Elbow moves with our darker times
The much-loved Manchester band is on its way to New Zealand for the first time in six years, writes Grant Smithies, but Elbow is not quite as romantic as it used to be.
We talked about his new baby and his dead dad. We discussed favourite cities, youthful insecurity and ancient ghosts. He hauled a battered paperback from his pocket and read me poetry.
Guy Garvey toasted my good health with multiple pints of Guinness and surmised that, yes, the last time he’d been on a beach was probably in New Zealand, on his band’s last tour six years ago.
‘‘I prefer comfortable chairs and good company to beaches,’’ said the Elbow singer in a gloriously gravelly Manchester accent.
He was sitting at home in London’s Soho, drinking stout and staring out on familiar rain.
‘‘I like drinking and talking more than wandering around at the seaside, though the climate here is part of that, of course.’’
A big, bearded bear of a man with sky-blue eyes, Garvey shares this house with actress Rachael Stirling and their 2-year-old son, Jack.
His mother-in-law is Game of Thrones actress Diana Rigg, now 81, who also showed up as James Bond’s only wife, Tracy Bond, in the 1969 movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Garvey laughed when I admitted I once had a debilitating crush on Rigg, who played karatekicking spy Emma Peel on TV series The Avengers in the 1960s.
‘‘You and a lot of others, mate! And fair enough, she’s the most amazing woman. She’s the coolest mother-in-law anyone ever had, and my wife’s a chip off the old block.’’
Rigg’s GoT character, Olenna Tyrell, was the ruthless, but essentially moral Queen of Thorns.
‘‘She’s the one who poisoned that sadistic little prick, King Joffrey, then later on she gets poisoned herself. But as soon as she realises her wine is poisoned, she just defiantly throws it down her neck! Diana told me that wasn’t even in the script – she just improvised. What a f…ing legend!’’
Garvey seemed as happy as a man could be and his cheerful goodwill seeped down the line to brighten my day.
He’s been doing a similar thing for 20-odd years with his music. Elbow’s songs are, for the most part, an exercise in open-hearted romanticism.
Backed by guys he’s known since they were all 17, Garvey gets up on stage at huge summer festivals across Europe to croon about friendship, community, love, drunken epiphanies, and the beauty of the natural world.
Audiences sing every word back to him. If the camera zooms close, many have tears streaming down their faces.
‘‘That’s true. You play One Day Like This and everyone belts it out as some sort of shared ritual. I write a lot of introspective stuff, but people feel a sense of communal ownership when you play these songs in a huge, live setting.’’
While fans wave lit cellphones and sing and weep, others frown and scowl and batter away at their keyboards, posting snarky comments under the band’s YouTube clips.
Elbow’s reputation as sentimental, earnest and cuddly, has led to the band being dismissed as ‘‘a poor man’s Coldplay’’ and ‘‘tepid dinner party music for uni students’’ in some quarters.
Certainly, many of Elbow’s biggest hits provide a useful barometer for a listener’s cynicism.
‘‘That’s very true. We’re boys from the tough bits of the north of England and not everyone wants to hear us sing about our feelings,’’ said Garvey.
‘‘And it’s not like any of us started out emotionally articulate. Coming through our teen years together, what we did at first was just try to
‘Songwriting is very slow and difficult for me. You have these moments where things happen, but there’s no great alchemy to it. The emotional effect of music can be magic, but music itself is made out of hangovers and bits of string . . . cobbled together from a million random shreds.’ GUY GARVEY
might cause festival crowds to hug each other and raise plastic pint pots aloft’’. That writer, incidentally, greatly preferred this darker new direction, suggesting Giants of All Sizes offered ‘‘a rich vision of broken Britain’’.
‘‘Yes, well, I’m hopeful that the people you mentioned earlier, Grant, who’ve been put off by the shameless positivity of our past anthems, will be glad to finally have a bit of respite!’’
He laughed and took another big slug of his pint.
‘‘Any bleakness on the new record is my special gift, just for them. But really, I guess, if you haven’t experienced grief by my age, 45, you’re a very lucky person. I couldn’t not write about that, this time around.’’
Losing friends and family never gets any easier, he said. ‘‘The first friend I lost was ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, Bryan Glancy, who died in 2006. And my own dad had already lost the vast majority of his mates by the time he died in 2018.
‘‘You always miss them, but one way to feel better about that fact is to celebrate those people by keeping their stories alive.’’
In Garvey’s case, he writes songs about them. ‘‘And I make no secret of the fact that I take great licence with dead friends. I make them sound far better than they actually were! If you’re lucky enough to be able to have a platform to keep the flame burning for your friends, you’ve got to embellish the f… out of their good points.’’
Amid all the political and personal turmoil of the past few years, Garvey has also had a great deal to be thankful for. Towards the end of the record, a trio of calmer, more gentle songs examines the more positive aspects of his recent life.
Love, longing, domesticity: ‘‘Come get me, guide and check me, sail and wreck me,’’ he sings to his wife on My Trouble. ‘‘Soak me to my skin . . .’’
Inspired by a bus journey Garvey takes regularly with his young son, On Daronda Road is parenthood rendered with a rosy tint over stuttering electronic beats, the swirling vocal harmonies, patchouli-scented like early 1970s Crosby, Stills and Nash.
The very lovely Weightless closes the album, in which Garvey talks to his son about his recently departed dad.
‘‘Hey, you look like me,’’ he sings. ‘‘So we, we look like him . . .’’
When Garvey sings of someone being ‘‘weightless in my arms’’ on the chorus, you’re not sure if he’s talking about his recently arrived child, or his dad on his deathbed. Probably both, I wager.
‘‘And you’d be right. The weightless image suggests illness and frailty, but also tiny new life, though I should admit that my dad was far from weightless when he died.
‘‘He was a very healthy [114 kilograms] when the cancer took him, and [1.95 metres tall]. So I suppose ‘weightless’ also referred to the love I felt. Dads and lads often have very complex relationships, but by the time he died, he was 100 per cent assured of the love and pride and respect I felt for him, and I was assured of the same thing. So, that very simple, direct love you have for your baby, I ended up having for my old man, too.’’
Garvey wanted to ‘‘confound some old expectations’’ with this album, he told me, and in this he has certainly succeeded.
One reviewer wrote that Giants of All Sizes showcased a ‘‘grittier, angrier Guy Garvey’’, which sparked an unwelcome mental image of this infamously mellow soul seething with irritation after getting sand down his togs at the beach.
‘‘The beach! I last went to the beach on our previous New Zealand tour, six years ago. It’s been a while since we got down there, right? But yes, beaches over here are more for wearing your overcoat and walking the dog. I’d rather stay indoors and drink more of this.’’
A big wet mouthful of Guinness can be heard travelling down his neck, and conversation turns to nostalgia as we discuss a mutual love for the cities of Edinburgh and Dublin.
I tell him I lived in both during the 1980s, but haven’t been back since. I’m afraid that I might be disappointed to return, as a middle-aged man, to places I used to roar around in, drunk and joyful, in my 20s.
‘‘That is precisely why you should go to such places,’’ said Garvey .
‘‘You go there and you look out for your younger self. You walk where you once staggered and you find younger people are still doing precisely the same things you once did, and you take your pleasure from that. And, of course, Dublin is still full of the ghosts of great writers.’’
One such writer is Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, who Garvey adores.
‘‘So much of his work really speaks to me. I’m actually carrying Seamus with me everywhere I go at the moment. In fact, I’ve got a book of his in my pocket.’’
Cue the sound of a cellphone clinking against a near-empty pint glass, followed by much rustling of fabric and paper.
‘‘Righto, hang on a minute.’’ More rustling, and the glug of the glass being refilled.
‘‘OK, here it is, Weighing In. Do you know that poem?’’
I do. But why don’t you read it to me anyway? And so, amazingly, he does.
‘‘The 56-pound weight . . . a solid iron unit of negation . . . stamped and cast . . .’’
Garvey’s voice is as thick and warm and scratchy as a fisherman’s new jersey.
‘‘And everything trembled, flowed with give and take . . .’’
He’s really doing it, I thought. He’s going to read the entire thing, top to tail!
‘‘Having to balance the intolerable in others against our own . . .’’
He gets, in due course, to the final full stop, and a mighty sigh gusts out of Garvey, like he’s suffered a sudden puncture.
‘‘How’s that? Boom! You will never f…ing find equilibrium while you reject your opposite, that’s the message there, and those are words to live by.
‘‘We need to stop buying into this polar division in politics and elsewhere. They rely on it, [those who] are ruining our world.
‘‘Anyway, that poem’s my parting gift to you, on this rainy Soho evening, across all those miles from here to New Zealand.’’
Elbow plays Auckland’s Town Hall on Thursday, June 4. Joining the band as a special guest is
Jesca Hoop, the Manchester-based, California-born singer-songwriter and guitarist. Tickets on sale now.