Not Overusing 'The Kinks'

Having always spent extra days in Sydney on previous tours, Spoon’s Britt Daniel decided to spend a couple of weeks in Melbourne in the lead-up to this run of shows. As he enters an organic café in Collingwood, Daniel brings a quiet, polite presence. He decides not to order anything and takes a seat. ”I’m here to write, theoretically, but I haven’t written too much yet. I’ve been hanging out,” he admits. Daniel praises an Alpha60 fashion show he attended at MPavilion, which featured Snuff Puppets, the night prior (“I dunno how any fashion show’s gonna top it again”) and finds some video footage on his smartphone to share.  

"I have a feeling, I just know [whether] I like something or not, you know? And if I like it, and it’s happened really fast, then that’s amazing. It’s the best thing in the world.”   

Daniel found accommodation on Airbnb and “was in the ‘CNB’ for the first week – CBD,” he corrects, practising his use of this three-letter abbreviation (or TLA) in a sentence. “We just call it downtown, never heard of CBD before,” he defends. After much discussion about songwriting, this scribe is particularly interested to hear about the beseeching masterpiece Do You from Spoon’s latest and eighth album, They Want My Soul. Turns out it came together “over years”. “There was a version where we played what we call The Kinks beat, where it’s like, ‘dunk-dunk-a-dunk-dunk,’ that kinda thing. And it worked like that, and the producer wanted to do it like that, but I just thought that we had done that too many times before.” Daniel offers up Don’t Make Me A Target and The Way We Get By as examples of other Spoon songs utilising “The Kinks beat” of which he speaks. So does Daniel ever get suspicious if a song comes together quickly? He pauses before offering: “No… I have a feeling, I just know [whether] I like something or not, you know? And if I like it, and it’s happened really fast, then that’s amazing. It’s the best thing in the world.”   

While Spoon were on hiatus, after Transference (their seventh record), Daniel turned his attention to a side-project and super-group of sorts, Divine Fits. And Would That Not Be Nice’s bassline is a corker! “Dan [Boeckner, Wolf Parade/Handsome Furs] came up with that, yeah! That’s really good,” Daniel commends. “We made it in a jam and he was just playing it… I knew as soon as he started playing it. I was, like, hitting record, ‘We’re not gonna lose this,’ you know?” 

Before owning a smartphone, Daniel “used to carry a digital recorder around” for when inspiration struck. “There’s a lot of subtleties that make something work and it’s funny that two minutes later I can come back to something and not remember exactly how I was doing it before, and it doesn’t feel quite as good,” he laments. 

When Spoon’s sixth album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007) went Top Ten in the States, Daniel’s grandma was still around to swell with pride. “I remember she called me when the Year End lists came out and even in her town of Temple, Texas there was a national article on best albums of the year, and we were in the national top ten. It was also cool hearing her say, ‘[adopts cute nanna voice] Radiohead,’ and, ‘Bruce Springsteen’. She said, ‘You’re up there with them! I don’t know who this is, but…’”