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Brothers from the Crib...to the charts
They tried to strangle each other while they were still in the womb and their first record deal was greeted with people wishing they were dead. But if they can stay alive long enough The Cribs could just be the band of 2006. Grant Woodward checks them out
O N a windswept car park somewhere in Middlesex, two men are lining up to take pot-shots at goal.
Their attempts to fire a football through the letter 'b' in an inflatable 'Wembley' are being watched by the two million viewers of popular Sky Sports show Soccer AM.
One is former Leeds United midfielder Seth Johnson, now plying his trade with Derby County.
The other is Ryan Jarman, a skinny musician from Wakefield who hasn't slept for two days and can't remember the last time he played football.
Johnson misses, Jarman scores.
The memory of the moment last Saturday morning causes Ryan's younger brother Ross to chuckle as he sits in a quiet pub in the brothers' home city.
"What made it even funnier was the fact that Ry did it in his Beatles boots," he says. "And they're falling apart."
"Well," reasons Ryan, nonchalantly lighting another cigarette, "if they were good enough for The Beatles..."
Seth Johnson has a burglar to thank for being embarrassed on live television by a guitarist dressed in drainpipe jeans and decaying winkle pickers.
If it hadn't been for him the Jarman brothers – 25-year-old twins Ryan and Gary and younger brother Ross, 21 – might never have formed a band in the first place.
Ryan had been given an electric guitar one Christmas but it sat gathering dust for ages in the corner of his bedroom in Netherton, near Wakefield, because he and his siblings were too busy playing on their computer games.
Then the burglar intervened, stealing the computer games and leaving them the guitar.
Short of much else to do, pretty soon a ramshackle band had been formed and impromptu gigs started taking place in Ryan's room.
So it was that New Year's Eve 1989 saw The Cribs give their very first public performance in front of a select gathering of relatives and friends at a party at the family home.
The twins were nine and Ross was just five.
"It was basically Ross on one drum and the rest made out of biscuit tins and us on guitars not knowing what we were doing," says Gary, who now plays bass and shares vocal duties with his twin brother.
Mimed along
"Because I was the youngest I got the last choice of instrument," recalls Ross. "We put on a Queen tape and sort of played and mimed along."
Sharing just one stereo between them, they inevitably got into the same music – The Sex Pistols and The Beatles – and moved on from doing cover versions of the theme tunes from their now forgotten computer games to making up their own songs.
A friend of Ryan's had a reel-to-reel tape machine and would pop round to record the sessions.
"I don't think our voices had even broken," says Gary. "It was just purely to do something. We didn't have much of a social life."
It was the music they honed in their bedroom that would later clinch them a record deal.
After leaving school Gary and Ryan enrolled in a music recording course at Barnsley College but failed to last the distance.
They then spent a year at Leeds College of Music, although they seldom put in an appearance.
"I remember showing up for one of the exams," recalls Ryan. "The tutor turned round and said, 'Who are you?'"
"We studied jazz and stuff like that," grimaces Gary. "It was just snobbery. It was too pompous for me, I was just into punk rock.
"As soon as we got our student loan we'd just buy another piece of equipment so we could record our music."
When they dropped out of college, the pair could at least fall back on a job at their dad Rellend's factory in Horbury Bridge making napkins and toilet rolls.
"We were the worst employees ever but he couldn't sack us," says Ryan.
"We could only carry one box each and anyone turning up for an order must have hated it because there were these three weirdos blasting out The Beatles in this big factory.
"People ask us if our mum and dad are happy with what we're doing. I think our dad's just happy we're out of that factory."
To Rellend's relief, major labels including Virgin and Island swiftly showed an interest in The Cribs' pop-punk rock on the strength of their five-track demo CD.
Faith
But the Jarmans instead picked independent label Wichita, run by Dick Green who helped mastermind Creation Records, home to Oasis in their glory years of the mid-nineties.
"They were just really into the same music we were," says Ryan. "They said you can do anything you'll like and we'll release it. They had a lot of faith in us and offered us freedom.
"Ross was still at school when the band started and when we got signed he'd just started college," adds Gary.
"We said wouldn't you rather quit college and come on tour and have a laugh. He said: 'Yeah, I probably would.'"
The news of their deal caused waves in a Leeds music scene that wondered exactly who these young upstarts were.
One poster on a music website forum even said they hoped the Jarmans died of a drugs overdose.
Such jealousy provided the inspiration for some of the lyrics on their second album, The New Fellas which was produced by former Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins who scored a hit with the 1995 hit single A Girl Like You.
Critical acclaim may not yet have translated into huge record sales, unlike close friends the Kaiser Chiefs, but The Cribs vow they won't sell out to find fame. They were recently asked to appear on Channel 4 teen drama Hollyoaks but turned it down flat.
"This album (The New Fellas) really upped the ante but we're not looking for the quick fix," insists Gary.
"The longer we can keep doing what we're doing and enjoying what we're doing the better.
"If the next album goes massive it would be cool but if not we'll just keep releasing records."
"We were told that we've sold more albums in this country than a band, I'm not gonna say who, that have had ten times the amount of money spent on them as what we've had," says Ryan. "And this is a band that people have heard of.
"That's cool because we've done it with dignity whereas all these other bands have had big full page adverts and TV adverts in some cases."
"We're in our own little zone," reckons Ross. "We're putting records out and we're doing something we really enjoy.
"At least things are building up rather than going down or standing still."
Despite spending so much time together, the Jarmans insist they get on well, even though they all still live in the family home.
"It can be quite weird," admits Ryan. "You come off about six weeks of total madness on tour and all of a sudden you're sleeping in your own bed and it's family dinners and all that."
"When we come off tour we try to spend some time apart," says Gary.
Girlfriend
"Ross has got a long-term girlfriend and the other week I went down to Brighton for a few days.
"I just walked round with my headphones not speaking to anyone for 10 hours a day. It was great."
Gary is five minutes older than his twin but says he had to be delivered first, "otherwise he'd have killed me".
"I was strangling him," nods Ryan proudly. "If we'd have come out naturally he wouldn't have survived. Now there's an analogy for you."
They confess they still argue constantly but say it's only because they're so used to doing it.
"In this last year I've realised how different I am to you and you," says Gary, pointing at his two brothers. "Being in the situations we've been in over the past few years, a lot of things Ry would do I wouldn't do. He enjoys different parts of this than I do, so does Ross.
"There's lot of doors open to you and they'll choose to go through different doors to what I will.
"Whereas this year's made me realise what my values are, in some ways it's encouraged Ry to be way more hedonistic than he's ever been.
"That's not to say we ride around on Harley Davidsons or anything like that, though."
"Well," says Ryan, "when we were in Los Angeles a couple of days I ago I was racing a Trans Ams through Sunset Strip with Carl from The Libertines and that drummer out of Jet..."
Gary Jarman flashes a quick look at his brother and shakes his head.
"Let's not talk about that."
l The Cribs play Leeds Met tomorrow night. Their new single You're Gonna Lose Us is out now.
grant.woodward@ypn.co.uk
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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