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Interview: Spector

The last time I interviewed Spector, it didn’t go very well I will admit. Radio Oxide refused to air my tour de force owing to frontman Fred Macpherson’s incessant, rambling and ludicrous chat. Choice nuggets included ‘I like your jacket. Turquoise. More people should wear that.’ when asked about musical influences. With neither the supreme inclination nor superior editing facilities apparent, the interview was unexposed to the Oxford airwaves. But with their headline slot at Oxford’s Gathering comes potential atonement. That’s right dammit. Spector Interview Round Two! Predictably, the disappointing fact that Fred isn’t actually present (‘He’s watching a horror film. It’s got a one word title I think.’) means this interview is both much shorter and more coherent than the previous. But more than most contemporary bands, Spector is reliant on the dynamism of its lead, so it feels like the equivalent of Beef Wellington with no pastry. And maybe no beef. Feel free to swap in an alternative food analogy.

Exuberantly courting controversy and ever mindful of fame, Spector’s debut album Enjoy It While It Lasts represents both anthemic indie rock in the vein of The Killers and Arcade Fire, but also a quasi-ironic dig at a transient celebrity culture.

But are they a pastiche of an indie boy band?

Aside from some initial confusion over the word ‘pastiche’, Jed Cullen replies ‘Music is our job. We’re musicians not personalities. If you want to put music to a lot of people, which is what you have to do to survive as musicians you have to do things like interviews. We’re entertainers and we like to make interviews entertaining and we like to enjoy ourselves when we do it, that’s really what its about. If were having fun usually other people will have fun.

But have they sacrificed musical integrity by aiming to grab headlines and sound bites? ‘Absolutely not. We don’t try and get headlines in any way, it’s not relevant to our music. Someone very high up in the music industry said to me, ‘You’ve got to remember that there’s the music, and everything after is bullshit’. It’s so important to have journalists and media, they have to exist, and as musicians it’s part of our job but were not [actively] trying to achieve headlines.’

Is this partly also because they’re very obviously emulating The Strokes, The Killers et al? ‘That’s like saying to Roy Lichtenstein, ‘oh you’re just copying someone’. Actually not Roy Lichtenstein, I hate Roy Lichtenstein. But it’s the difference between copying someone and using a motif, and motifs are very important.’

So how do they respond to people who say indie guitar bands are dead?

‘I agree with them. I guess in depends what you class as indie guitar bands. With the genre ‘indie’ we never use it in a serious way. We’re not indie, we’re on a major label.’

If this is testament to the band’s success, much of this must be attributed to Fred’s charismatic frontman persona. Perpetually cracking onstage wisecracks, sometimes it seems like the band is a vehicle for Fred’s ego.

Jed frowns. ‘Fred has worked so hard for this to happen. And if it was all about him I don’t think I’d mind… I’ve known Fred for eight years and the thing you have to understand is that he has a completely instinctive want to entertain people, and that’s greater than his ambition. Whether he was in a band or not people would probably say he was an attention seeker … but he’s a joy giver.’

In a brief moment of Fred-esque humour, Jed tells me Fred is a fan of One Direction; ‘He likes the music and the songs. Harry Styles has an incredible taste in music! But I mean it’s not all great because he has all those horrible cougars after him’.

Even so, it ultimately feels like the spectre of Spector is Fred himself. Both subscribing to and subverting the modern allure of fame, with a winning humour Spector could be a band with strong music credentials if we could only get past all that bloody faux-irony beforehand…

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