{"id":267193,"date":"2025-11-02T16:30:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T16:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/267193\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T16:30:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T16:30:08","slug":"i-was-an-idiot-but-thats-part-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/267193\/","title":{"rendered":"I was an idiot! But that’s part of life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Max\u00efmo Park<\/a> frontman Paul Smith has spoken to NME about celebrating the 20th anniversary of their classic debut album \u2018A Certain Trigger\u2019<\/a> \u2013 looking back on touring with Arctic Monkeys<\/a> and the heady days of \u2018indie sleaze\u2019.<\/p>\n

Friday (October 31) saw the Newcastle art-rock stalwarts release a bumper, 20th anniversary edition of their Mercury-nominated debut, featuring the original release plus a comprehensive collection of B-sides, demo versions, radio session tracks and alternative edits.<\/p>\n

It comes ahead of a UK tour next February<\/a> where the band, fronted by vocalist Paul Smith, will take in 12 dates up and down the country to celebrate the record, joined by fellow \u201900s eccentrics Art Brut<\/a>. \u201cWhen we play next year, we\u2019ll end up playing pretty much all of the record every night, although not in order. You want to do it backwards really, that\u2019s what I always say.\u201d Smith told NME. \u201cI don\u2019t want to sound big headed, but I think most of the songs have held up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

First released in May 2005, \u2018A Certain Trigger\u2019 sent the North East group into the Top 20 and the thick of the decade\u2019s alternative indie purple patch. Spinning tales of romantic rejection and poetically bleak regional landscapes, Smith became the new torchbearer for a quintessentially English kind of literary rock star \u2013 Morrissey or Jarvis in a porkpie hat. In a 7\/10 review of the record<\/a>, NME declared: \u201cWith a debut this energetic and cleverly crafted, we can only hope that Max\u00efmo Park keep on reading books, sulking in bus shelters and, most importantly, remaining unlucky in love.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI did wonder if there was room for ourselves in terms of a wider audience,\u201d Smith reflected on their early success. \u201cI\u2019ve always had complete faith in the music, but songs like \u2018Apply Some Pressure\u2019 or \u2018Graffiti\u2019 \u2013 they were fairly abrasive and quite harsh on the ear [for mainstream consumption]. But we got played on Radio One and reached so many more people who then got hold of this band that were a little bit unwieldy or eccentric.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were outside the circle; we didn\u2019t come from London where bands play in bars every night with music industry people there. We were doing things in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The following year, the band headlined NME\u2019s annual Awards Tour, with Smith and co taking top billing over the newly-minted Arctic Monkeys, who were then mere days away from the release of \u2018Whatever People Say I Am, That\u2019s What I\u2019m Not<\/a>\u2019. Smith remembers them as \u201cvery shy\u201d and facing down the whirlwind of their trajectory, but is keen for people not to undersell Max\u00efmo Park\u2019s own victories on that UK run.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have tried to rewrite history with that tour, but all of the shows were really amazing,\u201d he told NME. \u201cSomebody came up to me one time and said, \u2018Oh, people walked out when you played\u2019, but I was on stage and they didn\u2019t. We filmed the last one at Brixton Academy and looking back, I was like, \u2018Wow, we were on fire\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really care about anybody else when I\u2019m on stage. A kind of zeal comes in, and we\u2019re preaching the gospel of Max\u00efmo Park. It was clearly a very interesting time; their first album became the biggest-selling debut of all time so there was definitely weirdness around. But every night we put on the best show possible and I felt so good about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Check out the rest of our interview with Paul Smith below, where he dug deep into \u2018A Certain Trigger\u2019, the \u201800s indie boom and the importance of regional representation.<\/p>\n

NME: Hello Paul! How does it feel to have a record that\u2019s been around long enough to be celebrating its 20th anniversary?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Paul Smith: \u201cIt feels good overall! We\u2019ve made peace with the idea that we\u2019re old men in rock \u2013 even though we consider ourselves writers of pop songs. 20 years is a real landmark, and to even just still be making records [is incredible]. We put our eighth one out last year, so I feel like if we weren\u2019t a creative band still making music that we think is as good as the first record, then probably it would be harder to celebrate. But we still play a lot of the songs from the first record when we play live, and they just feel as alive as they did back then.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take us back to the mid-\u201900s. How do you remember yourself at that time?<\/p>\n

\u201cI was an idiot! But that\u2019s part of life. The record is pretty angsty, and all of our songs are kind of heart on sleeve; that\u2019s part of our musical DNA. But apart from \u2018Acrobat\u2019, any of the songs could have been a single, and that was our sort of mantra when we were going in \u2013 that there should be no excess. There was something in the air I guess at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know other bands were gestating in a similar way to us around the country, but Franz Ferdinand<\/a> had come out, and The Futureheads<\/a>\u2019 first album came out the day we signed our record contract on the Millenium Bridge in Newcastle on a decorating table with some champagne and Newcastle Brown Ale, making our own horrendous cocktail that we called a Maxini. We were young and just excited by music, and I think that that feeds into the energy on the record.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In a Guardian interview<\/a> at the time, they described you as \u201ca cross between Oscar Wilde, Basil Fawlty, and a regional bank clerk undergoing a crisis\u201d. Would you say that was accurate?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, there is some truth to it. I was working at a call centre when the band started, and then I was a part-time art teacher while we were waiting to be signed, so I felt like: OK, I\u2019m going to look like I\u2019ve just turned up at work \u2013 albeit with a few extra, Bryan Ferry<\/a>-ish nods to something slightly more stylish. I wanted to unravel as the performance went on. I was inspired by Iggy Pop<\/a> and the Stooges, and the idea of maximum rock and roll, but also it\u2019s been done so many times, so how can we avoid those clich\u00e9s? By me playing up to being an ordinary guy, but then taking it more extreme.<\/p>\n

It was quite a good time in indie to be an oddball!<\/p>\n

\u201cI do believe that people realised who we were and what we were, whether they liked it or not. I\u2019m not saying everybody loved us, but it was like, \u2018Right, OK, the guy\u2019s reading from a book on stage\u2019. It\u2019s a sort of signifier to say: if you think that\u2019s pretentious or whatever, then this is probably not for you.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re taking Art Brut out on the road with you, who are very different musically but share perhaps a similar outsider ethos. Do you go way back?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, on our very first tour we had a van and one of the things that we had on our compilation tape was \u2018Formed a Band\u2019 by Art Brut. We would cheer along to that because we had formed a band, and we were out on tour, and it was amazing. We met them for the first time in Germany at a big MTV televised gig, and it was just nice to see people who were normal and down to earth, but also serious about having fun and making music that didn\u2019t sound like anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, that era has been retrospectively dubbed \u2018indie sleaze<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 does that term reflect your experiences?<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, there were definitely some sleazy people around! Some of the things attributed to indie sleaze were an interest in carnal desire, and certainly some of our songs are dealing with desire, and yet I feel like a lot of the bands that are seen as indie sleaze, I don\u2019t know, they just seem pretty daft to me\u2026 Also I\u2019d like to think that our music is not particularly indie half the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pop music, or it\u2019s rock, and our influences were much wider. I was listening to the Wu-Tang Clan<\/a>\u2018s \u201836 Chambers\u2019 and feeling dazzled, so hopefully we avoided some of the pitfalls of that time by virtue of our listening habits and hopefully being a bit more self-aware than some of the other bands who descended into self-parody.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve said that people wrote about your Newcastle accent as if it was a curio back in the day; now, we\u2019ve had the Mercury Prize happening in your city, with Sam Fender taking the gong<\/a>. How important is that regional representation?<\/p>\n

\u201cTo have people coming up on the train and being part of our region, I think that is important. I was involved in some of the fringe events that were happening as well [around the Mercury] and that was equally important to me -, the idea of showcasing grassroots venues and local artists who are coming through.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were nominated for \u2018A Certain Trigger\u2019 many years ago, and it felt like a big thing for the North East. It seems like a long time ago that people were talking about my accent when you\u2019ve now got Sam Fender in stadiums and winning prizes. But I think more things should be outside of London \u2013 the further the better!\u201d<\/p>\n

And what\u2019s next for Max\u00efmo Park after this UK run?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got a European tour in March, and now an Australian tour in April, and then festivals will no doubt appear on the horizon. After that, hopefully I\u2019m going to try and make another record by myself, and while all of these other things are going on, I would love to think that Max\u00efmo Park will write another record. Album number nine would be good. Some days I feel like I\u2019ve said all I need to say, and then a song will come along and all of a sudden you\u2019re like, \u2018Ah I was wrong!\u2019 If you lose that, then you need to stop making records. Unfortunately, some people lose it and keep making records, but I don\u2019t want to be one of those people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 20th anniversary edition of \u2018A Certain Trigger\u2019 is out now. Max\u00efmo Park\u2019s tour with Art Brut<\/a> kicks off in February 2026. Visit here<\/a> for tickets and more information.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max\u00efmo Park frontman Paul Smith has spoken to NME about celebrating the 20th anniversary of their classic debut…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-267193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}