Cribs
Johnny Marr’s Their Man
The Cribs add the ex-Smiths’ guitarist to the mix on Ignore the Ignorant

By Jeff Niesel

Calling from Los Angeles, where the band had just performed an intimate club show at the Roxy, Cribs’ drummer Ross Jarman said the group was having “a lot of fun.”

“We haven’t been to the States as much as we’d like, so it was great,” he says of the concert that showed off the UK band’s latest addition, ex-Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr.

Marr’s addition to the band came in a roundabout manner. Cribs singer-bassist Gary Jarman lives in Portland and met Marr at a barbeque at the house of Modest Mouse singer Isaac Brock who introduced Gary Jarman to Marr, his friend and occasional band mate. The two hit it off and then Marr hung out with the Ross, Gary and singer-guitarist Ryan Jarman when they played Glastonbury a couple of years ago.

“We became good friends and had a bit of time off together to write music together as you do with friends,” Ross Jarman says. “It was completely natural. It was just jamming for fun. We wrote four songs in five days and them demo-ed them. Johnny said he’d come out and tour. Before we knew it, we wrote an album and it fell into place. It was unplanned. It’s like how other bands start. You get together and play with your friends. It’s really fun for us because it’s been the three of us for so many years so it’s like having a new best friend.”

In truth, the Cribs were doing just fine before they met Marr. Formed in the depressed, working class town of Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 2002, the band quickly became a UK sensation, thanks in part to a slew of British bands that emerged at the same time. The Cribs, however, have a far more fiery side to their sound and that’s readily apparent on their first three discs, 2004’s self-titled debut, 2005’s The New Fellas and 2005’s Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever. If their new album Ignore the Ignorant sounds a bit more polished and poised, that’s merely a function of band members getting older. There’s a softer side in songs like “Cheat On Me” and “We Share the Same Skies” that is art least partly a byproduct of Marr joining the band.

“I think naturally we’re all a little older than we were,” Jarman says. “You grow up, and I think we’re going through a stage where the slowest stuff pushes our buttons. There are a couple of tracks that are more cinematic.”

But the album kicks off with the raunchy “We Were Aborted,” a nasty little number that confirms Marr’s description of the band. He’s said the group possesses “the brains of the Buzzcocks, the guts of Nirvana and the fizz of the Ramones.” That’s quite a compliment and nicely summarizes the Cribs’ sound.

That’s great,” Jarman says of the description. “I couldn’t ask for anything more. All of us are really into the Buzzcocks and Ramones and Nirvana is great. That’s the weird thing is that Johnny’s from an earlier generation, but as far as music goes, we have all that in common and share the same love for the same bands. It doesn’t matter what generation you’re from. We all like the same music.”

The band emerged during a pretty fertile time right as the Libertines and other like-minded acts were making waves in the States. Things continued to escalate as Franz Ferdinand and a slew of other bands issued chart-topping albums. Jarman maintains the band didn’t feel much affinity with its musical peers.