Interview: Pavement - Sidewalk sensation

Published on Sunday 2 May 2010 12:42

IN 2004, the Pixies reformed, prompting jubilation amongst fans of incestuous punk rock Bible stories shouted in Spanish. In 2008, My Bloody Valentine followed suit, a cause of great joy for those nostalgic for the bleeding eardrums of their youth.

• Pavement: (From left) Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Mark Ibold, Scott Kannberg and Steve West

Now legendary shamble-rockers Pavement are embarking on their first tour in a decade: a global jaunt taking in numerous European festival headline slots, a stint at Brixton Academy in May and four gigs in New York's Central Park, the first of which sold out in two minutes. In alternative rock reunion terms, this is the perfect storm.

"Yeah!" says Pavement guitarist Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs. "To me those two bands were an influence for Pavement even starting. I don't think we'll be as loud as My Bloody Valentine, but Pixies were amazing, they put a big smile on my face, and hopefully that's what we'll do. With regards to the history of music, I can't fathom where our place is because we just wrote songs to be like our favourite bands and hopefully we influenced some people into connecting the dots and maybe starting a band and enjoying a great record, that's all really."

In typical Pavement style, this is a mumbly understatement. Though they barely sold a million copies of their five albums combined during their ten-year lifespan between 1989 and 1999, the legacy of the Stockton, California five-piece is practically omnipresent in US indie rock today.

By assimilating the ramshackle post-punk attitudes of UK acts like The Fall and Swell Maps into the grunge aesthetic and adding their own strand of laconic melody on their seminal 1992 debut album Slanted And Enchanted, Pavement came to encapsulate the collegiate end of the slacker scene and paved (ahem) the way for the next generation of American guitar esoterica.

You can hear singer Stephen Malkmus in the fuzzy drawls of The Strokes' Julian Casablancas or Beck, their garage-reared crankiness in the likes of Guided By Voices, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Apples In Stereo, The Dandy Warhols, Lambchop, Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective, and their influence in a whole new strata of no-fi US underground rock, united under the umbrella of uber-indie website Pitchfork.

Pavement almost single-handedly made "stoned and knackered" the new "tattoo'd and angry", and though they were the band that inspired Radiohead to experiment beyond the realms of traditional guitar music and turned Blur to grunge on Song 2 (Malkmus was a regular sleepover guest on Damon Albarn's sofa), their own career played out very quietly.

Originally formed as a studio-based project for schoolfriends Malkmus and Kannberg, Pavement became a full band with the arrival of bassist Mark Ibold and drummer Gary Young. Forty-something acid fiend Young was a great comedy fulcrum for the band, stealing early shows by greeting fans at the door, handing out toast and salad to the front rows, performing onstage handstands and occasionally passing out drunk. What he wasn't was that good a drummer; second sticksmith Bob Nastanovich had to be hired to help Young keep time, and he was sacked soon after the release of Slanted And Enchanted, to be replaced by Steve West.

Yet arguably it was Young's amateurish approach that underpinned Slanted…'s slap-dash charm and brilliance. The ultimate slacker heartbreaker Here, the irrepressible pop of Summer Babe (Winter Version) and Trigger Cut and the cryptic intellectual yelps of Two States and Conduit For Sale! combined in an album widely regarded as an underground classic and voted the Best Indie Album Ever by Blender magazine in 2007.

"I love that record and it's nice being on a list," says Kannberg, "but having people like it is the most important thing. For us it was just a record. We were young kids trying to tour and have fun, and we didn't realise it was an important record until a lot later."

They expanded their cult with 1994's more accessible follow-up Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and knocked out melodic gold aplenty for the rest of the 1990s – most notably Stereo, Cut Your Hair, Shady Lane, Carrot Rope, Gold Soundz and Range Life, which invented alt.country while dissing The Smashing Pumpkins as having "no function". But, underachieving wasters at heart, Pavement ultimately hobbled their own career. Wowee Zowee from 1995 was an eclectic, meandering, hour-long, 18-track stick in their commercial wheels and their subsequent stint at the Lollapalooza festival was characterised by aimless drug jams and bottle barrages.

"We were just five guys that barely knew how to play their instruments and when you put us in those situations we were bound to f*** it up. We were trying to be like The Replacements and we came from this suburban punk rock attitude, and those bands definitely try to screw with things and in the back of our mind things like Lollapalooza were kind of a joke."

By 1999's final album Twilight Terror, penned entirely by Malkmus, Pavement felt dislocated and confined, as symbolised by the pair of handcuffs Malkmus hung from his microphone stand at the band's final show at Brixton Academy that November. Although Kannberg argues this was down to Malkmus's theatrical bent and the split was far less acrimonious than has been rumoured.

"Steve's very dramatic," Kannberg laughs. "If he wasn't a musician he would've probably been on Broadway. The London Brixton show, the last show we played, to 4,000 people, was really cool. Even though it was our last show and it was sad, it was very emotional because it was our biggest show ever and people just didn't want us to leave.

"All bands have problems when they decide to break up. We were at our peak, at least live, and when you're around people for such a long time things get handled differently than people want. But everyone's cool with it. There's no hard feelings, that's just what people wrote to create this myth. People made that up. The internet really blows things out of proportion. What one little guy writes on his little tiny blog can mean so much."

With Kannberg now based in Seattle and Malkmus nearby in Portland, Oregon, the pair stayed in touch after the split and kept tabs on the band's solo projects – Malkmus with The Jicks, Kannberg as Preston School Of Industry, Ibold with Sonic Youth and West on his solo albums. Then, over the past few years, the reunion offers started to come in as every festival season approached.

"Our agent gets the call 'Will Pavement reunite?'" says Kannberg, "and we shoot the e-mails around and everybody's like 'Nah, we don't want to do it'. This year Steve and I got on the phone and had a little talk about it. We called everybody, and Steve's kids are really young, Steve West's kids are a little older, but everybody's at a point where we can do something for a year and then move on again. Everybody thought it'd be a fun thing to do."

Were you surprised by the response? "Totally, it's out of control. We had no idea it would be this huge."

Could a new Pavement album be on the cards? "I think we have to play together as a band first and see if we like doing it. A lot of time has passed, and I think it'd be pretty weird to try to write a Pavement record now, but it could happen. I'd definitely look forward to it but I don't see it happening initially."

Before they've even played a note public the alternative world is already raining honours upon its unsteadiest godfathers. In May the band are curating the spring leg of All Tomorrow's Parties, the weekender that regularly sees Minehead Butlins become a Mecca for strokers of the post-rock beard. It's a plaudit previously afforded to alt.legends such as Sonic Youth, MBV, The Breeders and Portishead, but Kannberg himself can hear the legacy of Pavement lingering in more mainstream spheres.

"One of the biggest songs ever is a rip-off of Here," he says. Which one, I ask, and he mentions the breakthrough hit by one of the most successful British bands of the past ten years. "Maybe we could sue..."

Pavement play the Barrowland, Glasgow, on Wednesday

&#149 This article was first published in The Scotland on Sunday, May 2, 2010