Maxïmo Park frontman Paul Smith has spoken to NME about celebrating the 20th anniversary of their classic debut album ‘A Certain Trigger’ – looking back on touring with Arctic Monkeys and the heady days of ‘indie sleaze’.
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.
It comes ahead of a UK tour next February 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 ’00s eccentrics Art Brut. “When we play next year, we’ll end up playing pretty much all of the record every night, although not in order. You want to do it backwards really, that’s what I always say.” Smith told NME. “I don’t want to sound big headed, but I think most of the songs have held up.”
First released in May 2005, ‘A Certain Trigger’ sent the North East group into the Top 20 and the thick of the decade’s 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 – Morrissey or Jarvis in a porkpie hat. In a 7/10 review of the record, NME declared: “With a debut this energetic and cleverly crafted, we can only hope that Maxïmo Park keep on reading books, sulking in bus shelters and, most importantly, remaining unlucky in love.”
“I did wonder if there was room for ourselves in terms of a wider audience,” Smith reflected on their early success. “I’ve always had complete faith in the music, but songs like ‘Apply Some Pressure’ or ‘Graffiti’ – 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.
“We were outside the circle; we didn’t come from London where bands play in bars every night with music industry people there. We were doing things in a different way.”
The following year, the band headlined NME’s 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 ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’. Smith remembers them as “very shy” and facing down the whirlwind of their trajectory, but is keen for people not to undersell Maxïmo Park’s own victories on that UK run.
“People have tried to rewrite history with that tour, but all of the shows were really amazing,” he told NME. “Somebody came up to me one time and said, ‘Oh, people walked out when you played’, but I was on stage and they didn’t. We filmed the last one at Brixton Academy and looking back, I was like, ‘Wow, we were on fire’.
“I don’t really care about anybody else when I’m on stage. A kind of zeal comes in, and we’re preaching the gospel of Maxïmo 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.”
Check out the rest of our interview with Paul Smith below, where he dug deep into ‘A Certain Trigger’, the ‘00s indie boom and the importance of regional representation.
NME: Hello Paul! How does it feel to have a record that’s been around long enough to be celebrating its 20th anniversary?
Paul Smith: “It feels good overall! We’ve made peace with the idea that we’re old men in rock – 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’t 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.”
Take us back to the mid-’00s. How do you remember yourself at that time?
“I was an idiot! But that’s part of life. The record is pretty angsty, and all of our songs are kind of heart on sleeve; that’s part of our musical DNA. But apart from ‘Acrobat’, any of the songs could have been a single, and that was our sort of mantra when we were going in – that there should be no excess. There was something in the air I guess at the time.
“We didn’t know other bands were gestating in a similar way to us around the country, but Franz Ferdinand had come out, and The Futureheads’ 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.”
In a Guardian interview at the time, they described you as “a cross between Oscar Wilde, Basil Fawlty, and a regional bank clerk undergoing a crisis”. Would you say that was accurate?
“Well, 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’m going to look like I’ve just turned up at work – albeit with a few extra, Bryan Ferry-ish nods to something slightly more stylish. I wanted to unravel as the performance went on. I was inspired by Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the idea of maximum rock and roll, but also it’s been done so many times, so how can we avoid those clichés? By me playing up to being an ordinary guy, but then taking it more extreme.
It was quite a good time in indie to be an oddball!
“I do believe that people realised who we were and what we were, whether they liked it or not. I’m not saying everybody loved us, but it was like, ‘Right, OK, the guy’s reading from a book on stage’. It’s a sort of signifier to say: if you think that’s pretentious or whatever, then this is probably not for you.
You’re 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?
“Well, on our very first tour we had a van and one of the things that we had on our compilation tape was ‘Formed a Band’ 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’t sound like anybody else.”
Now, that era has been retrospectively dubbed ‘indie sleaze’ – does that term reflect your experiences?
“I 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’t know, they just seem pretty daft to me… Also I’d like to think that our music is not particularly indie half the time.
“It’s pop music, or it’s rock, and our influences were much wider. I was listening to the Wu-Tang Clan‘s ‘36 Chambers’ 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.”
You’ve said that people wrote about your Newcastle accent as if it was a curio back in the day; now, we’ve had the Mercury Prize happening in your city, with Sam Fender taking the gong. How important is that regional representation?
“To 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.
“We were nominated for ‘A Certain Trigger’ 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’ve now got Sam Fender in stadiums and winning prizes. But I think more things should be outside of London – the further the better!”
And what’s next for Maxïmo Park after this UK run?
“We’ve 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’m 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 Maxïmo Park will write another record. Album number nine would be good. Some days I feel like I’ve said all I need to say, and then a song will come along and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Ah I was wrong!’ If you lose that, then you need to stop making records. Unfortunately, some people lose it and keep making records, but I don’t want to be one of those people.”
The 20th anniversary edition of ‘A Certain Trigger’ is out now. Maxïmo Park’s tour with Art Brut kicks off in February 2026. Visit here for tickets and more information.