To The Max

Maximo Park's frontman Paul Smith is famous for his onstage exuberance. Has he ever fallen over and busted his arse? The bandleader chuckles. “I've been pretty lucky, really. I jumped off a stage once at a festival – it was in the North East and I was so excited that there was a festival in the North East [of England] and, you know, I was trying to put on the best show I possibly could, and at the end of the show I just thought, 'Well, where do you go from here?' And I jumped off the stage and landed on the ground kind of on both feet but, yeah! The jump went straight through my spine probably and I just thought, 'That's not the right thing to do,' and I never did that again. It was definitely a misguided act, but at the same time you get carried away onstage and the only other time where I can think of something where I thought, 'Right, I'm gonna – I could've really necked myself there,' was in Italy. I remember the stage was set up quite differently to what we're used to, and it was quite a small stage, and I was running across the stage probably in the last couple of songs and kinda ramping it up, and I was sort of running sideways and I tripped over Archis [Tiku, bass]'s monitor and I went flyin'! And I think I banged my head and just kept going.”

Don't be fooled by Smith's rambunctious onstage persona, the North East Englishman is softly spoken, extremely articulate and puts a lot of thought into his responses. He also certainly doesn't take life as a touring musician for granted and enjoys exploring every town and district his band touch down in. “Whenever I get to a new place I just tend to go for a wander without a map,” he shares. “If it's a big sort of sprawling metropolis I'll take map, but just going around the corner and not knowing what's there is quite exciting, and thinking you could see an amazing building or you could end up in a great record shop,” he laughs.

“One of the things that I often do is just go a day early to places since, you know, it's lucky that we get our airfares paid for as a band. It doesn't feel like you're shelling out loads to go to all of these places so I don't mind an extra night in a hotel or something beforehand, it gives me a chance to acclimatise and see something more of a place. But, yeah, it's a shame. Some of the other lads should come on these little journeys, but maybe you'd just end up talking loads – end up at a place and you'd have a fun day, but it wouldn't be the same kind of solitary journey that you might have where you have that little time to reflect.”

It sounds as if Smith should take a film crew along and shoot his own travelogue, something like Steve Coogan's BBC sitcom The Trip. The singer gently laughs, “Absolutely. I enjoy wandering around and I enjoyed that series, actually.” So who would be Smith's travelling partner of choice, as Welsh comedian Rob Brydon was to Coogan in that series? “I don't know anyone as funny as Rob Brydon,” he confesses. “I'm unfortunately a bit of a loner, I think.”

During these spontaneous ambles, Smith admits he often feels inspired to write notes: “I try and write as much as I possibly can. Going to lots of different places gives you extra stimulation and extra things to write about… For the most part our lyrics are very personal and they're quite descriptive at times, but I'd like to do something that is more purely descriptive and maybe do that in conjunction with a slightly different type of music. I'm not entirely sure how it would work out but, yeah! I always write down things that I'm interested in and just things that catch my eye, really, and things that seem unusual to me. And you can always go back to your notes and look at them and go, 'Wow, that's kinda like the first cliché that you would think of when you're in Australia, let's get rid of that,' and, you know, 'That's the best bit there'. You can go and assess these things, but it's good to keep a note of it and kind of map where you've been in terms of words.”

When it's revealed that this scribe's favourite track from Maximo Park's latest The National Health set is Write This Down, Smith details that particular song's genesis. “Well Lukas [Wooller, keyboard] had a crazy synth riff, Dunc [Lloyd, guitar] had a crazy guitar riff and it felt like they couldn't go together, but when we played them it suddenly sounded very Maximo Park and very right. And so I put together this little story of a strange relationship I had when I was in my teens – in my late teens – and for some reason it'd just popped up in my mind. But it was about this girl who had written lots of stuff in her diary about wanting to go out with me, and then we were going out together and she decided to share all of this with me and the rest of the story is in the song. It's a pretty full-on song so we thought it would be a pretty good one to kind of reintroduce people to Maximo Park with.”

Has there ever been a time when a friend or family member has approached Smith believing they are the inspiration behind a song? “A girl who I used to go out with did say to me, 'Oh, my friends keep telling me about all these songs that you've put on your records,' and, you know, 'Why did you write all these songs about me?'” he recalls. “And I said, 'None of these songs are about you,' which was pretty embarrassing, but I had to say it 'cause she was wound up about it and I just thought, 'You're getting wound up over nothing,' hahaha. I think she was quite hurt that the songs weren't about her in the end. She was like, 'Ah, I don't wanna hear about myself all the time,' and I was like, 'Well, they're not about you, so…' That's the only occasion where I've had a sort of lyrical confrontation.

“I mean, a lot of [the lyrics] are composites where a line fits in with another line and creates a better song, and so you end up having things that are about a multitude of different people and different experiences that make a song more solid and palatable. So there you go.”