He’s the lead singer in a band that, with little hype, sold nearly 700,000 copies of their debut album, bagging a Mercury prize nomination in the process. So when Dave McCabe opens proceedings on the Zutons’ new CD, Tired of Hanging Around, with the lines, “These should be the best days of your life/But you’ve worried all the goodness away,” you want to ask: “What’s there to worry about?”
The singer and chief songwriter of the Liverpool five-piece is given to agonising — about the meaning of life one minute, the fixtures and fittings in his hotel room the next. Seemingly constrained by the role he has chosen to play and the creative format he’s forced to operate within, he nonetheless turns out perfect, unforgettable pop songs. The mixed nature of this blessing seems to needle him.
“You get to the point in your life,” he mutters, in an adenoidal Scouse singsong you could grout a shower with, “when you start opening all these wardrobes you’ve never opened before. And you speak to older people about it, and everyone’s like, ‘Look, you’re just thinking too much, you’re growing up.’ But when someone says, ‘It’s a lovely job, enjoy yourself while you’re young,’ you worry. I think there’s something good about being old: sitting there in my house with me slippers on, not having to deal with people any more.”
Since swaggering onto the music scene in 2004 with Who Killed the Zutons?, the band have banked a huge amount of goodwill — with an incendiary live show, a flailing, leggy saxophonist (Abi Harding), who is the ideal visual foil for McCabe’s scuffed-up slacker, and a clutch of self-styled “zombie-soul” songs (You Will You Won’t, Pressure Point, Remember Me) that lodged in record-buyers’ memory banks and refused to leave. In an age when the spotlight’s glare has flicked from Franz to the Kaisers to the Monkeys, the Zutons, tortoise-like, have come up on the outside. Now they’ve ramped up their sound on a superb second album that will please existing fans and should win plenty of new ones.
Yet the 24-year-old McCabe comes across as a lot less cock-a-hoop than someone in his position might be expected to be. In part, that’s because he likes a good fret. A self-proclaimed hater of anonymous hotel rooms, he’s sitting in one that might have been specially selected to feed his aversion: it’s in a basement, for starters, and its occupant, only just risen at noon, bears a savage, suppurating shaving cut and is almost certainly counting the cost of last night’s excess.
“It’s payday today,” he sings on a new song, It’s the Little Things We Do, before adding, “just for having a good time.” He seems both gung-ho and anxious. “It’s the age of three chords again,” he says, in reference to the post-Libertines explosion of thrashy, lippy garage bands, “of not being a great musician.” Not that he’s having any of the art-school or muso tags, either. “We don’t really want to be a cool band. I don’t think of myself as a cool person: I don’t walk in a bar and there’s girls all over me and loads of interesting fellas with stupid hats.”
He’s content, he says, to be somewhere in the middle, as, you suspect, are the band’s discerning fan base. “It’s not like I’m making James Blunt or Coldplay music for people who don’t actually like music. Our songs are for people who like music, not trends.”
That’s the opposition duly dispatched. But he has a point. When the band he formed four years ago with Boyan Chowdhury (guitar), Sean Payne (drums) and Russell Pritchard (bass) first began to make a stir outside their home city, pigeonholes were almost arbitrarily allotted to them. Signing to the same label as fellow Liverpool band the Coral, they were thus in the vanguard of the “new Merseybeat”.
Made up as zombies for an early photo shoot because they’re all camera-shy, the quintet were wacky purveyors of dungeon pop. The comic-book-caper artwork on their early releases didn’t exactly dent this perception. But what got lost is that, if you strip away all the packaging, what’s left is a band writing exhilarating, eccentric pop songs, full of quintessentially Liverpool turns of phrase (“I just can’t put my finger on what makes me bite my nails”), all sung by a singer with a great, gravelly soul rasp, whose vocal prowess has never once been remarked upon.
“It’s probably because we’re a Scouse band,” McCabe chuckles. “They hear the accent and don’t remember that I can actually sing. But I don’t think anyone’s singing much these days, are they? It’s all talking-singing, you know, like the Arctic Monkeys or Franz Ferdinand.” If he sounds like an old man griping in a pub, it was a role he studied avidly for a while before the band reconvened to record their second album.
“I went off a bit,” he admits. “A lot of people [in Liverpool] have changed. Sometimes you want to say, ‘I’ve been there and I’ve done this,’ but when you see someone and they’re a bit cagey with you, you think, why? Then it’s like, oh, yeah, I’m in that band that’s done well and been on the telly.”
Coming to terms with the Zutons’ success, McCabe hampered the adjustment process by embarking on a bender. “There was this three-month period where I was getting pissed all the time. I stepped back and looked at meself and it was like, ‘F***ing hell, I’m not being nice to people.’ ’Cos I’m quite rude to people when I’m pissed. But when I said that, friends went, ‘You’ve always been rude when you’re pissed.’ ”
He’s a complex character. Looking at the transcript of this interview, he seems like a right mardy moaner. But in person, he’s warm and appealingly scatty, spraying one-liners and profanities around the room, laughing at his own contrariness. “I do love what we do,” McCabe says, “but I’m in a funny phase with it at the minute. It’s been so long since we’ve done a big tour, I don’t even know what our band’s about any more.”
Not long to wait. A world tour kicks off this month. New Zutons songs such as the T Rex skiffle of Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love? and the brassy blues of Valerie will lay waste to radio and the festival circuit. McCabe might even learn to feel comfortable inside his own skin. Those older people: did he take their advice about thinking too much? “I think I’ve just psychoanalysed myself,” he says, slumping down, exhausted, on the sofa. From where he takes in his surroundings. “This is not my bedroom,” he announces. “I would never have any of them lamps. It’s nice and all that, but it’s not real, is it?”
Tired of Hanging Around is released tomorrow
