Album anniversary tours are fun because you get to revisit a classic for the night but they are also not fun because they remind you how old you are. Take Interpol’s upcoming Antics tour, for example, celebrating the 20th anniversary of a dynamic indie-rock cracker that feels like it only came out yesterday but did not only come out yesterday. It came out in 2004, which is why Interpol are embarking on a 20th anniversary tour of it. It all makes sense now.
In an interview with The New Cue published tomorrow (Monday 21 October), frontman Paul Banks said he was mentally prepped for the upcoming deep-dive into the past. “We’ve done a couple of these shows already, so I know the drill,” he said. “There seems to be a lot of exciting and there’s interesting nostalgia components, because you just don’t feel that much time has passed. But I recognise there’s a whole new generation of people experiencing that record for the first time.”
Playing a whole record in sequence live requires a little recalibration around how you approach the live show, the Essex-born Banks said. “It does a little bit, because when you sequence a record, it’s not necessarily how you would sequence the ebb and flow and excitement of a live concert,” he stated. “It’s like preparing to view it like that, like a presentation, and you’re trying to honour the source material and the flow inherent in that sequence and transfer it from the personal listening experience to the stage. But I do think mentally you have to prepare for where you might normally put an up-tempo song, now it’s the moment on the record where the denouement is happening so things get a little chiller than you might often do in a live show otherwise. You have to go into it with a prepared headspace to accommodate that adjusted arc.”
The Antics tour, which some hilarious wag (me) suggested on X should’ve been titled the Antics Roadshow, begins in Copenhagen this week, reaching British shores at the beginning of November.
