Nine Songs: The Cribs

It wasn’t interpersonal; the Jarmans may be brothers, but their relationship always felt more Gibb than Gallagher. It was, first and foremost, a tension between a raucous, DIY ethos – one which seemed more authentic than the affected outsider spirit a lot of their contemporaries were keen to emphasise – and an inescapable, if subconscious, tendency towards melodic, pop songwriting.

Take their first single, 2004’s “Another Number”; its primal and inchoate production barely disguised the fact that this was a song destined to be chanted by festival crowds with as much gusto as even the most stirring rendition of “Live Forever”.

A further tension sprang from the fact that The Cribs were a band of working-class outsiders who had suddenly been thrust very much inside. Swept up in the post-punk revival of the early 2000s – which has, since then, not inaccurately been rechristened indie sleaze – brothers Ryan, Gary and Ross Jarman found success in a period in which the tabloid press took as much interest in the indie scene’s personal intrigues as the NME did in the music itself.

This was also a period in which appearances on Soccer AM and Never Mind the Buzzcocks were an inescapable part of the media circuit. For lesser bands, the cult of personality began to eclipse the music. That The Cribs managed to maintain their underground spirit in this above-ground world, and to enjoy success within the mainstream without sacrificing an inch of their DIY ethos, is perhaps their greatest success story of all.

In more recent years, another tension began to surface; that inevitable and time-worn tale of a band torn between their primitive instinct to make music, and the necessity of instead dedicating their time to legal wrangling and navigating the seedier corners of the music business.

After the release of 2017’s 24-7 Rock Star Shit, the Jarmans began managing themselves and soon uncovered a labyrinthian mass of contracts and legal documents, all signed behind their leather-jacket-clad backs, all indicating one sobering fact: the band owned very little of the music they had been making for the previous decade-and-a-half.

Taking their first ever extended break from touring and recording, they realised that the only way out was through; rather than admit defeat, they stubbornly pored over contract after contract, acting as their own legal representatives. Through dogged determination, they eventually reclaimed the rights to their catalogue.

There were nights when, tumbling down a seemingly bottomless pit of legal jargon, the Jarmans considered packing it in altogether. No musician gets into the game with the ambition of one day becoming fluent in contract law or the finer points of intellectual property, but for a band so defined by their ambivalence towards the music industry’s machinations it must have felt particularly egregious.

It’s easy to imagine that in such moments, nostalgia for simpler times would’ve crept in; a time before the name Jarman had been written above a single dotted line.

“Anything that we wrote before we started going on the road or before we became professional and started putting records out, I always hold in a higher degree of reverence,” Ryan tells me. “It holds that position because it was hopeless, there was no reason for me doing it.”

“I do still have that idealism towards it,” he adds. “I still view it as something that I’ve got to do, and the thing that I get out of it – especially playing guitar and singing – is that it’s almost my primary form of communication these days. I can say way more with a guitar than I can in writing, or that I can verbalise.”

Perhaps the reason that The Cribs ultimately rose above their legal disputes, just as they transcended the British indie scene that could quite easily have eaten them alive, is because this idealism endured and grew, thick and calloused by time. “Brothers Won’t Break”, the closing song on their new album Selling a Vibe, is a defiant and fitting tribute to that endurance; a record-closer which promises that there is plenty more to come.

Just as the music Jarman wrote in his early years in Wakefield, West Yorkshire represents a kind of creative ideal, the records he was listening to in those hopeless, hopeful days have an equally unsurpassable significance to him.

“A band could come out now, be amazing and put out my favourite record of this era and it would still have nowhere near as much of an impact on me as Ugly Kid Joe did in the ‘90s, because I was a kid. The bands that get you in that time of your life will always seem like the big stuff to you.”

It is with that in mind that Jarman’s describes his Nine Songs selections as being “almost like flags in the ground throughout my life.”