Ahead of The Cribs first album in five years, Ryan Jarman talks Samuel Cox through the pivotal songs in his life.
As soon as they released their first album, it was clear there was an underlying tension that made The Cribs tick.
It wasn’t interpersonal; the Jarmans may be brothers, but their relationship always felt more Gibb than Gallagher. It was, first and foremost, a tension between a raucous, DIY ethos – one which seemed more authentic than the affected outsider spirit a lot of their contemporaries were keen to emphasise – and an inescapable, if subconscious, tendency towards melodic, pop songwriting.
Take their first single, 2004’s “Another Number”; its primal and inchoate production barely disguised the fact that this was a song destined to be chanted by festival crowds with as much gusto as even the most stirring rendition of “Live Forever”.
A further tension sprang from the fact that The Cribs were a band of working-class outsiders who had suddenly been thrust very much inside. Swept up in the post-punk revival of the early 2000s – which has, since then, not inaccurately been rechristened indie sleaze – brothers Ryan, Gary and Ross Jarman found success in a period in which the tabloid press took as much interest in the indie scene’s personal intrigues as the NME did in the music itself.
This was also a period in which appearances on Soccer AM and Never Mind the Buzzcocks were an inescapable part of the media circuit. For lesser bands, the cult of personality began to eclipse the music. That The Cribs managed to maintain their underground spirit in this above-ground world, and to enjoy success within the mainstream without sacrificing an inch of their DIY ethos, is perhaps their greatest success story of all.
In more recent years, another tension began to surface; that inevitable and time-worn tale of a band torn between their primitive instinct to make music, and the necessity of instead dedicating their time to legal wrangling and navigating the seedier corners of the music business.
After the release of 2017’s 24-7 Rock Star Shit, the Jarmans began managing themselves and soon uncovered a labyrinthian mass of contracts and legal documents, all signed behind their leather-jacket-clad backs, all indicating one sobering fact: the band owned very little of the music they had been making for the previous decade-and-a-half.
Taking their first ever extended break from touring and recording, they realised that the only way out was through; rather than admit defeat, they stubbornly pored over contract after contract, acting as their own legal representatives. Through dogged determination, they eventually reclaimed the rights to their catalogue.
There were nights when, tumbling down a seemingly bottomless pit of legal jargon, the Jarmans considered packing it in altogether. No musician gets into the game with the ambition of one day becoming fluent in contract law or the finer points of intellectual property, but for a band so defined by their ambivalence towards the music industry’s machinations it must have felt particularly egregious.
It’s easy to imagine that in such moments, nostalgia for simpler times would’ve crept in; a time before the name Jarman had been written above a single dotted line.
“Anything that we wrote before we started going on the road or before we became professional and started putting records out, I always hold in a higher degree of reverence,” Ryan tells me. “It holds that position because it was hopeless, there was no reason for me doing it.”
“I do still have that idealism towards it,” he adds. “I still view it as something that I’ve got to do, and the thing that I get out of it – especially playing guitar and singing – is that it’s almost my primary form of communication these days. I can say way more with a guitar than I can in writing, or that I can verbalise.”
Perhaps the reason that The Cribs ultimately rose above their legal disputes, just as they transcended the British indie scene that could quite easily have eaten them alive, is because this idealism endured and grew, thick and calloused by time. “Brothers Won’t Break”, the closing song on their new album Selling a Vibe, is a defiant and fitting tribute to that endurance; a record-closer which promises that there is plenty more to come.
Just as the music Jarman wrote in his early years in Wakefield, West Yorkshire represents a kind of creative ideal, the records he was listening to in those hopeless, hopeful days have an equally unsurpassable significance to him.
“A band could come out now, be amazing and put out my favourite record of this era and it would still have nowhere near as much of an impact on me as Ugly Kid Joe did in the ‘90s, because I was a kid. The bands that get you in that time of your life will always seem like the big stuff to you.”
It is with that in mind that Jarman describes his Nine Songs selections as being “almost like flags in the ground throughout my life.”
“These Are the Days of Our Lives” by Queen
RYAN JARMAN: This isn’t necessarily my favourite Queen song, but obviously they were the first band that any of us [in The Cribs] ever truly loved. My uncle turned us on to Queen. I’ve said this before in an interview, but I always feel like every person that grew up in the ‘80s in the UK had an uncle that got them into Queen. It’s almost like a rite of passage.
We got into Queen a couple of years before Freddie died and I remember following that in the news and being in some degree of denial about it, like, ‘Oh, Freddie won’t die, because he’s a superhero to us.’ He’s still in some ways the closest thing that I’ve ever had to a superhero in my life, really.
He died around the time that they released this single and I loved it when it came out. After he died, we heard it a lot on the TV and there were a lot of tribute shows that were on late at night. I wasn’t allowed to stay up because I was still just a little kid, but I’d hear my mum and dad watching them downstairs.
It was almost like Freddie dying was the biggest news at the time. To me, it felt like this seismic event and this song is completely tied to it. It’s a song which I can’t separate from that time. That was the first time I remember being really obsessed with music and being really, really affected by something that had happened to a musician, or any artist. I just remember being devastated.
BEST FIT: I really like Brian May’s guitar on this song. He’s almost in Robert Fripp territory.
Yes, it’s got a delay on it. When I was a kid, I didn’t know anything about guitar effects and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s the best guitarist ever, he can play two guitars at once’, or whatever. I think it almost added to the heaviness of the song – there’s almost this spectral feel to it, having that delay on it.
Freddie had died and when you’re a kid something like that doesn’t really compute to you that much – the idea of mortality is just so massive. Brian’s guitar solo, there’s something about it… it has this heavy, creepy feel to it.
It had a massive impact on me. Not just the music, the events around it too. It was a significant event in my life up to that point.
“Fallen Angel” by Bee Gees
This is a song I hadn’t heard before. A ‘90s deep cut!
You probably won’t have heard it. After Freddie died, me and Gary didn’t listen to much music, we were playing Super Nintendo and probably listening to Queen on and off. But the Bee Gees came back with this song “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. We saw it on a gameshow one night, and I still really like that song.
Me and Gary saved our dinner money and gave our mum a fiver to get a cassette and said, “I want you to get us the new Bee Gees album.” My mum was like, “Are you sure that’s what you want? Are you sure you want the new Bee Gees album?” And so she got us that.
That whole album is great. It’s very ‘90s and it’s very of its time so it’s kind of cheesy, but the songwriting’s really good. There’s loads of oh-ohs and woh-ohs on it which I feel definitely had a massive influence on the DNA of our songwriting. I feel like that’s where a lot of our pop sensibilities come from, that album specifically, it’s called Size Isn’t Everything.
Around that time, you’re getting to the point where you’re at high school and you’re starting to feel different – you’re starting to get affected by hormones – and we became really quiet and withdrawn and would just spend all our time in my bedroom painting Dungeons & Dragons models and listening to the Bee Gees.
I think my mum and dad were really concerned about us at the time. We never played D&D or anything, it was just something to do. Obviously, the year after that Nirvana happened, so that was the next big musical awakening, but the Bee Gees came the year before. It’s just super pop. Good pop music, that. We still listen to it.
I love that idea that when you’re younger you’ve only got so much money, and you have to decide what record to buy. That can be a really pivotal moment.
Yes, because it was impossible, getting an album, I’d always feel really lucky to have it. I really love the fact that you felt invested in it. Like I said, that Bee Gees album, and a lot of the albums that me and Gary got growing up, would be so few and far between because we would save our dinner money to get it. We wouldn’t eat at school. It was always totally worthwhile.
“Across the Sea” by Weezer
This is when I get to the age of fifteen. That’s when you first start dating people and going to parties and stuff.
I got this album when it came out because I liked the first Weezer album. I stole the first Weezer album actually, from HMV in Wakefield. It was one of the first and only records I ever stole. I couldn’t steal Pinkerton because one of my friends had got arrested and it scared the hell out of everyone. He got busted for trying to steal Nirvana’s “About a Girl” single on CD.
After that we stopped doing it, so Pinkerton was one of the first CDs that I remember buying. I remember none of my friends really liked it, I guess they didn’t like it compared to the blue record [Weezer’s self-titled debut]. I really liked it, and it really reminds me of this time in late ’96.
I think by the time I got Pinkerton it was around Christmas, and me and Gary were playing in this orchestra. We’d play in the orchestra on Friday night and then go into town to go drinking, and because it was around Christmas it felt like people were having parties all the time. I had this CD with me, and this was the song that I liked the most.
It’s the time in your life when you start noticing girls and start getting fucked up, and this is the soundtrack of that to me. I actually ended up getting really sick around this time, I got glandular fever, and I was bedridden for nearly three months.
So it reminds me of that time in my life too. I see it as something that soundtracked a pivotal coming-of-age period to me. And it’s a great song anyway.
“A Million Thousand Giant Steps” by Pylon
Pylon were a Wakefield band. This came out in 1999 and at that point there wasn’t really much to be excited about in the UK when it came to guitar music. I think it was going through a real fallow period, a really boring period. But there were a lot of good bands locally in Wakefield.
There was one place to play, a punk club called Players. The bands that played there were actually pretty legit, they were signed to decent indie labels, and would get written about in big fanzines like Fracture. Pylon used to be a band called Chopper and they were the biggest of those bands, and the most influential.
They started Pylon and referred to it as their “indie band”. To me, I never heard it as indie, I always heard it as more punk really. Seriously, in the late ‘90s this was the only record that came out that I actually bought and listened to and liked by a guitar band. It was the only thing that was exciting or that was giving us any degree of hope at all. It’s another record that we still listen to a lot now.
By the time they put this record out they were the best band in town, and we rehearsed next to them every Wednesday night. Rehearsing next to them really made you start upping your game, because they were the benchmark that you had to get to, they were the band in town that everyone liked.
Was that local competition that you had – or, rather, the sense of wanting to up your game – more intense then than it was when you started playing with bands nationally?
Yes, because I didn’t care at all by that point. It wasn’t a case of it being a competition with those guys, because it was such a communal thing and everyone was friends. But it was difficult to stomach the idea of a band being that much better than your band. It was difficult to rehearse next to a band that was so much better than you were, but all it did was make you up your game.
“I Know There’s an Answer” by Sonic Youth
Me and Gary were at college, and we basically just weren’t going. We were doing a production course and it was pointless, because we were in the process of setting up our own studio in Wakefield where we could record other bands and run it as a rehearsal room.
We weren’t going to make any money out of it. It was this big building in an old mill, and if we rented it out to other bands we could basically rehearse for free. It also had this room where we could put shows on. So we weren’t going to university, we were mainly working on that, setting this place up.
We got a Sonic Youth bootleg CD from this second-hand market and record fare which didn’t usually have any good records. Every now and again they’d have something cool, like a record on Sympathy for the Record Industry, or something random that you hadn’t heard of, but that was on a decent label.
I had no idea this song was a cover. I had no way of knowing because I wasn’t a Beach Boys fan. It was the first track on the bootleg, and we thought it was rad. We really, really liked it. We were setting up this studio at the time, and it was really ramshackle and lo-fi. It had an old sixteen-track tape machine and stuff, it was very basic gear, but the sound of this song was what we were shooting for. We’d listen to it through the desk and think, ‘This is what we’re going for, this is the sound and aesthetic that we’re trying to get.’
It’s interesting, because when we did our last record [Night Network], we got Lee [Ranaldo of Sonic Youth] to put guitar on one of the tracks and we had to go over to Sonic Youth’s studio. Their archive is in there and he was showing me the original master tapes for this song, and I was telling him this exact story. He thought it was funny, because they were actually just really quick recordings that were bashed out without much thought.
Have you got into the Beach Boys version since?
Yes, I like the Beach Boys now. But going back to that time – around 2001 – I didn’t have the money to just buy records, so I only had a limited record collection, and I only had stuff that I knew I liked. We had some Beatles records, old vinyl and stuff, and The Doors, but I guess a Beach Boys record would never come up for sale in Oxfam’s vinyl bin.
I didn’t know much about them and what I did know about them was stuff like “I Get Around”. It’s a cool song, but I don’t need to listen to it at home, you know?
“Winners” by Bobby Conn
This is about 2002. By this point The Cribs are in full swing, but it was before we had a record contract. We were always the support band in Sheffield and Leeds – local promoters would always get us on because we were good for selling tickets locally.
We were playing with Bobby Conn in Sheffield, and he was just ace. He’s such a unique and leftfield personality and we got on really well with him and his band. We bought a copy of his CD that night, The Golden Age, and I started dating this girl that worked as his nanny, so my head was fucked, because they all lived in Chicago and I was in Wakefield, I had no money and I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to make this work.’
But I was listening to that CD all summer. I loved the album, but it was just thrashing my head because I wanted to get out there and be back with those guys. So listening to the record was one of those things that was painful, but enjoyably so. I did go out there in the summer in 2002, and it was a really good time. It was the first time I’d ever left the UK – it was the first time I’d ever left Wakefield, really. It was the first time I’d felt like I was part of something outside.
Again, The Cribs were still just a local band at the time, but it was interesting going to being a local musician in Chicago where it was all noise rock and stuff at the time. You could show up to a party, and someone would say, “Alright, do you want to do a set? Fine.” And it would just be noise guitar for two hours.
So I was doing stuff like that, which to me seemed at the time like a total utopia, because I’d never been anywhere where I had the opportunity for that to be seen as viable before.
It reminds me of a really good time in my life. I had to come back because The Cribs, in my absence, finally settled on a record label we were going to sign with, and that kind of closed the book on that whole period, but I still love this record, and it still reminds me of an exciting time in my life.
“Fingernailed For You” by Comet Gain
This is one that you covered, right?
Yes, we covered this one. I had to pick a Comet Gain song, because they were one of our favourite bands when The Cribs first started.
How did the cover come about?
Gary lives in Portland, so he knows all the Kill Rock Stars guys. He bumps into them all a lot and they said they were celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the label. They were asking people to cover stuff from their catalogue, and we said, “We’ll do a Comet Gain song!” They were really psyched about that because Maggie [Vail] at Kill Rock Stars is just the biggest Comet Gain fan, and no one else had suggested doing a Comet Gain song.
I think that was actually during the pandemic – I feel like we had to do that remotely, which I’d never done before. We usually record when we’re all together, so it was our first stab at remote recording where Ross would send the drums and you didn’t know what you were gonna get sent, it’s not like we were discussing it beforehand. I was happy with how it came out.
This record came out in 2005, we were touring a lot at that point, doing a lot of festivals and stuff, and when this came out it was on in the van all the time. We had a CD player in the van, and it would just loop over and over and over.
This song really, really reminds me of our first full summer of festivals. A lot of the time it would be raining and miserable, but you were excited because you were like, ‘This is amazing, I’m playing festivals, I used to go to festivals.’
Again, this song seems really melancholy to me. Comet Gain are really, really good at that kind of stuff. All of David Feck’s music has got this damaged, tragic feel to it, even when that’s not what the intent is. All his songs are shot through with that, and I find that really appealing.
I’m only really picking songs that remind me of specific periods and this really reminds me of summer 2005, listening to it over and over again in the van.
“Over The Ocean” by Here We Go Magic
This reminds me of 2012. My girlfriend Jen was in Here We Go Magic – I met her in Japan because Here We Go Magic were playing with us at this venue called The Garden Hall in Tokyo, and we got on like a house on fire that night. We were kindred spirits. But The Cribs had gone to Japan at the end of a really long US tour, so we were kind of fried. I met Jen, hung out with her that night, and then I had to fly straight back to the UK.
When I got back I was kind of moping around and being all forlorn and lovesick and all that kind of shit, so I downloaded their album and it was great. I really like that Brooklyn scene that was happening at the time, in the 2010s. That, to me, is the sound of the 2010s, that Brooklyn loft party kind of stuff.
I was living at Ross’s, and I used to have a fire in his garden every night, because I didn’t know what else to do. I’m moping around and one night I just booked a flight and said, “I’m coming out to New York, I’m coming out and see you guys.”
Williamsburg, at that point, was still really good. There were so many independent venues to play, but it was mainly built up around loft parties and house parties and stuff, so the scene that I saw when I got out there seemed really exciting to me, and those guys were a big part of it.
It reminds me of when I first moved to New York and it’s almost the last gasp of New York being this uber-cool place again, which had started in the 2000s. I feel like the end of that was in that Brooklyn party scene. I loved the fact that everyone involved was a really, really good musician. They’re all weirdos, they were fun to hang out with.
I don’t know why stylistically it had gone more prog-y and a lot more leftfield – the people involved seemed more like unabashed artists, but they were still kind of fucked up. It wasn’t pretentious at all. I can imagine myself feeling like it was pretentious until I actually met them all and no, it wasn’t at all.
“Love” by John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
This is a recent thing. I’ve always liked Plastic Ono Band – personally I think that’s John Lennon’s best, including everything, because the songs are so honest, but he also stripped out all the bullshit. They’re so simple.
I started listening to it again a lot recently because a few years ago I’d been going through a tough time. Jen had some pretty bad health problems, one after another, and it felt like everything was going to shit and getting harder. It’s only me and her out there, so I was having to navigate it and do what I could to help and look after her and stuff, and get us through it. Plastic Ono Band became something of a comfort blanket that I would listen to whenever I had a moment on my own, in the kitchen cooking dinner or whatever.
I honestly think this is about as good as songwriting gets, because he’s realised that you can just boil it down to the simplest, most basic bits, and that’s where music is at its best.
I think it takes an advanced songwriter of the level of someone like John Lennon to actually identify that and to strip it back as far as he does. If anyone else did it, it would probably suck or wouldn’t be anything, but with him he seems really strong and powerful. It’s kind of cliché to have John Lennon on a list like this, but it’d be disingenuous to not have him in, so what’re you going do about it?
I’m all for it. I love Plastic Ono Band, and I love Lennon deciding to call a song “Love” and calling another song “God”.
I know, it’s great, isn’t it? It’s so sophisticated and so simple at the same time. I really, really like that record. Like I said, I feel like it’s his best work, including everything he ever did. It’s just a really potent statement. And “God” is a right song. That is just an amazing song whatever way you slice it, isn’t it?
Selling A Vibe is released on 9 January 2026
Sign up to Best Fit's Substack for regular dispatches from the world of pop culture