As one of the main bands to emerge from the Madchester scene along with the Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, the Inspiral Carpets spawned an army of ‘cool as fuck’ t-shirt wearing followers with bad bowl haircuts. After an 8-year absence the INSPIRAL CARPETS are touring again and I caught up with singer Tom Hingley and drummer Craig Gill before their gig in Leeds.
Q.
What have you been doing since the inspirals split up?
A.
Tom – “Me dad tried to kill himself, I had a nervous breakdown, split up with me wife. Then I moved out, then I did a sort of solo record, just an acoustic record it’s just me and a guitar, no overdubs. Supported Ian Brown on Millennium Eve in 1999 playing to 20,000 people in Manchester. I still have a band called the Lovers, we’re a sort of punk band, we’re recording an album.”
Craig – "I’ve opened a record shop in Manchester."
Tom – “We’re not stopping doing any of the other things that we’re doing. Clint’s still doing what he’s doing and good luck to him, he’s probably one the biggest indie DJ’s in the country and I don’t wanna detract from that. We not arsed about competing with the Cheeky Girls.”
Tom – “I’m doing me own band and we’re doing a very lo-fi album which we’ve recorded half of, which I want to put out on vinyl. That album’s gonna be called “Passive Aggressive”, it’s a really really good band, you know. I don’t know whether it’ll ever be commercially successful, but that’s not why you do music. We’ve got a website which is www.tomhingley.co.uk, so you know.”
Q.
How did it feel playing together again after all this time?
A.
Tom – “I’ve had to go swimming for an hour a day, for the last three months. I reckon I’ve only had ten days off in the whole of this year. Coz basically I was just a fat bastard and you need the stamina to be able to get through a gig as high octane as an Inspiral Carpets gig and I didn’t wanna let the rest of the band down.”
Craig – “A bit easier, I’m slightly fitter than a few years back, I’ve put the effort in. I’ve been on the bike, I’ve put the jogging in, stuff like that. I feel a bit fitter but we’ll see after about six or seven gigs.”
Tom – “It’s about having fun, being with me mates, playing some good gigs and having a good time.”
Craig – “The show’s quite raucous with it being all the singles it’s, you know, punchy tune after punchy tune. There’s no slow album fillers. It’s good everyone’s quite vibed up.”
Q.
Did you remember all the songs?
A.
Craig – “It was a bit strange, the first rehearsal was a bit strange. As soon as we started playing the songs it just came back to us, they call it muscle memory or something.”
Tom – “I’ve lost a lot of brain cell recently, I mean, the lyrics are classic lyrics. Everyone in the band apart from Craig contributed to the lyrics in Inspiral Carpets songs, there wasn’t one particular writer.”
Tom – “I’ve thought a lot more about the some of the lyrical content of the songs, some of the more garage-y songs, where as I would have sung them before.”
Tom – “It’s interesting to look back at the lyrics and it’s good to look back at all the bands output so many years after it because most of it stands up. When we were putting this greatest hits record together, I was quite insistent that we didn’t put loads of dance re-mixes on. Because I think, with the exception of the one we did with Collapsed Lung, I think most of them were bollocks!”
Craig – “We’re doing like errr… “Garage Full of Flowers” off the first EP and “Butterfly” off the second EP which was with a different singer so some of them songs were like learning them again coz we’d not played them in like 12 years and Tom obviously had to learn them, so it was like working on new songs.”
Q.
What songs are you playing on the tour?
A.
Craig –“ It’s just all the singles basically, with about two left out.”
Q.
Are there any plans for any new material?
A.
Craig – “It’s a funny one this, coz we’ve got a new single coming out, It was recorded in 1995 but never released. We’re playing it live so that’s about as close as we’ve got to new tracks.”
Q.
What are your memories of the Manchester scene?
A.
Craig – “A bit of a blur really.”
Tom – “Mental, I mean, I think the Manchester sort of thing started a long time before people think. I used to work collecting glasses in the Hacienda and I remember this weird thing, which ended up being house music. It was kind of a mix of Detroit techno, Latin records, obscure American soul records and a slightly kind of guitar thing sort of thrown in from New Order’s influence.”
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Craig – “It was good and it was then and it was the Hacienda every weekend.”
Tom – “At that time people like Cressa and Bez, Shaun and Clint, people like that would be in the Hacienda wearing these paisley shirts and bowl heads and it was this very anti-fashion statement.”
Tom – “I remember 1985 and thinking god, the scene, the kind of E scene or house scene is gonna be massive and some time people are gonna write books about it and make films about it, which obviously then went on to happen.”
Craig – “It was a massive movement, it’s hard to explain to young kids now what impact that scene had. It was the biggest youth culture movement since punk, you know.”
Craig – “You could see the scene and you could see cool people like Cressa at the gigs. All these people that were hanging round the Boardwalk and the Hacienda it was a great little scene. When the press attention came I think everyone got their own little ego and it was like “I’m not playing with them” and there were things said in the press that got twisted and there were things like a slanging match between us and The Farm and then we met up with them in Barcelona and went out with them.”
Tom – “A lot of the things the Inspirals did contributed to the scene. Clint used to be in a band with Mani and they used to do tracks and they used to run the tracks backwards and put vocals over the top of them, which of course the Roses did later on. You sometimes hear about us just being passive benefactors of a scene that was around before us and it pisses me off a bit coz it’s not fucking true. It’s just lazy journalism. That and the idea that the only significant thing about us is that Noel worked for us.”
Q.
What do you think it was about the Madchester scene, which made it so big?
A.
Tom – “Probably the fact that Manchester was quite depressed, the country was in a fucking mess and Thatcher was just starting to get it in the neck. Manchester is such a melting pot and the bands which came up, the Roses, the Mondays and us were very much dispossessed underdogs. I mean people in Lancashire aren’t supposed to get on with people in Yorkshire but we were always very popular in Yorkshire. English people aren’t supposed to get on with Scottish people but we were always really popular in Scotland and particularly popular in Wales.”
Q.
What music are you listening to at the minute?
A.
Tom – “I like Grand Drive, I think they’re pretty good, very melodious, very antipodean and very chilled. I think The Music are very good, there seems to be a big debate about whether The Music are fake or real but I think they’re really good.”
Q.
Who do you rate in the British music scene at the moment?
A.
Tom – “The Music are really good. I’m trying to think who I’ve seen recently. Coin-Op are good, they’re melodic, they’ve got a keyboard and they’re a bit indie and when we were putting this tour together a lot of people were trying to get us to have sub-standard bands on who we could £500 for. We’re not into non-sense, you’re better off having a band on who can play.”
Q.
If you had to pick one song by anyone as the best song ever what would you pick?
A.
Tom – “Pretty much anything from Blonde on Blonde by Dylan apart from maybe Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands coz that’s him whinging about his woman leaving him for about 22 minutes.”
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