Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard has spoken to NME about the joint 20th anniversary celebrations for ‘Transatlanticism’ and ‘Give Up’ – which hit UK shores this week – as well as the future of both bands.
Playing both seminal albums in full across back-to-back sets, Death Cab and The Postal Service will headline London’s All Points East Festival on Sunday (August 25), alongside dates in Cardiff, Glasgow and mainland Europe. After extensive celebrations across the US, these gigs will mark the conclusion of the highly-anticipated anniversary tour, and the second reunion of The Postal Service, who haven’t released any music since 2003’s ‘Give Up.’
“Once we got going, it was like riding a bike”, exclaimed Gibbard, who told NME how old Postal Service keyboard sounds had to be rebuilt from scratch. “Death Cab being an active band, all that material from ‘Transatlanticism’ has been peppered through our sets for 20 years, but getting the Postal Service machine up and running took a fair amount of work in the front end.”
“I’ve never really had a gauge on what ‘Give Up’ and ‘Transatlanticism’ mean to the greater public, specifically in the UK”, he explained, with All Points East set to mark either band’s biggest ever UK show.
“In 2003, you guys [were] freaking out about The Strokes, The White Stripes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs – fucking great bands, right? If you’ve heard [Death Cab’s] music, you know we don’t really slot in with that. We never really found a cultural lane in the UK until the last five to 10 years.”
Read our full interview below, where Gibbard also spoke to NME about the anniversary celebrations, plans for Death Cab’s 11th album and if the tour has changed his stance on a second album from The Postal Service.
NME: Hello Ben. You’ve brought The Postal Service back for a second time, how does it compare to the 2013 reunion?
Ben Gibbard: “This time, it has felt even more pronounced. There are assuredly people who were too young to see the 2013 shows, who are seeing The Postal Service for the very first time. Looking at the audiences – of course, younger people tend to be in the front – there’s some people in the front row singing along, who were 100 per cent not alive when this record came out. The snowballing enthusiasm around these different people who formed a relationship with ‘Give Up’ has made these shows utterly bananas.”
Was there a moment, in or around 2003, where you’d realised you’d made two records that would stand the test of time in ‘Give Up’ and ‘Transatlanticism?’
“I don’t know if there was a point, certainly not that early. ‘Give Up’ was becoming a cultural phenomenon, in the sense that there was no band. There were no shows, interviews or TV appearances – the records were just selling like crazy… without any work on our behalf, other than having made the album. With hindsight, I think it was definitely a function of the early internet, word-of-mouth buzz. This cultural shift was happening, where indie rock was going from people’s secret music to a more mainstream style of music. Riding that wave was exciting, and terrifying at times.”
Has the tour impacted the way you feel about either of those albums?
“It’s been really illuminating. It’s making me reassess some of the choices that I’m currently making, musically. Not so much that I want to remake ‘Transatlanticism’, or ‘Give Up’, for that matter. Sometimes, as an artist, you’re moving forward at such [pace] that one can lose sight of what one does best. It’s not so much that I want to recreate the past, I want to make sure that I’m checking in with myself more often, creatively. The best career artists are the ones who know what lane they’re in, and their diversions still bring them back to that path, over the course of an album or a song. It’s been more informative than nostalgic.”
You touched on the organic growth of The Postal Service. In an age where artists are expected to constantly churn out music, what is the beauty, for you, in leaving something untouched for 20 years?
“I’m in a band that has been actively making music for 27 years, and I’m also the partial author of a one-and-done cult record. As a member of Death Cab, I have been living with the critiques that come with being a career artist, where people [ask], ‘Why can’t you make a record like ‘Transatlanticism’ or ‘Plans’ again?’
“Then I also have… let’s call it ‘the Neutral Milk Hotel perspective’ – I know they have a couple of records, but for argument’s sake. You put out this record, it becomes this cultural phenomenon, and you leave people in that place where they can dream on what a follow-up might have sounded like, but there will always be unfulfilled potential. But they have that one record. For me, it’s been really fun to have my cake and eat it too, where I can also be in the messy band [Death Cab]: we made a bad record, but then we made a good record.”
We know you’ve had a firm stance on this matter for two decades, but has the tour inspired a newfound desire to write new music for The Postal Service?
“I think the main reason that a second Postal Service record has never come to fruition – and will never come to fruition – the time commitments that Death Cab ended up taking, which really started with ‘Transatlanticism’, haven’t really ever let up. There’s just not enough time, let alone creative juices flowing, to make a suitable follow-up [to ‘Give Up’]. I think anything that we would attempt to make at this point would be thoroughly disappointing.
“The stakes are just lower [in Death Cab] when you’re putting an album out every two to three years. If people don’t like this one, there’ll be another one later. But after 20 years, there is no way we could ever follow that up in a way that would be satisfying to people. I would rather have all my focus on Death Cab than be watering both projects down. I just don’t have the capacity to do both. Some might argue I barely have the capacity to do one!”
Speaking of Death Cab, it’s been two years since the acclaimed ‘Asphalt Meadows‘. Have you turned your attention to album 11 yet?
“The band has been writing intermittently, over the last couple of years. I can’t — nor would I – give you a release date for a new record, but I think we’re going to take time off from touring and being in the limelight. We have asked our fans for a lot over the last two years. Speaking merely strategically, it is very much in our best interest to get the fuck out of people’s faces! We’re from an era where artists went away for a while, into the woodshed…”
How are you feeling ahead of All Points East – your biggest ever show in the UK?
“I’m cautiously optimistic. There are some old homies of ours [on the line-up] — The Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney. That’s a lot of Americans showing up in London, we’ll see how this goes…
“There’s obviously a long-utilised playbook of a US band going over to the UK before their first record comes out, and starting to develop that buzz. We never did that, we didn’t play a show in London until our third album. By that point, we might as well have been 75 years old compared to the speed at which things move through the culture there! Although, we’ve certainly been embraced by people in the UK. I’m not going to play the underdog card.”
Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service headline All Points East on August 25, respectively playing ‘Transatlanticism’ and ‘Give Up’ in full. Check out their full tour dates below and visit here for tickets and more information.
AUGUST
23 – OVO Hydro, Glasgow
24 – Utilita Arena, Cardiff
25 – All Points East Festival, London
27 – Poble Espanyol, Barcelona
29 – KALORAMA, Madrid
30 – MEO Kalorama, Lisbon
SEPTEMBER
21 – HSFstival, Washington D.C.