Interview: Spoon - A Spoonful of cool

A SPOON show doesn't quite end when the band leaves the stage.

• Spoon, from left: Britt Daniel, Rob Pope, Jim Eno and Eric Harvey.

The group may be gone, but a bit of the members' exacting taste lingers, in the songs the audience hears while clearing out. At most rock concerts this music is chosen by the club management to be as wallpaper-background as possible, impetus just to move along, please. At Spoon shows it is chosen by Spoon. And so after a recent show at Boston's Orpheum Theatre, the crowd, still buzzing from the encore, left to the strains of The Star-Spangled Banner, followed by AC/DC's Back in Black – anthems to the country, and to rock'n'roll.

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And a good fit for Spoon, which started out as an emblem of the indie scene in their hometown, Austin, Texas, and now, 17 years later, are as expansive and enduring as the symbolism of the US's flag. Hanging out backstage after the concert, Britt Daniel, Spoon's outsize frontman, guitarist and songwriter, says it was inspired by a video he had seen of Bob Dylan performing in Britain; God Save the Queen was the soundtrack as he left the stage. "I always thought it was cool to play something very official afterward."

His unflinching, classic vision of what is cool has guided the band since its inception. When Daniel, now 38, founded Spoon with the drummer, Jim Eno, 43, they were part of a wave of fuzzed-out post-punk acts, many of whom – the Pixies, Pavement, Guided by Voices – are now kaput or working the reunion circuit. But Spoon kept calm and carried on; they have survived being dropped by a major label, Elektra; cast changes – the line-up now includes Eric Harvey, 35, on keyboards and Rob Pope, 31, on bass – and shifts in the indie scene. Not just survived, succeeded: Spoon's last record, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, from 2007, reached the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, selling 46,000 copies in its debut week, more than double their previous album and huge for an indie label.

Spoon's critical acclaim is almost comically universal. In December the online review aggregator Metacritic named Spoon the best artists of the decade, above acts including Radiohead and the White Stripes. In March the group will headline Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Though the band are now spread out around the US, they have a palpable cohesion thanks to Daniel's rigorous songwriting and pared-down aesthetic. They wear button-down shirts onstage and have no notable haircuts.

Daniel, whose musical inspirations run to The Stooges, Lou Reed, Paul Simon and Prince, also rejects the indie label. "To me indie always meant something like not really caring enough to try, or not wanting to appear that you care and so therefore not trying," he says over dinner in New York a few nights after the Boston show. "And I've never liked music like that. I want to see that there is some care in it, or at least some passion."

In person Daniel can be reserved – laconic, if we're being rock'n'roll – though not unfriendly or incurious. He described himself as a "blind optimist" about pursuing a music career, the only thing he has wanted to do since he picked up a guitar in high school, but adds: "I think it would surprise a lot of people that know me to say that I'm an optimist.

"Jim has said that I can turn any compliment towards me around as some sort of negative." Being on the road with his bandmates is an antidote to that. "That's my favourite thing," he says. "It's the most carefree thing. If I'm left to my own devices, I don't experience that camaraderie so much. There's no other time that I can be as happy on a 24-hour basis."

Spoon's sound has always built on tension and release, between formality – tightly packed, seemingly elemental arrangements that nod to Motown and punk – and feel-good-ism. Daniel's most frequent lyric is some variation on "It's all right" ("Lou Reed's favourite line," he says). His verses can be expressionistic, with oblique meanings: Who Makes Your Money, for example, begins, "Japanese John, his slight face fur/Still just as confused, still just as sure."

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What exactly is he singing about? "I don't know a lot of the times," he said. "I'm just trying to fit the mood of the song."

Janet Weiss, a veteran drummer now with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, who has played with Daniel in Portland, calls him a crafty songwriter. "With Spoon you get the feeling, like, he's up to something; something's happening that he's aware of that he's not quite letting you in on," she said. "It's like sly or coy at times. I think that makes people want to put their ear closer to the speaker." New album Transference, the first the group has produced on their own, is more stripped down than its predecessor, "less glassy" Daniel says. The title is a reference to the Freudian theory, and "also I just thought the word was really pretty". The 11 tracks, including one outright ballad, Goodnight Laura, a rarity in the Spooniverse, were cut more closely to the rough demos he recorded at home. "I just didn't want it to sound as fretted over," he says, "and in a way that's a total lie, because it was totally fretted over."

It is unmistakably a Spoon record, deliberate but fun. "I don't think Britt is about to all of a sudden veer into some territory just for the sake of being modern," says Mac McCaughan, a founder of Merge, who signed the band after Elektra dropped them in 1998. "He's taking familiar things and putting them back together in a certain way that's specifically Spoon."

That routine was dented by the experience with Elektra, which dropped the band after just one album. Spoon responded by releasing a few vitriolic singles directed – by name – at Elektra executives. "I definitely felt vulnerable," Daniel said, "and after that I was less afraid to put out music that had elements of vulnerability." Merge released the keyboard-heavy Girls Can Tell, critically considered Spoon's breakthrough album, in 2001.

Spoon's ascent owes a lot to the slow growth of indie rock in the 1990s, before the online world made music easier both to distribute and to dismiss. "You had a lot more time to develop sort of unnoticed," Weiss says. "It wasn't like you were shoved into the spotlight immediately. Your ideas could simmer, and you could bounce your ideas off the other bands that were in your scene before everyone else knew about it."

That attitude is rarer today, when baby bands can blow up before their first tour, driven by cyclotronic digital promotion. Spoon "started where most bands start, in the basement practice space, and did the van tour and learned how to make records themselves on their own equipment", Weiss says. "That, in a way, assures some kind of longevity, because you do know how to do it yourself, in case you have to, in case you don't make the big advance."

Of course, Spoon eventually did make that advance, and found commercial success; their songs have been in the requisite films, television shows and ads (Wedding Crashers, The OC). But though Daniel says the group have been courted by majors, they were happy to stay with Merge, whose studious approach matched his. "They're in it for the long haul," McCaughan says.

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The group have found their creative pinnacle in the self-reliance of Transference. "It's the most that we sounded like us yet," Daniel said. McCaughan agrees. "It's the Spooniest." What does it mean to be Spoony? In New York to shoot a video, the band members gather at a Lower East Side bar to explain the group's longevity and place in the music spectrum. Or try to, anyway.

"When I joined the band, Britt would discourage anybody in the band from having a beard," Harvey says. "He thought beards were not cool. Five years later everyone in a band has a beard." Not Spoon. "So," he concludes, "we can say Spoon is not beard rock."

Without Daniel the bandmates are rarely recognised – or "rockegnised", in their parlance. They are still at the level of fame where they need badges to get into their own afterparties. "Usually a good afterparty is smoking weed out of an apple and talking about documentaries," Pope says, only half-joking. Living in different parts of the country, they get together only to perform or record; the group gives feedback on the sound, "but ultimately it kind of goes through the Britt filter," Pope says.

For his part Daniel continues to be uncompromising about the crafting of rock'n'roll, about what constitutes cool. Shooting the video, for Written in Reverse, was not. "We don't have any good videos," he says. "What's your criteria for a good video?" Harvey asks. Daniel: "Is Devo in it?"

His band laugh, but Daniel seems serious. The video's "one saving grace", he says, is that they would record the song live. Wouldn't it be easier to do what most bands do, and lip-sync? "Easier technically, yes," he says. "Easier on our souls, no."

• Spoon play King Tut's, Glasgow, on Sunday.

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