I wasn't sure how to approach my conversation with Interpol. I knew I'd been allocated a decent amount of time to chat with vocalist/guitarist Paul Banks and bassist Carlos Dengler, but where would I take the conversation? Unlike a number of other music writers, I was on the fence about Turn On the Bright Lights. I liked the album's post-punk sound, but its reliance upon tried and true riffs and rhythms meant that repeat listens yielded diminished returns. I simply hadn't made enough of an emotional connection with the record to write a fawning puff-piece.

At the same time, I wasn't willing to go after the Interpol hype machine with bared claws. I'm not saying that there isn't a shadowy svengali lurking in the background, manipulating the band's career, but I'm willing to consider the fact that the group's abrupt rise to prominence could have come due to a combination of their unusual sound, their marketable look and sheer good timing. Yes, guitarist Daniel Kessler runs Domino Records' US office, which many people seem to find suspicious -- but even if his job gave the band a higher profile, it's the music that earned Interpol their newfound legion of fans.

Ultimately, I opted for as straightforward a conversation as I could muster (which is always a challenge), and I think that was the right decision. Paul and Carlos were friendly, intelligent guys -- a little glib sometimes, but clearly delighted and a little overwhelmed by the fact that four years of hard work are really starting to pay off. There may well be more to the band's story than that, but I don't want to hear it.

This interview was conducted on a sunny September afternoon in the front room of Chicago's Empty Bottle, while the rest of the band shot a game of pool. Due to noise from the street traffic and clacking billiard balls, a few brief portions of our recording were inaudible. We've done our best to reconstruct them, but in places where we couldn't, you may notice abrupt shifts in the direction of the conversation. We're not bipolar -- it just sounds that way.

Splendid: Where were you guys last night? Did you have a day off?

Paul Banks: Yeah, we were here last night. We drove from Cleveland.

Splendid: That's right. I remember seeing that in the itinerary. So this is Day Three?

Paul: Gig Three.

Carlos D.: Day three on the road.

Splendid: Working day three, then.

Carlos: Yeah. Cleveland was weird. I didn't expect anything from Cleveland but we actually had some fans out there.

Splendid: I don't know all the venues on the tour, but it looks like you're mostly booked into places that would be smaller than the demand.

Carlos: You think so?

Splendid: Seems like a lot of 200-300 person venues, yeah. I'm sure the Empty Bottle will be packed solid this evening.

Paul: I think it is, yeah. I think they pre-sold almost everything. The tour was booked a little while ago, for one thing, and this is our first time on the road out here so I don't know if anyone really had any sense of what it would be like.

Carlos: Yeah, we didn't want to headline a tour with...

Paul: ...twenty people in the audience.

Carlos: I think when we booked the tour we figured let's just book small venues --

Paul: It'll be great if attendance keeps turning out this good, but we wouldn't have known that, in some cases, we could've played a bigger venue.

Splendid: It seems like things have blown up for you guys in a very, very short amount of time. It's probably not as short a time as it seems to people who weren't necessarily aware of you -- and I admit I wasn't.

Carlos: Yeah, it's weird. We're getting that a lot, actually.

Splendid: Everything just hit at the right time?

Carlos: It was good timing, but, I mean...for us it's kind of weird, because for us this is just phase three, four or five of what we're doing. We've been at it for a while.

Splendid: Right, you've been around since '98, right?

Carlos: Yeah. We've had a fan base since then. For them, it's like a special time, because they feel like, "We've been with this band for a while!" It's not like we've never played outside New York before, either...

Paul: I think it's that we have a great in-house publicist at the label (Matador), and he did a really good job. That's why it seems like all of a sudden it's really big. I guess the response has been really good with the magazines.

Splendid: Definitely. I remember one month Matador saying "Hey, we signed Interpol," and the next month you're in Entertainment Weekly. That's not the normal "press awareness path" for most bands -- certainly not most Matador bands.

Paul: They just had some guy who did that interview...the guy there was just a big fan. I've worked at wack magazines myself, and there's always people on staff who actually have good taste and are into good stuff, and it's always like a big coup for them when they get a bit on a band they like.

Splendid: But rare for it actually to make it into print. You guys have been together for four years, but this is your first full-length, and some of the stuff from your first EP, the one you did for Chemikal Underground, also appears on Turn On the Bright Lights. How much material do you actually have. Or that we haven't heard?

Paul: That you haven't heard...we have new songs, and then we have a few that didn't make it on the record -- three or four old songs that didn't get on there. And it's true, actually, that even the Chemikal Underground thing, some of those songs were written long before that was released. Chemikal Underground picked up our first demo, which we put out in '98. Basically it's been, like, along the way, a lot of songs have come into existence and then passed out of existence...

Carlos: There's maybe half an hour more material.

Splendid: So basically, you've been working with the same twenty, twenty-five songs for the whole four years?

Paul: Not even that much.

Carlos: Maybe in total there've been twenty-five songs that we've worked on, but there have been songs that we've just ditched.

Paul: There've been plenty of songs that we've ditched.

Splendid: But the core songs that make up Turn On the Bright Lights -- you've been playing at least some of those for quite a while?

Paul: Yes.

Splendid: That must be a little challenging. We've talked to bands like Clinic, who due to the weirdness of different albums coming out at different times in different countries, end up touring behind the same few songs for years and years. Does it get difficult to stay interested? Do you change the songs?

Paul: We don't change the songs, and I did have some difficulty -- I've been through phases when I was tired of songs. But then... Sam (Fogarino, drummer) joined in 2000, and the songs that existed before he joined the band just became very new, because it really was like an injection into our rehearsals and into our playing. And also, he really wanted to play those songs, because that was why he joined the band, because of the demos he'd heard. He was pushing... And for me, he just rejuvenated those songs, so it's almost like everything was new as of 2000 -- which isn't such a long time.

Splendid: Speaking of Sam, one of the things I noticed listening to the live material on Matador's site was the general energy level seemed higher, or at least less "glossy" -- particularly the drumming. Was it toned down at all on the record, in the interest of achieving a particular mood?

Paul: Not at all. Not at all. I think it's just the nature of being in the studio, kind of.

Carlos: Yeah. There's always going to be a difference between live and recorded.

Splendid: I was thinking in terms of a few songs where it seemed like the drums could've been higher in the mix, but it might have changed the overall tone of the record...still, fair enough. You've mentioned having an existing base of fans who are very happy that you've moved on to the next phase of your existence as a band. Are there also a lot of people coming out of the woodwork saying "Hey, I was with you guys since way back when -- I just never had the time to actually come to a show!"

Carlos: I have a couple of friends who've done that...

Paul: I don't socialize much, so people don't come up to me and say anything to me about the band, outside of my immediate circle of friends. I have noticed (he gestures to Carlos) he's got an extensive kind of social life, and I have noticed the people that he's talking about appearing on the scene. As I said, like there was a guy, just some guy, and I saw him backstage after a show, and I was like, "Get out of here, dude. You were a total dick three months ago."

Carlos: Yeah, that's true. The closest people are the ones who are like, "I'm really happy for you." Then there's people who liked you before, and they like you more now. Then there's people who didn't like me before, and now all of a sudden are friendly.

Splendid: I know a lot of American bands are encountering a strange reverse phenomenon where they're bigger overseas than they are in the US, and that definitely seems to have happened to you guys in Europe. Was it weird to go over there and discover that you had a higher profile, then come back here and be back in the trenches?

Paul: It wasn't so much a higher profile... It was mostly in France -- there was a higher profile in France, but I think that was pretty much it. And it was mostly because we'd had the opportunity to play a really big festival (Either La Route du Rock or Festival Off -- Ed.) a year ago, and we got a lot of exposure at that festival because there were 9000 people there, so we got a jump start in France. But there wasn't a massive profile in the UK -- it was actually kind of matched with the US, I think. Only in France. And then we weren't megastars by any means; we just had more fans there than anywhere else on the tour, but only because of the festival, I think.

Carlos: The US is such a different market, too.

Splendid: Right, you can have more fans of something, but it still won't rate a blip on the cultural radar.

Carlos: Exactly. (The next few seconds of our exchange is drowned out by a passing ambulance and fire truck.)

Splendid: When you were in Europe, did you ever have any run-ins with actual members of INTERPOL?

Paul: I did! I met a guy. And I can talk about it...

Carlos: What's the question?

Paul: Did we meet anyone from INTERPOL. The actual INTERPOL. And no, we've never gotten an e-mail from them or anything at all, like "Cease and desist," or anything like that. But we did get some e-mails from jackasses who thought we were the real INTERPOL. Literally, we got an e-mail from Afghanistan one time about a stolen car, and then we got one from a guy in Brazil asking what were the steps to go through to become a recruit. And we were like, dude, if you think INTERPOL is interpolny@yahoo.com, and that's the real INTERPOL, then you're a fucking jackass. But we played a festival in B______, and after the show this guy came up to me and said "There was a piece on you guys in our local paper so I came down to see you. I'm with INTERPOL."

Carlos: Seriously?

Paul: Yes. And I was like, "Get the fuck out of town!" I go, "Dan, Dan, this guy's from INTERPOL!" And the guy's like, "Shhhh! I'm working with security, but it's not known that I'm with INTERPOL." And then he left. It's the kind of thing where you think, "Oh, that's bullshit," but he didn't even say he "I'm a fan" or anything. Just "I saw that there was a band called INTERPOL and I wanted to come check it out." And he, like, blew his cover, told me he was with INTERPOL, and I was so excited. And I don't know, I believed him because he seemed serious, and he didn't want to chat. He just wanted to point it out. It was weird.

Splendid: That seems like a pleasantly non-uptight thing to do. Not like here, where they'd probably send you a Cease and Desist notice because you were diluting their identity and harming their ability to enforce the law, or whatever.

Paul: I know. They haven't contacted us. Not at all.

Carlos: Yeah, then we'd have to change our name to "Interpol (not the organization)".

Splendid: Have you guys reached the point where the band's doing well enough that those of you who want to can quit your day jobs? I've read in a few places, Sam, that you're definitely not enamored of yours. Have you hit that point yet?

Paul: Where we can quit it? No, but my means of kind of compensating have been that I've moved out of my apartment, so now I just don't have to pay rent, so it's more that I can't have a day job, but I also can't have rent. (He pauses) I think...maybe let's not say that it was in B______, the INTERPOL thing, because I wonder if the guy can get in trouble... but actually, how would they find out?

Splendid: "B_________? That would be Luc Van Snelder!" I suspect they have more than one guy in B______.

Carlos: The director of INTERPOL was on Splendid...

Paul: "I was on Splendid the other day, and..."

Splendid: It could happen. We get people from ridiculously weird parts of the world... Anyway, I know that Matador doesn't cling to that whole eighteen-month product cycle thing, so presumably they're not averse to you heading back into the studio as soon as you're done touring. So is that where you're headed after the tour?

Paul: They haven't said anything...

Empty Bottle employee: Would you guys rather have Stella or Grolsch (backstage)?

Carlos: Is it possible to split half and half? (The guy indicates that it is.) That's fucking awesome. Thanks a lot, man.

Splendid: Would you rather be out there on the road for the next half a year, or back home writing fresh material?

Carlos: It's a weird kind of situation. We're kind of at the point where we're ready to write some new songs, and we've got some new songs, but they're still not finished and we want to work on them more. There's so little time, so we have to keep looking for little opportunities here and there to work on them. At the same time, I think we're all pretty excited to finally be able to say Okay, we're touring, we're going to new cities every day, and we're bringing the music to people who haven't had a chance to see us before.

Paul: Our touring hasn't been so grueling yet. We've spent maybe two months on the road total, if that.

Carlos: There's more in store, though. I think at some point we're probably going to have to consciously say okay, we need a good amount of time right now to just work on new material. But that's still in the distance.

Splendid: Is writing happening on the road at all?

Paul: It's going to have to, I think. From what I understand, some bands wind up writing during sound checks. That's why I'm really comfortable being on tour -- you get like tour-tight, which is something I'm looking forward to, just getting tighter and tighter and tighter. That's great. And when you're really there, if you're lucky enough to have a two-hour soundcheck, you don't really need to work on the songs because everything is down pat, so you can just spend it writing. So I imagine we will be writing on the road.

Splendid: Much has been made of the fact that you guys come on stage in more than t-shirts and jeans -- you've got the whole -- and I hate to describe it this way -- shirts and ties and sweaters and vests and jackets thing. When you're playing on a night like this, when it's pretty damn hot out and air conditioning isn't going to do much good, do you ever go, like, "Jesus, what were we thinking?" Or is it always a style thing?

Carlos: Well, if I took off this tie right now, you'd see that it's really not a tie but a rope -- the only part you can see is the part that doesn't look like a rope. That's from sweat. We're pretty grimy.

Paul: I'm also one of those people where, playing in a t-shirt versus this, you're gonna be utterly drenched in sweat if a venue's like that regardless. We played this show in Philadelphia where it was 93 degrees outside and the place didn't have air conditioning...

Splendid: I guess it wouldn't make a difference at that point.

Paul: Right. At was a hundred degrees in the venue, and nothing was gonna make a difference. So, like, a long-sleeve cotton shirt versus a t-shirt...same shit.

Splendid: I was just curious. If you were uncomfortable already, I could see being pushed over the edge by wearing, say, a sweater.

Paul: No. It's not like a stage uniform or an outfit -- it's kind of like how we dress anyway.

Splendid: That's useful. Moving on...I'm not going to ask a bush-league "what are your influences" question, and I'm sure you've had Joy Division thrown at you until you're blue in the face. What other bands come up again and again, and what do you think of the comparisons?

Carlos: Like who are the artists?

Splendid: Yeah.

Carlos: Besides the obvious?

Paul: Yeah, besides Joy Division.

Splendid: Yeah, because I don't think anyone who's listened to a Joy Division record in the last year is going to compare you guys to Joy Division. It's just rock critic shorthand.

Paul: It's just necessary to compare a band to something else to give the reader some kind of idea.

Carlos: They're all kind of in that circle -- I hear Echo a lot, and the Smiths. In a way, it doesn't make a difference -- they could name any one of those bands and they're essentially making the same point. In terms of what we actually take from, it's so much wider than just those sort of bands.

Splendid: Have any of the comparisons surprised you? Picked up something you weren't expecting people to catch?

Carlos: It happens very rarely but it's always awesome when it does. What was the last one?

Paul: I don't know. We didn't have a band "notion" of what we wanted to sound like, so it's more if someone will mention an artist that individually we're into. Like some guy said to Dan, the other day in Cleveland, that he felt that there was a big dub influence. Dan had to shake the guy's hand, because Dan is a big dub fan, and no-one ever caught that. We do have some dubby parts in songs that we're working on, so the fact that the guy would detect it is crazy. But my personal favorite artists have never ever been brought up.

Splendid: How about the Kitchens of Distinction comparison?

Carlos: It's funny that you say that.

Paul: That's kind of left-field, 'cos I've never heard them in my life.

Carlos: I've never heard them either, and I've heard that for a really long time now. Apparently the name keeps coming up and it's really piquing my curiosity.

Splendid: I've gotta go home before the show. I'll burn you a couple of songs.

Carlos: If you could, that'd be so great. I've been meaning to go to a record store and pick some up, just to hear it.

Splendid: Yeah, their stuff has gotten kind of hard to find.

Paul: (To Daniel Kessler, who's playing pool nearby) Dan, have you ever heard them?

Dan: I've never heard them, but I've seen that comparison too. More since the album; less from live, but I've never heard them.

Splendid: Yeah, I think they had a different taste in melodies than you do, but in songs where you have a lot of feedbacky stuff going on, like "NYC", you can hear it.

Carlos: They were a band, from what I understand, that were kind of on the fringe, that never fit into a specific sound. They were kind of an anomaly for their time, but they had a cult fanbase.

Splendid: Exactly, yeah. Getting back to your own music...how much difference is there between your songs live and the songs as they've been recorded? Is it difficult to reproduce them to your satisfaction?

Paul: Basically, I think it was more that we were careful when we did the record to not go too far from what we do live. We looked at our "live" for the studio instead of moving the studio concepts to live. We just tried to make it sound like we sound live. There's no real effort.

Carlos: The whole point was to make it sound live.

Splendid: Given your choice of any future for Interpol, where do you want to be down the line? Do you want to be recording and touring 'til you're all tired of it, do you have a specific plan in mind...?

Paul: It's been a nice beginning and things have been going very well for us. We can only hope that it would continue to go as well. Everything's been at a good pace, in my mind, since the beginning of our career. For Interpol to continue to keep growing would be a good thing. I'd also like for our next records to be evolutions.

Carlos: We'd like to explore a little more, maybe pursue our side interests.

Splendid: What would you like to explore on the next record?

Carlos: Lately we've been trying to pare things down a little bit -- not have so many layers. Maybe keep things more minimal, concentrate more on the rhythm section, make that where the center of the song is. Not that we don't perceive that as the case in the present, but (we'd like to) give it more of an equal footing... You know what I'm trying to say, maybe make it a little more funky.

Paul: It's true. We want to focus more on a groove.

Splendid: A less mechanical sound?

Paul: Mechanical's fine, actually, but more of a stripped-down sound. Not a big departure from our sound, but focused on honing the bass and drums together, which they already are, but really trying to go somewhere new with that.

Carlos: A lot of our concentration for this album was "We've got a guitar; let's see what other guitar we can add to it, and what kind of melodies we can create, and harmonies and stuff like that." I think right now we're kind of implementing restraint -- saying "It by itself is fine."

Splendid: Which is a difficult thing.

Carlos: It really is.

Splendid: Especially for a young band -- you've got that impulse to use every idea you've got, and it's hard to hold back.

Carlos: Exactly.

Splendid: I've got two more questions. I was talking to Ben at Matador about your videos. I gather you've been working on two. They sounded really interesting...but he hasn't seen 'em yet. How'd they go?

Paul: We haven't seen the finished videos, but I can tell you about the gist of both of them.

Splendid: By all means.

Paul: "NYC" is really cool; we did it with this guy Doug Aitken, who's like a video artist. He was really excited because he got his hands on this night vision camera that I guess is usually just for the military at this point, and it hasn't ever been incorporated into TV or video before. Obviously you've seen plenty of night-vision, but this is a little bit more... the definition's a little bit better, the clarity of it is a little better than typical night vision, so we shot the whole thing in that. We went out to the Mojave desert -- is that right? -- and because it was night vision, we had to shoot everything at night, in low light, and that was a very cool experience. And just seeing the footage that I saw through the viewfinder, it looked really cool and really strange.

Splendid: So it's typical greenish night-vision --

Paul: Greeny.

Splendid: But a lot cleaner and clearer.

Paul: Yes.

Splendid: That sounds really cool.

Paul: And he actually also used a heat-sensitive camera, which I thought was really cool, but we used very little of it and I have a suspicion that he's going to cut it out. And then "PDA" was with this guy Christopher Mills. He went pretty crazy with it. It's like a photographic animation -- a series of photos of us, and then he kind of created the environments that we're in from scratch, from photographs. So it'll be like a whole photographically animated world.

Splendid: Maybe a very sophisticated version of what Terry Gilliam used to do on Monty Python, or...

Paul: In a way. But a little more signature to Mills; in Monty Python, those were newspaper clippings or paintings, I think. These are all photographs that Mills took and then mounted into rooms and cityscapes.

Splendid: When will those start showing on video channels?

Paul: I don't know.

Carlos: I don't know.

Paul: We got a rough cut of "PDA" today, so we'll have to check it out.

Carlos: Really?

Paul: Yeah. It arrived at the hotel today. It's just a rough cut. No, it's a rough cut of "NYC".

Carlos: How can we see it?

Paul: Get a VCR. We'll watch it later.

Splendid: Another standard question: what are you guys listening to right now?

Paul: I actually just got some new shit. I've been listening to this Ikara Colt EP that I like a lot; we saw them live in Germany and they just blew me away. The EP is really growing on me. It's not quite as intense as live, though, because their drummer is literally insane, and they're really really fucking good live. Initially I felt like the intensity didn't come across on the EP, but now I'm starting to feel that and I really like it a lot. And then we're all kind of big into Spoon right now.

Splendid: Yeah, the Spoon record is really good.

Carlos: I don't really listen to new music too much. Our label in Europe just let us run through their closet, and they just did a whole lot of Depeche Mode reissues, so I was like, "Every single Depeche Mode CD? Sure!"

Splendid: One last one. Since you're from New York, the allure of other towns and other record stores is probably not as great as it would be to, say, a band from Tulsa, but do you guys do much record shopping on the road?

Paul: I have no money at all to buy anything whatsoever.

Carlos: Same here.