Gomez is sitting backstage in LA., in a black room with black walls and a black ceiling, when this guy—a doorman or a talk-show host, no one can cell for certain—pokes his head in the door to ask a question. It's one of those stupid music-journalist questions, like "What kind of music do you play?" The kind of question the guys in the band would rather not answer, the kind of question they can't answer, so instead one of them starts singing: “Scaramouche Scaramouche will you do the fandango?”
At which point the whole backstage mess, all five members of Gomez, plus their touring percussionist and manager and crew and opening band, erupts into a raucous chant: Thunderbolt and lightning - very, very frightening! Which, if you don't already know it, is a couple of lines from Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," and somehow the tune has become a theme song for this band, and not because everyone in the band saw Wayne’s World, and not because Queen's Freddie Mercury was a way-out-Englishman capable of inducing mass hysteria in the most unlikely places —though these things are certainly part of it—but because it somehow reminds them of their music. Never mind that Gomez never really sounds like Queen. Just that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a damn long song, a funny and awkward song that rises and dodges and then returns, and ultimately it's a song that's really, really fun to sing - which is, after all, the point.
Gomez's love of music is nearly out of control. You can sing anything to these guys, even random things, and they'll sing back, because they can't leave it alone they have to sing back, and if they don't know the words or they don't know the song, they'll make something up to keep the music going. They will burst into song in hotel lobbies and elevators and crowded restaurants. I have heard them take Keanu Reeves's final speech from the movie Point Break and turn it into blues and swing and a crooner ballad.
They call their own music psychedelic blues - that's their riff, their throwaway. It's what they usually say when people ask them what kind of music they play, because, really, they don't know what kind of music they play. They do know it's music you feel as much as hear. Like "TIjuana Lady," a slow, sweet number about getting lost in Mexico and needing a woman to lead you home. It is a funny song that includes the word enchilada in its lyrics. It's a song the posh, hip ultrasuede L.A. crowd nearly shout themselves hoarse requesting. A song that moves the crowd in famously unmovable San Francisco, moves them to raising lit lighters in holy sway. It is, in truth, a song that should not be possible, not for five white guys from a small town in England. I mean, sure, Otis Redding or Ray Charles or Nina Simone, they could do songs like this. They could do them all night and all day and no one would ever bat an eye. But five white guys, and not one of them older than 23?
If you've heard Gomez, then maybe you already understand. Maybe you already know the story of how these blokes got together and, on a whim, just for the fun of it, recorded twelve tracks in someone's basement and passed the tape around to a few friends, including a guy named Steve Fellows who worked at the local record shop. They didn't know that years back Steve had played in a band called Comsat Angels and that he had serious industry connections. Steve played the tape for an ex-band mate who had become a big-time record producer, and then this guy played it for that guy and for that guy, and three weeks later, three weeks after they passed the tape to Steve, Gomez had more than twenty offers from more than twenty major labels.
They didn't go for the big money or for the hotshot producer. "We were all set to fly over to America and meet the guys from A&M and Island," recounts singer and guitarist Benjamin Ottewell. "Then we met Dave Boyd from Hut Records. He was this very mellow, very genuine music guy. It was a typical Gomez moment—we all reached the same decision at the same time, though no one ever talked about it. After that there was no point flying to America and developing a cocaine habit."
Boyd in turn gave Gomez total control. So the band produced the album Bring it On (Hut/Virgin) itself, and in the next eight months it won three of the top music prizes in England-the Mercury Music Award for best album and the NME and the Q music awards for best new band. At the Q Awards, John Lee Hooker took the stage to give Gomez its award. He had a stack of the band's CDs in his hand. He held the CDs before him as one would hold an offering. No one had given him the CDs, and no one had cold him to hold them onstage. Nevertheless he took the stage and held the CDs and looked out into the crowd and said, "I done listen to this record over and over, and I can't find no defect. The kids like it, and the older folks are gonna catch up real soon."
So how does Gomez do what it does? You can break it down. You can say that besides Ottewell, there are Tom Gray on vocals, guitar and keyboards, and Ian Ball on vocals, guitar and harmonica, and Paul Blackburn on bass and vocals, and ally Peacock on drums and percussion. You can say that before he made a record Gray was studying political science or that Blackburn was a few years shy of being a pharmacist. You can say all that and mention all their individual musical strengths and you can miss the point entirely. With Gomez there is no one focus. There is Ottewell, whose voice is not of this world-it is a deep, reverent baritone, the kind of voice that shakes windows. There is Peacock, perhaps the band's best musician, but when Peacock plays drums, he doesn't play them like other musicians do; he plays melody, which is usually reserved for the guitarist. This means that unlike typical bands, where the bassist leads the drummer, in Gomez nobody leads anybody. Which means that when they go off, and they always go off, off into some wild blues yonder, someplace where the music seems to be coming from all angles, where it seems to be an accumulation of all music, and from which it seems they'll never be able to bring it together again-suddenly, without signal or warning, there they are, all coming back in, all five of them returning to the song at the same time.
They can do this because musically they are not five separate guys. The bond that unites Gomez is not the kind of bond that comes from meeting a guy in a bar and learning that you both play music and wouldn't it be fun to put a band together. No, what unites Gomez is another kind of bond. Ian and Oily have known each other since they were about four days old. Tom and Paul and Oily and Ian all, at one time or another, went to school together and played music together and can now finish one another's sentences.
"We're from Southport," Ian explains. "There's not a whole lot there besides music."
"It's mostly a retirement community for Liverpool." says Oily. "Ian keeps getting into trouble for talking bad about it."
"I've never said anything bad about Southport," Ian says. "It's just that there are a lot of old people there. Gomez is the sound of being surrounded by old age."
After the show, when they're utterly exhausted, sprawled across a van, waiting to go to the hotel and get maybe two hours of sleep before starring in on tomorrow's torturous schedule, Tom looks up at the club's sign.
"Hey, we just played the Whisky!"
"The goddamn Whisky," says Ian, and suddenly they're all singing-no prelude, no discussion-all six of them are three bars into the Doors "Break on Through." But then Jim Morrison becomes Freddie Mercury, and it's "Bohemian Rhapsody" time again. A minute ago, they were too tired to move. Now they're all sitting up; now they’re all singing.
The next night, they play another historic L.A. venue, the Troubador. The audience is a collection of industry heavies producers, music writers, record-label executives. People who have a definite sway in the career that will be Gomez. Tom spends most of the night in an ongoing exchange with three Englishmen in the audience. Between songs, the guys in Gomez talk about English football and they talk about English politics and they talk about someone from Southport who might have dated someone else from Southport. They act like everyone's their friend, and then they play some music. The three guys from England and the several hundred folks from America go crazy. They pound and dance and sweat and scream. They may not know why, they may not have the words to describe it; they just have the feeling as deep down as one can have that feeling.
Scaramouche, Scaramollche -will you do the fandango?!