New Model Army’s ‘bad attitude’ reaps rewards
IN Berlin while on tour, Justin Sullivan, mainstay of New Model Army, is pondering the meaning of success. The band’s latest album, Unbroken, might have become their third record in a row to breach the top 10 in Germany’s charts, but the singer and guitarist is not keeping tabs. “Success is a really strange thing in the sense that when you’re a young musician we used to talk about when we make it, but what you mean by that is what you dream of is to make a living by it – that is a big line, to make a living from what you love. We crossed the line in ’84/’85, after that it really doesn’t matter,” the 68-year-old says philosophically.
Dividing the early part of lockdown between his adopted home city Bradford and Paris, where his partner lives, Sullivan made a solo album, Surrounded, before commencing writing Unbroken with the band.
“We were just messing around in our own studio, and it took shape over a couple of years,” he says. “There was a much-delayed (40th) anniversary tour that we had to do, the Sinfonia project (with the Leipzig Orchestra), so we kept being interrupted but we worked on it in a fairly leisurely way.”
Deciding early on in the process that they wanted it to be mixed by Tchad Blake, the American producer and engineer who has worked with the likes of Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Arctic Monkeys and U2, they sent him some demo recordings and asked which studio they might work in.
“He said ‘I like the demos’ because there is something about demos when you first come up with ideas that’s very immediate. So basically over a year and a half, bit by bit, we’d put together songs. We’d do rough monitor mixes and we sent them to Tchad, who did things to them and it came out as Unbroken.
“One of the things about rock music is there is a bass and drummer then all of the other things are the interesting bit, with New Model Army it’s always been about the bass and drums are the interesting bits and there’s some other instrumentation. This album is very bass and drums heavy, which is kind of what we wanted it to be.”
For the most part over the past 40 years, New Model Army have stayed outside of musical trends. Sullivan believes there are several factors involved. “We started with a bad attitude and we’ve still got a bad attitude,” he says. “In order to become popular you should give people what they want and there was a period in the early ’90s when we were on the edge of becoming quite a big band and it never really quite happened, and I think it’s because we didn’t play what people wanted us to play.
“We’ve ended up in a situation where there’s no song we have to play, we just play what we want to play, and the audience which we have got, which is perhaps smaller than we might have had, accepts that that’s what we’re doing. Most bands when they get to their 16th album play two songs from it and the hits, we play most of the new album and we’ve got an audience that accepts that about us.”
Unbroken is out now. New Model Army play at O2 Academy Leeds on April 27.