Cymbals: "Music is music and it shouldn’t have an aim"

​Ahead of their performance for Line of Best Fit alongside Thumpers and Mausi at the Camden Crawl, we sat down with front man Jack to talk post-structuralism, growing up as a young musician in Paris and what it is about Conrad’s writing that makes he keep going back for more.

How did you come across the book?

I first came across it in the London Review of Books and it touched on some really interesting topics, both in the book itself but also in the way that it engaged with wider debates. It really struck me. I jotted down a couple of lyrics then and there, went out, bought the book and read it cover to cover. It’s difficult to explain in some ways, but it really has had a big impact on me. I studied History at uni and ended up covering quite a lot of post-structuralist and post-modernist ideas which got me interested in thinking about the ways in which we understand language. All those philosophies kind of informed the way I think about the world and this book is about questioning that mode of thinking. It argues that we over-complicate things and use that complexity as an excuse almost for apathy. You end up kind of getting ‘paralysed’ into inaction because you convince yourself that you’ll never fully understand an issue.

Is the aim of your music to motivate people to act?

No, I feel very strongly that music is music and it shouldn’t have an aim. It’s not there to educate people or motivate people to do something. It’s much more reflective. You definitely want it to connect with people, but it’s that shared experience that’s important more than anything else, it’s not a call to arms.

You talk about ‘paralysis’ but it feels like quite happy music, quite euphoric in fact. Is it just supposed to make you dance? Liberate you from a physical paralysis maybe…

That’s an interesting way to think about it, I’d say it’s more about escapism maybe, how when you’re feeling apathetic sometimes the best way to break out of that is to just move. You know if you’ve been working really hard all week, or have been suppressing yourself in some way, as soon as Friday rolls around you just want to go out and get fucked, it’s a shared impulse. I’d say the album is about precisely the feeling of release.

Are the lyrics intentionally more sombre than the melodies?

Yeah I think that’s fair. New Order are a big influence for us I think – they’ve got lyrics which are so tragic they’re almost funny. I hope we don’t sound like a New Order copy, but it’s a notion of dance music that I really like.

What kind of music did you grow up around?

I grew up in Paris, I lived there for about 10 years from about 8 to 18/19. Around the time I was really getting into music trip-hop was taking off and so I think that would probably have had an important first impact for me. The big difference between the music scene in France and the UK is that everyone here is in a band, it’s part of a culture you grow up with, whereas in Paris it felt quite rare to play guitar and write songs. I remember playing my first song in front of a few friends at school and everyone being like ‘wow, that’s amazing’ but I think if I’d played it here, people would have seen it for what it really was, which was not very good ...

Do you find the writing process quite easy?

It’s totally unpredictable, lyrics just kind of happen. I don’t want to suggest that what we do in the band is similar to what a poet does, there are some really obvious distinctions, but I think that process of writing lyrics shares similarities. You can work really hard at trying to write about a particular topic but more often than not you’ll end up hitting a brick wall, you just have to wait for it to come to you. I just jot down lyrics as they come to me.

Do you find it hard, if you’ve been reading a certain style of book for a while, do you think that has an impact on the way you write lyrics?

Definitely. I’ll read books quite often that have an impact on the way I feel and that’ll move me to write something. With fiction as well, there are several songs on the record that share characters and storylines with books that I’ve read. John Berger writes this amazing fiction, he has a disjoined, broken up way of talking about things, it’s quite obscure, but I really like that style.

What are you reading at the moment?

I’ve gotten really into this publisher called The Little Toller Books, they’ve just republished loads of Conrad stuff – Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes are two favourites of mine by him – and he’s written this book about the art of sailing so I’ve been reading up on that. I’ve also just finished The Immoralist by André Gide – really cracking read. I kind of pick stuff up and put it down so I’m normally reading a few things at once.

Do you enjoy playing live? Are you looking forward to the Camden Crawl?

Yeah, SXSW was amazing! We’ve all got jobs so spending the festival playing music every day was really good fun. It’s about finding that connection with the audience that I talked about. We’re going back to the states in July as well which should be good. Tough Love have put in a lot of investment to this project and we’ve ended up having more offers that we can fill over there so it made sense to go back. I’m looking forward to the Camden gigs as well. We played a couple of years ago, and had a really good time so it should be just as good if not better this time around.

Anyone in particular you’re looking forward to seeing?

The number one on my list is Jeffrey Lewis – I think he’s one of the greatest artists of our time.

Cymbals play the Best Fit stage at CC14, along with Thumpers and Mausi. Tickets for the festival are still available here.