Maximo Park are heading off in a convoy with indie darlings Arctic Monkeys, New Yorkers We Are Scientists and father-and-son band Mystery Jets for this year's NME Awards Tour. The magazine's previous road trips have propelled groups on the cusp of making it like Franz Ferdinand, The Killers and The Kaiser Chiefs to household names. This time last year, Maximo Park were in the Newcastle audience to watch fellow Geordies The Futureheads, and say being picked to head the 2006 tour is the challenge they had hoped for. Since its May 2005 release, their debut album, A Certain Trigger, has gone gold and been nominated for a Mercury Music Award. Ahead of the sellout gig at Norwich's University of East Anglia on Thursday 9 February, guitarist Duncan Lloyd chatted to Chris Goreham about old-fashioned values, replacing typewriters with laptops and front man Paul Smith's way with words. A Certain Trigger was an amazing album - were you surprised by the amount of success you had? Yeah, I guess it's weird because when you're making it you don't know how far it's going to go - maybe to fans who already knew us with the little tours we'd done. But for it to do as well as it has, it's been something else. Once we'd made it we thought we'd done a good job but you can never really tell so it was a nice surprise at the end of last year, just thinking how well it had gone. It excited us for the next one - it felt like a starting point for us. It was something else really, just to have such a great following and people really getting into the album and enjoying it. What do you think it is about the album that people love? I think it's a mixture - it's a pretty diverse album. It's all very upbeat apart from one of the songs, Acrobat. Lyrically, it's original with a lot of Paul's lyrics and I think people find that quite exciting because he's singing about quite different things but also universal themes. In terms of the music as well, it's very catchy stuff and very upbeat, which when it first came out, was a bit of change from what was going on. There was a new bunch of bands making very much more upbeat music and it seems to be carrying on. It's changed it from the post-Radiohead type sound - which was around when we got together - and we wanted to make it exciting. I think people are excited by it because it's fresh and it still seems fresh as an album and it's diverse. The lyrics are brilliant. The one that people will know from Graffiti is, "I'll do graffiti if you sing to me in French." How do you go about coming up with the songs?  | | Maximo Park - old-fashioned gentlemen |
That's actually my line. When Paul joined we already had Going Missing and Graffiti written and I said to Paul - I gave him a bunch of songs - "You can change the lyrics to whatever," and he really liked that lyric and it reminded him of more romantic images. He came up with the line, "What are we doing here if romance isn't dead." He just wanted to keep that and there is stuff like That's Enough that I'd written and he liked it and wanted to keep it. A lot of the lyrics are mainly Paul's - it's just a couple of the early songs. At the moment it's open canvas for anyone to write stuff, but generally Paul does literally all the lyrics. Is he the kind of person who is always trying to come up with ideas for lyrics and poetic lines because I've read the little diaries he does on your website and some of those are incredible. Yeah, I think words excite him and he's always writing something down. He's finally shelled out and got himself a little laptop which he's never had so he's very excited to have a computer of some sort. He's got this old typewriter which he used to write on - but he's into writing, he's into words and likes playing with words and likes expressing himself through words so for him it's very important. For us, we might pick up a guitar but he'll pick up a pen. That's where the lyrics come from - from the passion he has for it. He's a brilliant front man with some of the moves he pulls on stage - but it was unusual in the way you got together with the front man the last person to join the band. Yeah, it was really. Paul was a mate of Tom's, the drummer initially. They went to college and Tom said to go and see Paul's instrumental band. We were looking for a singer and up in Newcastle there are a lot of Liam Gallagher look-alikes and that was the only scene a lot of people related to guitar-wise because the closest northern town was Manchester. For us, it wasn't very inspiring and we wanted somebody to front the band who wasn't like us.  | | Paul jumps for joy at a gig. Credit: Alex Flahive. |
As soon as we saw Paul - he was jumping around trying to express himself with a guitar - and I thought, 'He'd make a really good front man - I don't know whether he has ever thought about that.' So, me and Tom went and asked him and I think Tom's ex-girlfriend had heard him singing at a club to Stevie Wonder so that gave us a little inkling that he might be able to sing in tune. So, we asked him, "Do you want to give it a go?" And he said, "Yeah, all right." It just clicked. He'd never sung properly in a band so it was all new to him which I suppose adds to the excitement. For us, each new song is an experiment - we haven't really been through it a million times which is why it remains exciting. You're coming to Norwich as part of the NME Tour. Last year we had The Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers, Bloc Party and The Futureheads. It really can help you to launch on to huge things, can't it? Yes, definitely. It's funny because some of the lads went to see the show when it came to Newcastle last year and they said it was amazing. We know The Futureheads and we know Bloc Party a little bit, so they went along to see them. It was, 'Maybe we'll make it on to that at some point,' so to be headlining it is a bit crazy especially with the Arctic Monkeys on the tour and all the hype and attention they're getting at the moment. It's going to be quite a tour. The Mystery Jets as well - we met up with them recently - and they're all very excited. As a line-up it's going to be very exciting for all concerned. How do you feel about following the Arctic Monkeys on stage because they're huge at the moment? It's totally mad. They'll get to number one with their single so it's going to be mental and they've got a pretty hardcore following. A lot of the fans, who have written to us, have said they're really excited about it. There will be people there who will want to see all the bands - there'll be fans there for each band. I suppose it will be a challenge in a way but at the same time it's something we don't shy away from because we're excited to play the headline slot but we're playing the same amount of time as the Arctic Monkeys. It's just very exciting. We don't really feel nervous because we know as a live band, we're a good live band and solid as well. We've met the Arctic Monkeys and played with them in Belgium and there were nods of approval each way. I think we'll probably complement each other because we are different lyrically and musically. Do bands still get excited about being featured in the NME? I think so. It's weird, especially with music journalism. Sometimes they write stuff about you, like you're meant to be influenced by certain bands and you think, 'We've never listened to those bands ever!' But then any young band who wants to make it, you need to get some kind of exposure and the NME is the main one because it's out every week and it's the only one that is. People do take notice of it even though some of it's tongue-in-cheek. They can also determine whether a band survives or not so it is a bit of a two-headed beast. At the same time, to be able to play shows that they put on - they're massive shows - so you can't shy away or shake your head at it. We're embracing it but we're not a band which likes too much hype so we try to avoid that and we haven't been on the front cover of anything yet and that is almost a good thing because we're not over-exposed. One of the things which strikes me about Maximo Park is that you're rock stars but you don't seem to have this traditional rock star attitude. You seem almost old-fashioned gentlemen: you wear ties on stage and there's a line in one song, "I tried to snare you with old-fashioned manners." That's Paul - that more traditional thing. I suppose it's bringing back certain elements in pop music which have gone missing or which were definitely missing at the end of the '90s - I suppose it was quite a boyish, laddish culture. When you were younger you ended up being washed up and being a part of it, then you end up saying, "Well, we want to make something different which isn't all simplistic lyrics and stuff." Just writing something that people haven't written about in a while. It's like when you listen to old '50s Motown, there are very romantic elements in them and old-fashioned things. We wanted to bring that back - even though drink is present, but I think that helps sometimes! | 
