelphia recently to speak with the rising stars of American indie, The Webb Brothers, on their first American tour. Justin and Christiaan Webb, already a cult success in England, return home to conquer new territory with their American debut, "Maroon", the follow-up to the UK-only "Beyond the Biosphere". Their unique mix of scifi-inspired pop, disturbing lyrics, and tight vocal harmonies create for one of the most promising debuts in recent memory. With three Webb Brothers (they've added brother James on keyboards live) touring with two Williams brothers in Doves, surely this is the real "Broverly Love" tour to watch.

Melissa Fehr- We’re playing this to students at Penn State and they have never heard your music , so maybe you could start off describing your sound for people who’ve never heard it. Maybe like five adjectives?
Justin Webb- We’ve been described as "Hanson on acid".
Christiaan Webb- "The evil Osmonds". (laughs)
J- Those are my favorites.
C- I don’t know. Because there’s alot of harmonies and there’s a lot of time and attention spent on lyrics and songwriting, sort of in a, well, we try to keep all our songs short. You know, alot of sorta bands that have the "psychedelic" tag have 5, 9 or 12 minute songs. When we started The Webb Brothers we were really into that Midwest rock like Wilco, Guided By Voices, rawer music that was really short and to the point.

Scott Turnbull- Was the whole "retro feel" to your songs just the way that you write songs, like some people they do punk, and some people, they do country, but do you kind of have that nostalgic psychedelic influence to it, or was that something you tried to add in?
J- We like a lot of music like that so we try and go across the border doing it. We write the melody first, so whatever the melody implies, you can do a song any way - you can do it country or you can do it any way if it’s got a good melody in it.
C- We like that our songs can be done by other artists, different styles.

M- Is there someone you’d like to se cover your songs? We said before about The Bluetones [covering "I’m Over and I Know It"].
C- I’d like to see any bands - Britney Spears! (laughs)
J- Britney Spears - that’d be good. (laughs)
C- We’d sell a few records!
J- Good idea.
C- Well, you know, that’s the thing. There are alot of bands starting to get signed that have music that has an emotional pull to it. It’s just been a strange journey for us through the business because we never set out to make records that never did anything except maybe connect with somebody emotionally, because that’s how we write, that’s our strongest suit.

M- I heard that you got signed in England so much quicker than you did here. How did that end up? How did that work out?
C- Well, first of all, we couldn’t find a label in the States that would release our first album, and then someone who became one of our best friends, was this guy Wyndham Wallace, he ran City Sling records. That record label actually started to put out Flaming Lips records abroad, and he worked with Guided By Voices, alot of bands.
J- Built to Spill...
C- Anyway, his label didn’t want to sign us, either, but he had a little boutique label that was just stuff that he loved and there were some Chicago connections. That label he had put out had some friends of ours in Chicago and somehow he had gotten the record and he put it out on his little 7 inch label, just like 3 songs from our first album.
M- Which are now worth alot of money, I bet.
C- There’s only a thousand of them, so they’re pretty hard to find.
J- I’ve seen them for like 30 or 40 bucks in the States.

S- Do you think that maybe why it was hard to find a label in America is just because of how trend-based the music industry here is focused? You know, you have the big pop swing of the boy bands and then after that, it swung back to the nu-metal with Korn, Limp Bizkit and testosterone-rock.
M- Do you think there’s any room for anyone in the middle?
C- I think there is. In our case, we made a record that was pretty unusual, and we needed to find a label that specialized in unusual music. And that was happy if they sold a thousand copies! But also sort of had some credibility and had enough connections that they could actually get the record to the stores... You know, we sold a thousand records in London in a week, which was a big surprise to us, but...
J- There’s a place for all music, it’s just hard to find your place.
C- A friend of ours in California said to us when we were trying to get a label, "There’s someone out there waiting for The Biosphere, they want it, they’re looking for it", and it’s not that the people aren’t out there, it’s finding them that’s the hard part.

M- I heard that you guys did the actual sci-fi set for the cover of "Beyond the Biosphere"?
J- This guy, Bill Kieffer, does all sorts of models and stuff, he built it. I helped him build it, but he’s a mad genius. We just found junk, went around with $200 to thrift stores looking at old toys and stuff and twisted them up. He can do anything, he’s great.

S- Was the whole "...Biosphere" set from an old movie you guys saw? Because we’ve heard you’re big 60s B-movie fans...
M- And also, the video for "I’m Over and I Know It" seems really B-movie influenced.
J- Well that’s the same guy who directed that did the artwork.
C- We came to him and said, because he can do anything, make a little comic book for us and make cartoons, and it’s good we didn’t do that, because he came back with the Thin Lizzy "Jailbreak" album, which has a similar theme to "...Biosphere", and pulled out of the comic book idea, and he was like "No, why don’t I make you real superheroes?". And it’s a really, really good thing that we met Bill because it’s carried over, even though we used different artists on the second record. Because now we’re going to do a haunted house, Hardy Boys sort of video. Which works for us since our records are pretty serious so we like people to know we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

M- What do you think the main differences are between "Maroon", the new album, and "Beyond the Biosphere"? Was there a big difference in the circumstances around the recording of them?
J- Yeah, we recorded "Beyond the Biosphere" in our rehearsal space on our own, trying to get down sessions with the strings and the horns with whoever we could find to work for 100 bucks a day. It was over a long period of time where we were working in our off time, working, doing that. With this new record, it was a lot different. We had a producer, we had a giant budget, great resources, lots of strings and horns.
C- However, you’re on a tighter schedule, so the pressure’s definitely on.
J- Everything’s different about the process of it. They’re different sounding records and they both each sound more similar... oh, I don’t know.
C- They have more in common with each other than our next record’s going to have. (laughs)

M- Well, I noticed in "Beyond the Biosphere", you have the reprise, and in "Maroon" you have the Intermission. Was that something you wanted to do, to make it sound like an A Side and a B Side?
C- Yeah, it’s just we like... Even with the artwork, if you’ve seen the British vinyl, it looks beautiful.
J- We think records have lost something when the cd format really took hold, people stopped thinking of things as having sides.
C- Or even a beginning, middle, and end.
J- And they just got longer and longer, with more and more songs appearing on every record. And soon, every record was 15 songs instead of 11 or 12. It killed the actual act of listening to a record. Even now, most of the records that I like to listen to, like "The Virgin Suicides" by Air, is 35 minutes.
S- This whole "quantity versus quality" issue with double albums being everywhere and usually there’s only an album’s worth of good songs on it as opposed to just having a concentrated focus of awesome songwriting and awesome music, it’s just tiring.
C- Yeah, being our British label, it’s cool, too, that by the time you’ve finished on an album project, you’ve recorded almost another album’s worth of material for the b-sides. So it’s like, there’s a time and a place for the material, it’s just amazing how little self control some people show. Because you can put out a song too soon, you have to make sure they’re ready to be listened to.

M- I know on our station, we’re putting "Summer People" really high on heavy rotation, so I was wondering if maybe you could tell a little bit about that song so we could play it before we play the song...
C- That song has a really good story around it.
J- One of our best friends in Chicago is in a band called The Hush Drops, and The Hush Drops put out a 7 inch of "Summer People" a couple years ago, distributed to Carrot Top. We just always loved the song and we were good friends with them so we cut it and umm, I don’t know. We wanted more up-tempo pop and it seemed to fit really well with the theme of the record and the rest of the stuff we had.
C- That song’s doing really well on college radio, it was like the second most added song in the country last week.
M- Congratulations.
C- I don’t know what that means, but... (laughs) Well, you’ve got to start somewhere in the States, it’s so huge, and putting on tours... We’ve never done a tour of America before.
M- Oh, really? Well, how’s it going?
C- It’s great! We couldn’t be out with a better band [Doves]. They’ve been fantastic. People that like them generally can get into it.

M- Have you noticed any major differences between European crowds and American crowds in terms of the way they maybe react differently to different songs?
C- I find that wherever you go, if you go to a place that doesn’t get a lot like really top quality bands, that they really appreciate it. So if you make that extra effort to go to some other places the other bands don’t go to see, then all around the world it’s the same, they just love it.
J- It’s not really the countries, but the cities. Each city has it’s personality. You can’t say English audiences are this way because they’re totally different.
C- Plus, they’ll take offense. (laughs) Well, London, in a way, has something in common with New York and LA in that they’re really cosmopolitan and everybody gets to see everything, anything that has any sort of value or notoriety is going to have to play in New York and London. So it’s like they’re spoiled in a way - they know it! And that’s why you have alot of frustrated musicians and people in bands. Instead of just getting to the pure joy of "Oh my god, this band’s coming through!" and the energy of it, they go "Oh, that guy just made a mistake", and to me, that’s not what it’s supposed to be. That’s not why I go to see a show. So it can be worth it, but sometimes those shows are great, and we love it. Generally, it’s good to play some of those places that don’t get to see everyone.

M- Is that maybe like a spectrum with the festival crowds where you have people who didn’t come to see you at all, and like the little towns...?
J- Those festivals are great, because people come from all over the country who have gotten into you will all come up to the stage and you’ve got Webb Brothers fans from all over. I mean, we’ve toured there 6 or 7 times. Then they all come up front and there they are.
C- Then they get to meet, and you look on the bulletin board and it’s all people meeting at shows. It’s cool, it’s like, if you’re a good band and people keep coming, a little culture sort of develops.

S- Have you found it odd that you’re essentially an American British band? And I mean, that you’ve already met with success there and you haven’t had that chance, as it’s your first tour here.
J- Our record’s only been out for two weeks in America, and it’s doing alot better than our record was doing in England after two weeks. We’ve done 6 or 7 tours in England to build that audience and have that culty thing going on. And I think we’ll get the same thing here if we tour 6 or 7 times in America, we just have been putting all our time and effort in England since the record hasn’t been out here. Now that the record’s out here, we’ll put as much time and effort into it as the record label lets us. I don’t know, I think that America’s just as receptive, it’s just harder to crack at radio and stuff.
C- It’s tougher to tour - the distances are really tough on your body.
J- I think it’s just the way it is. We’ve just been out here for two weeks and we’ve been working England for two records and three years, it’s just you can’t compare the kind of momentum you’re going to get going in those situations.

M- Well, you talked about checking the website, are you guys involved with your website at all?
C- Well, they used all the images from the artwork and our art designer was involved with the record, he’s done every aspect of it, from the tee-shirts to the website.
J- The art director’s the same, we worked really hand in hand with him on a planning level then we just let him go until the end and then touched up.

S- Is the whole vixen theme of "Maroon" an idea of yours, or was it the art director’s?
J- No, we wanted it to be that way...
C- Probably the most troubled time in Justin’s and my relationship was when we both had girlfriends and we weren’t living together, we’d have to sneak out together to write songs because our girlfriends didn’t get along. (laughs)
J- It just definitely fit the mood, I mean, all that we really did was work in bars and chase dangerous women around. Just like rock and roll. Once in a while we saw crap gigs and we were just trying to capture the hedonistic late-night Chicago scene.
C- There’s something desperate about it....
J- So the girls, the girls weren’t really that hot in real life! (laughs) But in our fantasy world, we always could in fantasy worlds, they all look like that, with angel wings.

S- Even though you said your songwriting was, you take the melody and start from there, do you try and capture some sort of fantasy idea that you have, or do you just wake up and go from there...?
C- What we do, is we run through the material we have, because, like I said, there’s a time and a place for every song, whether it’s a b-side or it’s a song to put in a film, or whatever. When you’re putting it on a cycle of songs for an album, you want them to have some continuity and have something in common. So alot of times songs will get ruled off an album just because, even though it’s a great song and we like it, it just doesn’t really fit the mood of what we’re trying to get across. In a way, it’s ["Maroon"] a tough debut to get across because it’s a dark, sort of hedonistic, it’s a little creepy... (laughs) But then, that’s what we’re trying to get across!
J- It’s also a time in our life, that’s ["Maroon"] years ago. We wrote those songs when our circumstances were alot different. Now we’re out promoting that, and the weirdest thing is that process of writing, recording, touring, and touring all the different countries, like the 6 or 7 countries we’ve seen, and then by the time you write and record, and release another one, you’re so far from that point in the songs emotionally. It’s years and years that have gone by, you’re not the same person you were, but you’re still going through the songs. You’ve still got to go out and promote them.

M- So the next album’s going to be sunshine pop?
C- Well, we like to call it "the sun coming out of the clouds". But not quite, I don’t think.
J- It’s more hopeful. Still a bit morose, but it’s not as angst-ridden.
C- We almost made it a conscious decision with the lyrics, like "Wait, there’s a way we can phrase this to give it some hope", rather than being completely... Because after a while, if your life isn’t angsty anymore, I mean, we’re doing the things we’ve always wanted to do, you know, it’s not honest. I don’t want to make another angsty record.

M- Did you ever think that you’d jinx yourself writing a song called "I’m Over and I Know It"?
J- Umm, no. (laughs) I just sort of wrote that song...
C- It’s a pisstake. Like that child’s nursery rhyme (proceeds to sing) "If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands..." (clap, clap) So we were just sort of taking the piss out of ourselves. (sarcastic) Big rock stars.
J- We weren’t big rock stars. I had the first seed of an idea for that song when a girlfriend had left me, I was living with her, and I came into my house, and she’d locked me out. I climbed in through the window and found all my bags, all packed up in the center of the room, waiting for me. She’d already moved all the furniture out, and I just sitting there, in this empty house with all my bags packed and my guitar was there. I just pulled out my guitar and started playing and that’s what came out. I felt I had nowhere to go, I mean, I damn near moved into our rehearsal space. Like, I was over and I knew it. (laughs)

M- Do you have any immediate plans after this tour? Are you going to do some more recording? Or another tour?
C- They’re talking about us doing another tour in August or September. We’re doing T in the Park, the Scottish rock festival, V2001, and then between those we’ll probably just be in Chicago working on demos and stuff. We’ve got alot of stuff, like at least 12 demos we recorded for the album. We’ve got tons more material, we’re just sorting through, and seeing what we’re going to put on the album, and what’s not going to go on the album. And then we’ll probably do, hopefully, another American tour before we start on the next record. We want to get working on it soon, I mean, it’s already been like a year since it came out, it’s been almost over a year and a half since we recorded the last album.
J- Six months since the last single, we can’t ignore the English too much. (laughs)
M- Yeah, they might forget about you and move onto someone else.
J- Like Trail of the Dead, The Strokes, At the Drive-In... (laughs)

At this point, keyboards needed fixing and interviewers needing feeding, so cds were signed and we parted company until the show. Playing an entertaining mix of old favorites and unreleased tracks, The Webb Brothers easily won over the receptive crowd and promise to be in no danger of becoming forgotten any time soon!

"Maroon" is out now on Atlantic Records.