I first heard the Cribs song Hey Scenesters at one of those Brit Pop dance parties that sprung up everywhere like weeds earlier this century, but at the time the tune seemed out of place. It was more of a throwback to the late 70s British punk than the early 90s, more Wire or Fall than Happy Mondays, and more importantly it was hard to dance to a song that seemed to be snidely pointing out what a hypocrite you were.

Nevertheless I was blown away, and sought the rest of the record out as soon as I could find it online (it was pretty much impossible to find in US stores). Since then the band has blown up huge in their native UK, recorded an album with Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos and a song with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, toured stadiums with the Smiths’ Johnny Marr playing rhythm guitar, and been hailed by various hyperbolic British gush-zines as the next pasty savior of rock and roll. But despite all that they are still making music as caustic and catchy as that first hit single. How does a band in such a cauldron of pressure and sycophancy manage to stay away from self-indulgence or rock-star creative implosion? In part it could be the family dynamic—all three members came from the same womb. But in another sense they did it the old fashioned way: by espousing beliefs about the way a band should conduct themselves, and then sticking to those ideals.

The brothers still tour in a single van, are still on the original indie record label that treated them well from the start despite offers from any number of majors, and they still play smaller pub gigs whenever they can. In an era where most groups would rather get praised by their publicist than appeal to a fanbase, the Cribs have been outspoken proponents of that musty fossil known as “keeping it real.”

Now they’re trying to conquer the US with the same strategy and with their work ethic and blithe, fuck-you spirit, it’s hard to imagine they’re going to fail. We spoke to drummer and youngest sibling Ross by phone in the midst of a hectic day at South By Southwest.

BYT: So you’re in Austin right now?
Ross Jarman: Yeah, we’re playing a couple shows tomorrow…we’re not doing what we did a couple years ago where we did seven in two days.

BYT: Are you going to make a point to see anyone you’re really into out there, or are you too busy?
RJ: I’d hope so but I haven’t even managed to look at the schedule or anything yet. We’ve literally turned up two hours ago and we’ve just done two hours of press. We’re trying to get that all out of the way today so that tomorrow we can just put on the shows.

BYT: So you don’t have any plans to go to specific bands…
RJ: Maybe tonight when the schedule’s calmed down a bit…I know Thurston Moore’s doing a lot of the shows so we’re going to check that out, but I really don’t know much at this moment. It’s been a bit stressful.

BYT: So is Johnny Marr with you all on this tour?
RJ: No, not on this tour. Johnny at the moment is a part time member who we’ve been doing songs with. He’s in Portland again right now. But he did play the last UK tour with us.

This has been booked for a while so we’re not going to be playing any of the dates with Johnny. We don’t have anything set in stone, we just enjoy playing together and writing music together, so we’re just going to see how things come out. It looks like we are writing some songs for the next record, so he’s probably going to be playing more shows with us after that. He’s doing the festivals with us this year too, but for this tour it’s just the three of us.

BYT: So he’s not going to sneak onstage with you on Letterman or anything.
RJ: Nah. But we like to keep it a little bit spontaneous, maybe we’ll do a couple shows with Johnny, maybe in Portland. He’s doing some writing with Modest Mouse and we don’t want to tread on that so…

BYT: Don’t want to start an international incident?
RJ: Yeah that’s it.

BYT: As a drummer, do dance remixes bug you? You’ve been remixed a bunch in the past couple months, by CSS and the Postal Service just to name two. Is it a necessary evil or something you enjoy listening to?
RJ: It’s something I’ve never been that knowledgeable about to be honest. I really like Postal Service one, I mean we know Ben pretty well since we went on Tour with Death Cab. The CSS came out well also. But I really don’t know much about remixes. A lot of bands do remixes when they can’t write songs in the meantime, but we certainly don’t do that.

BYT: So you’re not being replaced by a drum machine anytime soon?
RJ: I’d hope not! On the Postal Service remix I don’t think any of my playing is on there, it’s all been replaced with a dance beat! I don’t mind though, it’s all good.

BYT: You all are known for your raucous live shows. Especially here in the states, is it crowd dependent,
RJ: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say that we go crazy every night. But it does help when you’re getting some good feedback off the audience, it definitely motivates you. But some nights we could just be having a lot of fun playing onstage. You could totally be doing your own thing and you don’t need to get anything off the audience. Coming on this tour so far our two US dates have been really great. I wouldn’t really say that we’re a totally crazy live band—we like to keep things energetic and spontaneous, unlike a lot of bands that go on tour and go through the same motions every night. I just bored of that, the three of us get bored of it. In the UK we’ve built a reputation as a live band, and happily we’re on an independent label so…we’d rather people see us first that way than read about us on the back of a bus-stop wall, you know? That really paid off in the UK, and we’re trying to do that in the US, tour as much as we can whenever we can and build things up. Every time we come back we seem to be playing to more people, which is really cool.

BYT: You mentioned being on an indie label still in the UK…but you’re now being distributed in the US by Warner Brothers…how’s that going?
RJ: It’s going well! On the first two records we didn’t have a deal in the US so we couldn’t afford to come over and tour, plus it wasn’t that heavily distributed. So we were frustrated with that. And then like Warner Brothers came along and said, “We want to sign you guys.” But we really wanted to keep Wichita, our UK label, heavily involved since they’ve been with us since the beginning and we didn’t want to change anything around that. We told them that and then when some other labels were interested Warner came back and said, “How about you keep Wichita in the UK and we’ll just have you in the US?” And that’s an ideal situation, since we get to come over to the US to tour more and promote the record, knowing it gets a proper release, but we can stay on Wichita who’s been with us from Day 1. So we’re definitely happy with that compromise.

BYT: They haven’t asked you to do anything ridiculous yet?
RJ: Nah. That’s the advantage of being in a band that’s already got two albums out. They can’t really mold us or anything. We’re already established. All they can do is put the records out. Obviously people would notice if all of a sudden we had fancy new haircuts and wore a bunch of makeup in our videos.

BYT: When y’all started (particularly because of songs like Hey Scenesters) you were known for speaking out about commercialization and mediocre music in the indie scene. Have your views changed over the past few years… has it gotten better or worse?
RJ: If anything our views have gotten stronger. I think the UK music scene right now is really appalling. There’s a lot of rubbish bands. It’s frustrating because there are some bands that have come out in the past year or whatever that have these terrible records and it’s really frustrating when we get lumped in with them. We just have nothing in common with them to be honest. We’ve watched things change in the UK, a lot more diluted bands have come out. But Ryan made some comments at Glastonbury last year [http://www.nme.com/news/the-cribs/29147] that got a lot of attention which isn’t necessarily what we were looking for. It’s just something he said flippantly on stage.

BYT: Is that an issue you wish you weren’t associated with as a group?
RJ: I don’t know really. I just hope that people can see that we’re an alternative to a lot of these shit UK bands that around right now.

BYT: Finally, looking at your website, where you’ve got a list of just about every show you guys have done since 2002, it strikes me that you all have been around for a long time considering you’re relatively young. How does it make you feel looking back over a career that’s longer than most bands lifespan?
RJ: It kind of scares me actually, since these last few years have flown by. I’m definitely proud of it as well… there’s a lot of bands that don’t have our longevity anyway, so I think it’s a good thing.

Record Company Guy In Background: Ross, we gotta go!

RJ: Oops, that’s it!

BYT: Perfect timing, anyway. Thanks again, and good luck.
RJ: Cheers.

Want more:
befriend them here
and check out the show (featuring also the wonderful Ra Ra Riot) tomorrow at the Cat

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