Interview: The Spinto Band

As the rock n’ roll lifestyle goes, munching on a crunchy salad Nicoise an hour before heading on stage doesn’t do for too many bands. I’m at the City Café, meeting the boys as they grab a bite prior to their performance at Cabaret Voltaire this evening – and the only thing on the Spinto Band’s menu is the green stuff. Their tour manager, the brilliantly named Nik Diezel, is definitely more of a carnivore. He’s sitting at the head of the table, leafing through The Sun and looking particularly hard; but the band’s chaperone is certainly in the minority. I’m sat bang in the middle of eleven plimsoll-clad, fresh-faced indie enthusiasts – and I know there’s only six in the band, so how do I discriminate the group from the groupies?

“Well there’s two sets of brothers,” pipes up drummer Jeff Hobson, “and we’re sat next to each other. We’re trying to avoid the cliché.” The Spinto Band’s genesis lies in the closely-knit family ties that propelled the sextet together from a young age to form their pubescent garage-band outfit, known then as Free Beer, in their hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. The older Hobson explains that they’ve never really escaped these modest beginnings: “It’s the bigger stages that cause us the most problems. Even though there’s a bunch of us up there. Where we rehearse is still this tiny little space.”

Although they’re here touring with their new LP, Moonwink, the guys are happy to attribute much of their current success to viral internet phenomenon, ‘Oh Mandy’, the standout track from their breakthrough album Nice and Nicely Done (2005) and currently doing the telly rounds on Kenco adverts. “It definitely opened doors for us. Is it our best song? I don’t know. It’s our best record, I don’t know about songs.” Duffel-coated brooding frontman Nick Krill clearly enjoys the odd profundity, so, in between mouthfuls of lettuce, I give him another chance to speak in abstraction about what we can expect from the new album.

“The sound’s a lot thicker," says Krill. "There are a lot more musical parts happening at once. In the studio it’s so different from on stage, we’ve got more time to tinker and mess with the sound, we’re much less spontaneous.” Krill identifies himself as the guilty party when I inquire as to which of the guitarists adds to his onstage performance with a joint-defying windmill action. “I think that’s me,” he mutters—more out of asocial reticence than arrogance—raising the limb in question with a nervous swish of his dark curtains.

Talk turns to their current European tour; they arrived in Edinburgh three hours ago from Aberdeen (“umm…pretty industrial”), and haven’t had time to look around the capital. “It’s awesome to be here, but we can’t wait for Italy; we’re going through Bologna, Florence…“ Although they haven’t visited Edinburgh, they’ve played the Glasgow venues and are full of praise for their British fans. “It’s like the US,” suggests Hobson Jnr. “We do well in the big cities over there, but when it comes to the smaller places, no one knows who we are. But when they hear us...” Hobson shares a grin with his fellow band-mates.

Despite their awkward and excessively youthful outer appearance, it’s good to see the band exuding an air of confidence in their collective ability. And they should do – they’ve been playing together for more than ten years. They’ll be revisiting the legendary SXSW festival in Austin, Texas later this year, so I wonder whether we can expect any performances at UK Festivals this coming summer? “We have before, but no, we haven’t made plans for that yet. We’d sure like to.” We share fond memories of Reading Festival in 2005, when I recall them being the critics’ choice of the weekend. On this nostalgic note, I make to leave, and the Spinto Band kindly insist that I find them after the gig for a drink and a chat. But, for a band that in their infancy used to refer to themselves as Free Beer, they don’t seem like the drinking type.