Good morning,
Welcome to your weekly Monday free edition of The New Cue. Free TNC! Do you even know how lucky you are? In today’s edition, we’ve got a massive chat with dEUS frontman Tom Barman which would’ve been shorter but Niall needed to ask him about a rumour one of his mates made up when they were teenagers.
We’ll see you on Friday, which isn’t a free edition, so press Subscribe Now if you want to be in the elite crew that receives all our music recommendations and extra interviews and ways to save money on your mortgage. That last bit was a lie in the hope that you’ll just skim read this paragraph and subscribe anyway.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Tom Barman
On Friday, dEUS released their eighth album How To Replace It. It’s the Belgian rockers’ first record in a decade and although they haven’t been idle in the time away – there’s been tours to support a Greatest Hits set, then a stretch on the road to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their excellent 1999 album The Ideal Crash – fans (me, hi, it’s Niall here) had begun to wonder when they might get back into the studio. Throughout their career they’ve constantly been a thrilling live band (as this searing live rendition of their Sopranos-featured 1996 song Theme From Turnpike demonstrates:)
But it’s on their records where the Antwerp quartet reveal deft new shades beyond the muscular rock epics, where they hit on the really interesting stuff, from the rolling slow build of Second Nature from 2011’s Keep You Close, or the sorrowful reflection of Smokers Reflect and gentle thump of Guy Garvey duet The Vanishing Of Maria Schneider, both from 2008’s Vantage Point, or the controlled explosions of Nightshopping, the best song from 2005’s Pocket Revolution. That song is motored forward by my favourite riff of the ‘00s:
There’s a feeling of restraint running through How To Replace It, which does everything that dEUS do well, tight hooks wound around playful lyricism, minor-chord patterns that settle into hypnotic grooves, bombastic interludes, gently poignant sad drunk songs. It’s a really, really good record. Last week, I spoke to frontman and band leader Tom Barman about how it came together, finally got the official word on a Radiohead rumour I’ve carried with me for most of my adult life and more. I’ve also made a big fat dEUS playlist of my favourite songs spanning their whole career if you fancy a listen along whilst you read:
Hey Tom.
Sorry I’m a bit late.
Two minutes is fine, I think we’ll get by.
I’ve changed from a pathological latecomer into a pathological on-time-comer. Try this one: being early is just as rude as being late! I’m just gonna grab my last ciggy that I was smoking, and then I’m going to switch to vaper.
How many cigarettes do you have before you switch?
When I finished the record, it was shocking. I was smoking 45 so I had to change, so I’m back at 15 which is good because I still like the morning cigarette. I have 15 and I vape now and then. In the studio, I’m just vaping.
Where are you at the moment?
I’m in Antwerp. We just started the rehearsals for the tour. I had done some preparation on my own and the band had done some without me and now we’re together in the room. It’s exciting because you work on the album for two years and then you forget chord progressions and ‘how the fuck did we do this?’, so you have to start learning to play it again.
Do you get the sort of excitement the crowd get when you hear yourself live for the first time in a while?
Yeah, you kind of project it to the stage because in this case we’re all looking at each other, it’s a circle situation. But absolutely, it’s the thing you look forward to, it’s a huge cliché but it’s been a while - the setlist is going to change, if that’s a reason to make a new record that’s already a good one because we’ve been playing Ideal Crash and then we stayed a couple of years in what I’ll call the Greatest Hits setlist, so that’s all going to change.
Setlists must get increasingly tricky when you’re three decades into it.
I’ve made all the mistakes that one can make for a setlist and I invented some new mistakes too! Man, how did I screw up because it’s so important but when you’re younger, there’s this stubbornness about ‘we have a new album!’.
What’s the biggest fuck-up you made?
I think it was at a big show in Antwerp for Keep You Close, which I like as an album but I chose the hardest song to start the set, a new song that wasn’t even the single, and it was also the hardest one to play so we screwed that up! Through my doing, we basically missed the start of the show, and it just went downhill from there. You learn, you make mistakes, and then you fucking learn.
It's been ten years since the last album. How did you approach it?
The last two albums were very long jams, long days, structuring together, singing together, finishing together. We didn’t want to do this now, just for the sake of variation. Everybody agreed on that so we went back to shorter, intense jams and I isolate myself with an engineer and start moulding songs out of it. I enjoyed The Ideal Crash 20th anniversary tour but we didn’t start How To Replace It with a nostalgia feel, it was just that it was a good time to go into work on a new one after that tour.
How do you look back over dEUS’ catalogue? There’s been different line-ups and gaps in time, do you see it all as one body of work?
I really don’t that much - like Nick Cave said, “I’m 50 dude, my mind is a swamp!” I feel in myself that the intensity and the concentration hasn’t changed. I’m trying to sing differently for the sake of freshness for myself, I think I’ve never sung so high on a record for Faux Bamboo and I’ve never sung so low on a record, like on 1989, so it’s just keeping that fresh. At the end of the day, it’s the songs and you want good songs and you want to play songs for a long time and you want them to survive. It’s as down to earth and prosaic as that. But how do I look backwards? Well, there’s not anything yet that I’m deeply ashamed of. Is that a good answer?
Yeah, that’ll do it. What was the starting point for you lyrically on this record?
It wasn’t personally the best period of my life, in that sense, great, because I was in the studio so I had something to sing about. There’s a lot of doubt, there’s a lot of disorientation, philosophical and emotional disorientation, betrayal. I didn’t want to make a depressing record. I think it has a defiance in it, I think that’s personal but also maybe the style of the band. I didn’t really think of a theme, I had no problem with finding subject matter at all. It came quite easily because of the internal turmoil. That’s generally a good motor.
Do you keep writing between records or is that tap switched off?
I haven’t had a lyrical idea in my life without a pen and paper, I haven’t had a musical idea in my life without an instrument in my hands. I’m not that sort of spirit that disappears from a dinner party to record some genius idea, it’s just not going to happen. I’ll be the one drinking all your wine at a dinner party. I need an instrument, I need to be sitting down and doing it, so no I’m not writing all the time. I only write when I write songs.
What’s been the toughest period in the band’s career?
This process was by far the toughest. It was a perfect storm of a personal hardship, parents dying of people involved, Covid, band members not well, it was one thing after another. It was a very hard one. The MO was sanctioned by everybody - ‘Okay, Tom is gonna do the heavy lifting, we just do the jams, fine.’ We discussed this as a band, but then fucking Covid happens, meaning I had shitloads of work and they didn’t, because they couldn’t work on the side, they were bored as fuck at home and they basically went, ‘dude, we’re a band!’ and I said, “I know, but we said we were gonna work like this.” It created tension. And that’s it, leading a band in your end 40s, which I was at the time when we began and most of us were, is not the same as leading a band in your 20s and your 30s, there’s families, the stakes are completely different.
At the same time, the energy is still there, the wish is still there, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. It’s fucking hard. I’m not saying this like ‘ooh, let’s all feel sorry for Tom…’ but it’s a very difficult unity. A band is not only an anachronism in a way, how many bands are still going at that level, but it’s also hard to keep together, especially when something as intrusive as Covid happens, which touches on everything, on emotions, on money, on making a living. It was hard. It was a hard time, but we survived.
What’s the trick to a band keeping together?
Talking, letting it all out, letting everybody have their say. It’s like a marriage. Don’t forget that in this formation we’re almost 20 years and with Klaas (Janzoons, keyboards and violin), I’m almost at 30 years together. It’s talking, communication and that’s where it went wrong. At one point, everybody became an island.
How did you react to that?
Very hard because I’m the leader. I have to give example but I had lots of work so it just piled up. But we got through it. Us being in the room together and playing those songs and going on tour is a vindication. It’s something that we’re enjoying right now, as we speak - in an hour, I’m going to be there.
Over your career who’s given you the best advice?
There’s many people. Michael Stipe didn’t tell me personally but when he said, ‘write a song every day, it doesn’t have to be great.’ I like that one. Mark Sandman from Morphine, who was a friend, he said, “I want to be happy, but not all the time.” That’s more life advice, I love that one.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen from the stage?
Oh my god... two English sisters beating the crap out of each other. A bullet, in somebody’s teeth. But the sisters was probably up there because we knew them. They were following us around and they had a… let’s call it a sisterly relationship and at one point, they’re fucking beating the shit out of each other.
Jeez! What are the first things that come to mind when you think back to breaking through in the mid-90s?
Not really taking it in. That’s typical for that kind of age, I guess. Very intense. I started really having fun only in the in the 2000s. In the 90s, of course, I had good times. I should be arrested if I didn’t have any good times but you’re young and it just goes so fast. In the 2000s, I was hitting 30, it all comes in a bit better, you started seeing a scheme, you started seeing things more clearly. And also, it was the first time in my life I was actually home in my 30s because we took that break before Pocket Revolution and I remember that being a really good time, not that I hated dEUS but it showed me there was a life outside of the band, which was very important for later in life. And it showed me that I can be happy without this band also, which in the 90s I didn’t have the time to do because you’re 20 and it’s one album after the other and one tour after the other. On a deeper level, my 30s were important to realise dEUS is fucking important, but there’s more to life, be it other artistic things or be it not getting absorbed in that shit, which is dangerous.
Me and my friends were teenage dEUS fans and we heard a rumour that you’d turned down touring with Radiohead because you couldn’t be arsed. It turned from rumour to hard fact in my head without a shred of evidence and I Googled it earlier and there’s nothing online to suggest it’s true. Did one of my friends just make it up?
Haha! No, we did some crazy stuff, but that wasn’t one of them. I think it was more prosaic - I think there was a tour, there was something like that, but our drummer broke his leg in Berlin and we had to cancel a tour. I don’t know if it was a supporting tour. But there was a story I will tell you that is very similar and which pissed me off, which is at the end of the Ideal Crash tour, Blur asked us to go to Australia and the Southeast Asia. Nice! But Craig Ward, our Scottish great guitar player at the time, had decided before that tour to leave us and it was non-negotiable that would stop in January and the tour with Blur was going to happen from January to March, so we missed out on that one. That’s typically dEUS. That’s typically somebody that says, ‘no, I’m gonna stop’, ‘come on, dude, we want to go with Blur, we’ve never been to Australia’, that’s a cancelled tour by our doing. But the Radiohead one was a myth! I’m flattered, I’m gonna tell the guys in two hours when I see them.
Ah, what a shame. What’s the most common mispronunciation of your band name?
Deuce. Jeuce. And in southern Spain, they say Ledough, because Le means de, they say the Deus and then in the accent they use becomes dough. They could be talking about my band, but I have no fucking idea what they’re talking about.
dEUS’s release patterns seem to be feast or famine. Where’s it heading at the moment?
Let’s see after this tour, because I think the logic thing would be with everything we’ve learned to make a record not too late after this one, because there’s a good flow now. But because it was a difficult process, we need some kind of a release from it which is going to be the live show. I have no idea where it’s going to take us. I just hope our fans are gonna still show up, and are we going to make some new ones? That’s all that matters right now.
ND