We chat to They Might Be Giants about life, music and everything in between

Is it Istanbul? Or Constantinople? No! Later this year, They Might Be Giants are going to be coming to Nottingham to celebrate the Covid- and injury-delayed anniversary tour for Flood – their seminal art-rock album beloved by fans to this day. Ahead of the Rock City gig, we spoke with John Flansburgh, one half of the original duo.

After over 40 years and 23 albums, what is the number one thing you’ve learned?

Learned? Bring enough laundry. You know, sustaining a level of consistency is actually a really good long term strategy. I think a lot of times people sort of cast about and experiment because they’re tired of themselves and they’re tired of their careers and they sort of... stop thinking about the audience and what their experience is like and you get a lot of performances and efforts where people are really not playing to their strengths. It’s hard. Nobody wants to feel like their strengths have been established.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the second people are pigeonholed they kind of lash out against it. Sometimes the pigeonholing is kind of accurate, but nobody wants to be pigeonholed. I mean, we don’t want to be pigeonholed either, but you can have sort of a neurotic response to common notions about yourself. You just have to really keep things in proportion. 

Is it about knowing who you are and what you’re doing and not letting those prescriptions bother you?

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what it’s like to be Tommy Lee. I can’t imagine having life issues much greater than whatever adjectives are ascribed to our project. To be honest, when I see descriptions of our band I kind of recoil. I kind of see ourselves and what we’re doing as being kind of art-schooly and a little bit complicated but it’s pop music and it’s designed to hold up to repeated listening.

But for a lot of people, especially rock critics who are the ones asking us the questions, they have a really hard time with music with any kind of humorous sensibility ... And I can understand it, but I hope that what we’re doing somehow seems exceptional; but I don’t want to get into the business of flattering myself.

You’re coming back to the UK for some rescheduled dates. Have you got any fond memories of the Brits when you come across the pond?

Well you know what’s funny for us, we got closer to experiencing Beatle- mania in Britain than anywhere else. It’s the only place where we actually had a record in the charts because in the US it works very differently. We never really thought about getting a record into the charts.

The UK has always had this really high-pitched, ever evolving pop scene, you know, with the Top of the Pops idea which is very much part of your culture. It was really interesting to experience it, and also to experience it from afar because we weren’t really invested in it ... it was just like ‘wow this is what it feels like to have an album in the charts’.

It was totally exhausting, because the record company mechanism makes all of these assumptions about how it has to go after that, but it was very interesting to witness and I got to meet a lot of interesting people. 

Will you be bringing the stick that you’ve recently acquired with you?

Haha, yes. For people that are not familiar with this stick thing, it’s not the fusion rock bass instrument, it’s an actual stick that triggers a drum sound that we rig up on stage, and it just provides a backbeat to a song but there’s a whole theatrical rigmarole as it’s introduced and it’s just a visual effect that we started doing very early on into our career with this one song Lie Still, Little Bottle which is from our second album, Lincoln. I think at some point we made the mistake where one stick was broken or left behind and we replaced the stick with an incredibly heavy one, and I just didn’t have the upper arm strength to hoist this thing and carry it through for an entire song so it fell out of the show and it just sat in the corner of our lock up with all our equipment for years and years.

And then finally ... I just picked up this piece of windfall, and it was perfectly light and 6 ft tall, so we’ve brought it back into the show. We were trying to figure out what could be a protective road case built for this specific stick.

Is it that sort of theatricality and wonder that really trademarks a They Might Be Giants set?

With the stick, there is a whole Stravinsky fanfare now. We present the stick in silence, there is a solemn theatrical element to it which is completely out of scale with its real importance. It’s just a fun part of the show, like a lot of other things it’s become larger than life. 

What other larger than life things can we expect from the show

We’re doing these shows in the UK where we are playing all of the songs from Flood. One thing we’re doing is we’re playing one of our songs, Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love, sonically backwards. When I say sonically, we’re not just playing it musically or metrically backwards, we’re playing it sonically backwards so when you reverse the audio or video, it actually scans as the song and you can understand the words, and as much as possible the instruments are playing the parts they did on the record, as best as they can reproduce them.

When you get in the business of recording things backwards you learn all kinds of things and what the hardest parts to record backwards are ... It’s quite a challenging thing to do, and we picked the song because it’s short, so it’s not too much of an endurance test for us or the audience. 

And then we actually record the performance and at the beginning of the second set we project the video of what we just did, sort of as a proof of work. 

So you’re playing songs from Flood throughout the show. How does it feel to have an album that is continually loved by audiences, 30 years on?

It’s always been our calling-card record. We spent a lot of time making it and it did capture the band at a key moment so we’re happy to reproduce it. We’ve been on the road in the United States doing what we’ve called ‘The Big Show’. When we started doing the Flood shows, and they all started selling out, we added a horn section and that’s given the scope to the musicality of the show.

We’re currently touring with 65-70 songs in the repertoire so the shows can really change quite radically from night to night. That’s been quite an interesting musical challenge. 

It must be quite difficult to make those selections when you’ve got such a huge back catalogue.

There are definitely people that want us to play the record in sequence, which we have done in our careers. But it’s already strange touring on playing an album that’s already in your catalogue, like it’s a little bit of music under glass. I feel like by liberating ourselves from playing the album in sequence it makes the whole theatrical experience of what we’re doing to have a certain element of surprise. 

So yeah, we’re keeping it lively and because we’re doing two sets we can do a lot of things besides Flood. It’s a nice way to introduce people who just came back into the mix because they loved Flood but stepped off after. For a lot of people in the UK, They Might Be Giants was a part of their teen years. 

You’ve just covered Irving Berlin’s Lazy for the Public Song Project. What made you gravitate towards that song.

It’s the 100th anniversary of WNYC which is a very beloved public radio station in New York City. It’s actually the most popular station in New York City which is interesting because it’s a public station and doesn’t have any commercials, and yet people like it.

So, they asked us, and said they were going to make this event record and have covers of songs that were 100 years old and so the challenge was finding an interesting song, and John [Linell] found Lazy.

It seems 100 years ago the meaning of the word 'lazy' was different. I think of it now as meaning slovenly, but in this song, this person is obsessed with reading books all day and being in their own mind and seems much more like a cerebral person lost in their own mind. That’s what the song is about, and there was this sister group that did a version of the song with a whole bunch of extra verses in it. It’s very charming, and we actually took the verses from the song, which Irving Berlin wrote for them. 

New music? What’s on the way?

We're going to be coming out with a live record called Beast of Horns sometime probably in the summer that captures what we’ve been doing with this 8-piece band. It really is a horn spotlight record and all of that repertoire is from the live show we’ve been doing. 

And the last question, if They Might Be Giants was a flavour, what would it be?

I don’t mind the fact that They Might Be Giants is a take it or leave it project, so... I would say maybe anchovies. I mean, because anchovies are absolutely delicious. I love Caesar salad and white anchovies... but for a lot of people it’s too much. Turn that s*** down. 

TMBG perform at Rock City on 15th November 2024.

@tmbgofficial