Menswear in 'better than we expected them to be' sensation!! When the darlings of the music weeklies played at Warwick University, they proved themselves to be an actually quite good live band. Dave and Tim managed to get a few words with the two who aren't total arseholes, Chris (guitar and origami) and Stuart (bass).

It's been quite a sudden rise to fame for Menswear. How do you react to the suggestion that it's all down to press agents and the music papers?
Chris: I think if we were a crap band then we wouldn't have taken it...the press agents can only take it so far with a band before people start getting pissed off and realise how good they really are. And I think we're good.

Do you get other bands resenting the hype you've had?
Stuart: Yeah, some jealousy. There's a few bands we hang around with and we've caught them saying stuff about us, but I don't want to mention any names.

We recently spoke to Clockwork Dogs, who spoke very highly of you
C: Really?

No. They said you weren't a lot of fun to tour with.
C: That's fair enough, 'cos we were cunts to them.
S: We were cunts to them, they were cunts to us.

How did you enjoy Glastonbury?
C: I really enjoyed it. And I think we pulled it off well.
S: We were the second best selling shirt at Glastonbury after Oasis. And that made me happy.

After a band has been hyped in the music press, there's often a backlash. Does it worry you?
C: It does worry me, but I think we can last..live through it hopefully with the second album. Because you're going to get a backlash probably after the first album. It happened with Suede and it's probably going to happen to Oasis [ermm?...] and Elastica probably as well. If you're a good band you can live through it. Suede have come out the other side and started to get a fanbase up again. They sold out the Albert Hall and that's, like, seven thousand. So if you're a good band, you can do it. It's not going to be nice, though, seeing a picture of yourself in the press and them slagging you off...
S: Even bad reviews. It just sort of winds you up because we've had good reviews for really awful gigs. And there's been gigs where we've thought we've really been on top form and we've just had, like, complete slaggings for it. And that sort of pisses us all off really, dunnit?

Do you think you've had good reviews just because you're Menswear?
S: No, no.
C: Yes.
S: No.
C: Well, at one point.
S: I've never seen a very good live review of us anyway.
C: The best one was probably in Select actually.
S: Yeah, that was very praising. But as far as I know the NME has never given us a good live review. We got the first praising from the NME ever today. And today was the first time in ages that Melody Maker have slagged us off. They sort of work against each other all the time.
[Chris is doing origami]

Chris, do you often do origami?
C: Before I go onstage, when I'm stressed and have nothing to do with my hands. Do you want me to make you something? I'll do you a bird while you do the interview.

How do you feel about playing University dates?
C: It's good to play this sort of thing. Sometimes you feel a bit cheated because it isn't really your crowd, they're here to celebrate the end of term, or end of exams and sometimes the response is...well, I don't know what the response is going to be tonight. I don't know what the buzz is like about us coming here tonight. I'm looking forward to it, hopefully play to some new people who haven't heard us.
S: It's always better to play to your own crowd. This is like a club night and when we've played clubs before, even when there's been fanbase there, there's also been a lot of people standing around at the sides watching. But tonight, everyone's getting pissed up and by the time we get on everyone'll be fucking collapsed on the floor anyway.

Do you think that putting out 'I'll Manage Somehow' as a limited edition restricted your audience at all?
C: 'Daydreamer' went straight into the chart at number 14. So I don't think it's limited the audience that much. It's part of the plan really. I mean, if 'I'll Manage Somehow' had got into the top 20, we would've been in the spotlight more than we were already. We didn't want a big hit with it because we hadn't recorded the album. Now we've recorded the album, we put 'Daydreamer' out. If 'I'll Manage Somehow' had been a big hit, the record company would have probably pushed us to record the album really quickly. We just wanted some time to breathe really...we were getting slagged off for not having a single out, so we thought, "put a single out, do 5,000 of them, you've got the best of both worlds really."
S: On the album, there is going to be a different version of 'I'll Manage Somehow' on it. Well as the first single went, the B-side, 'Second Hand', we think that's a pile of shit now, so fuck it. We're not that upset that not many people got the single. We're not going to re-release it. It's a nicer version on the album, so people won't really have missed out.

So when is the album scheduled for release?
C: Second week of September. It's really good.
S: Yeah, we were surprised. Because on the singles so far, the production and stuff and that, it's been alright, but the bloke we're working with now has got, like, really fucking good sounds for us now. We've had more time to work stuff like that out, really.
C: This is the first interview I've done about the album. Everyone else just asks us about our clothes.

Does the image thing piss you off?
S: Yeah, we've completely toned that down now. Except Jonny, but he's the frontman. He'll carry on wearing his suit, but none of the rest of us would be seen dead in them anymore. From the beginning, the front cover of Melody Maker, it was 'the best dressed band in Britain' and all anyone asked about was the clothes and we thought we'd better start playing it down a bit. If we want to make it as a band, it's the music that's going to count.

Another pigeonhole the press want to put you in is this Camden scene...
C: That's a load of shit. Have you ever been to Camden? All Camden consists of, right, is you come out of the station and you've got 100, 200 metres of high street. That's it. All you've got is shops, like any normal high street, and one pub, you all know about The Good Mixer. You've got the Underworld, this club nobody really goes to, and thats it. And all the music press hang out there. To be honest, there are a lot of bands that live in North London, I could name fucking...ten bands who live near there.
S: You can ask any of the bands that come from anywhere near Camden if they're anything to do with 'the Camden scene' and they'll say there's no such thing.
C: The only reason the press started going to The Good Mixer is because bands started going to The Good Mixer. And all the press want to be in bands. And then they start writing about it and create this big Camden thing where all these bands live in Camden. I don't know anybody in Camden.
S: None of us live in Camden. He [Chris} did for a bit, sleeping on people's floors and shit, but now he's got his own place in Archway. The only reason we got put in that scene is because all the journalists hang out in The Good Mixer and so do a lot of musicians. There's just a good atmosphere there. Or there used to be. It's not that great now.
C: Shit pub. Good beer, strong beer, but it's nothing what the press make it out to be.
S: You don't walk in there and see Graham from Blur sitting at the bar and the others playing pool. It's nothing like that. They went in there a couple of times last year, but you won't see them in there at all now.

Melody Maker did a centre spread with a map of Camden...
S: You could have that about any town. All towns have got clubs and a market and it's no different. Maybe a few more people go there. The market's about as big as this room. It's a fruit and veg market, but you don't see fruit and veg there very often.

Where do you see Menswear heading after the album's come out?
S: Well, we're going to tour the album. We're doing a tour of Japan in December for seven days. Then we're going to America for a month, just for a few small gigs in Universities and that. Then we'll probably do a bit of Europe and then we'll be writing some new stuff for the new album and singles and that.

A lot of British bands are having problems making it in America. Do you think you'll be able to?
S: We don't know. You can never tell.
C: It's difficult to know what the Americans will like, because they like EMF and Jesus Jones. They got a number one there. The Americans like Bush. You can never tell what they're going to like.
S: I'd never heard of Bush before and now they're on the verge of breaking America. But they've got a big, American-style sound, I s'pose. They don't sound very British, do they? So just because they've made it, it doesn't mean loads of British bands are going to make it. But Elastica are doing really well now, they're getting close to the Top 50...
[Chris presents us with an origami swan.]
C: And if you pull its tail, the wings flap.
S: I've forgotten what I was saying.

Elastica.
S: Oh yeah. They're doing well, they've sold about one and a half million worldwide. But we don't know. We went to see the record company in New York and they said it's going to be hard, but we've got the best push behind us as far as the record company is concerned. We've got a lot of chances, but we don't know until we've gone there. And Oasis' attitude, being rude to audiences and stuff, doesn't realy help any of the other bands who go out there at all.

Do you think it's better to have a massive first hit, with all the hype, or to build up slowly?
C: A lot of bands say that, say "we want to do an REM". But REM didn't decide to do four fucking crap albums and then start writing good pop songs, did they? They didn't choose to do that. We write good pop songs now. But we're still developing as a band.

There've been a lot of rumours flying about all over the place about Menswear. Will you clear them up for us?
C & S: Yeah, sure.

Is it true that Top Of The Pops threatened to boycott you for the rest of your career if you didn't do the exclusive performance of 'I"ll Manage..'?
S: We can't really comment on that.
C: We can. It wasn't that.
S: They weren't going to boycott us. What it was, we'd been asked by TOTP and then The Word asked us to go on the last one of the series and we said yeah. But Adrian, our manager, said we'd better check it out with TOTP...
C: And they said "if you do The Word, we won't have an exclusive". So we could either do TOTP and have an exclusive on it, or do The Word and have an exclusive on that. And we decided that TOTP was more exposure.
S: It might not have made that much of a difference, but If we'd have done The Word I think TOTP would have been quite pissed off with us.

Is it true that at the beginning, music journalists would wake up in the morning to find Chris sleeping on the sofa?
C: That'd be Taylor Parkes. Right, I've been hanging around in London for nearly two years now and I've only been in a band for about nine months. And before that I was just ligging around. He was living with one of my friends and I was kipping on her floor. I didn't know him at all and he was just showing off because he thinks he knows me.

Is it true that Menswear were getting record company interest before you even had a complete band?
S: Yeah, that's true. We had offers of deals before we'd even rehearsed properly.
C: We'd not been offered deals, we'd just had interest.
S: The first gig we played there were loads of record company people there. And the bloke who we signed with was there. He took us out after the gig and said that night that he wanted to sign us. We only played four songs to the bloke, that's all we had at the time. We were only on about fifteen minutes. And after that he said he wanted to get his order in first, before the other record companies. It's all Chris's fault really. He was going around last year telling people he was in a band to get drinks off them.
C: I wanted to be in a band and I just started talking to people and telling them...It wasn't planned, I didn't wake up one morning and say, "right, this is what I'm going to do". It just sort of happened. I didn't plan it.
S: He didn't even tell us about it until after all the interest started. Then he told us he was going out and people'd ask if he was in a band and he'd say he was in Menswear and then people'd get interested and want to know when we were playing. It was really fucking strange. Everyone who met Chris decided he was really charming and that. He's a little shit really.

Is it true that there has been a spate of thefts of 'Menswear' signs from department stores all over the country?
C & S: No.
C: That was made up by our manager. The Chart Show wanted a...d'you know those little newsbites that they put up? One of them. So they rang him and he made it up.

Chris & Stuart from Menswear were talking to Dave and Tim, in October 1995.