Sitting in the suite of an upmarket hotel with an iced latte in hand, Paul Banks (Essex, 48) shows few visible aftereffects of the intoxicated lifestyle that nearly sent him to the other side. The Interpol singer looks happy in middle age. His band, which shone in early-2000s New York amid the post-punk revival, is now enjoying a second youth, lifted up by a generation that once again reveres the archetype of the tormented indie figure à la Ian Curtis, with whom Banks has long been compared.
He is in Madrid to present This Mirror Weighs a Ton, the band’s eighth album. He knows the city well. He lived in the Spanish capital from the ages of 11 to 16. He still has friends and visits them every time he comes. He says he fell in love with Madrid and learned that, with time and the right attitude, he could live anywhere. “When I got here I was on a BMX and playing basketball. I left at 16, but by then we were drinking, smoking and going to clubs and stuff. The last moments of pure happiness and the first moments of adulthood were in Madrid.”
He grew up with skaters in the downtown Plaza de Colón because his father, an automotive executive, came to Madrid for a job at Volkswagen. Later the family moved to Mexico and then to New Jersey. “When you talk to people who talk about having families and moving around a lot, I think a lot of people frame it from a negative standpoint, you know, maybe the child won’t be able to develop roots or have a sense of home. The way it worked for me was sort of on the contrary: I think it allowed me to just be a citizen of the world with no notions of one thing being above another and that every place has its charms.”
Banks studied literature in New York. It was the era of rock’s rebirth, with bands such as The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Rapture, and LCD Soundsystem. In 1997 he joined Daniel Kessler, Carlos Dengler and Greg Drudy to form Interpol. Five years later, with Sam Fogarino replacing Drudy, they debuted with Turn On the Bright Lights, a key album of that scene. But as Interpol grew commercially, its members began to show signs of wear. In 2010, Dengler left the group. For Banks, those years were marked by substance use. He says he quit when he realized he wouldn’t last much longer on that road. “I was open about the fact that I was getting to the point where I think I was getting close to mortal situations. And then I just went to get treatment.”
He moved to New Jersey, to a house that was far from the bars and clubs and from some of his friends, whom he didn’t see again for a long time. “If you say, okay, this table’s my life and I’m going to move the beer over there to the far side of the table, that’s not going to work if you’re trying to stop drinking. It has to be off the table. Once something is genuinely off the table, there’s not really that much left to do. It was hard; I had to go through a major chemical rebalance, and I think I went into some pretty profound depressions at the time. I couldn’t quit cigarettes for a long time after that. But the drugs and alcohol wasn’t that hard because it was time and I was just ready for it.”
Despite everything, he has fond memories of that year and a half of recovery, during which he exercised a lot and threw himself into music. “[In 2013] I did this crazy mixtape called Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be. I don’t know if you know about it; it’s only on YouTube. It was just something I did for fun. I learned to use Logic [a music-production program], and it was the first time I realized, oh, I could write with horns or trumpets or trombones. I can create any sounds I want. It was pure creativity at a time when I really needed it.”
Like many artists who get used to creating under the influence, Banks needed time to discover he could do it sober. “I’ve never felt that booze or weed — and I do smoke weed still — is somehow helping the creation. You’re telling yourself that it’s this sort of ceremonial preamble to the process of creation. So you can do without them and instead sit for a few minutes and quietly tell yourself you’re going to channel your creativity and try to make something beautiful.”
He changed his lifestyle and found in surfing and boxing two activities to fill the “void of excitement” drugs had once provided. While standing on a board in the middle of the ocean he applied the same principle he used to stop drinking. “There’s not really a middle ground because anything in the middle, you can just keep leaning into panic and then just fucking slide that way. If you’re on a surfboard and you start thinking, ‘What if there’s a shark?’ It can become overwhelming. Instead you have to realize: ‘I’m not on the menu; I’m sure the universe is not upset with me for being out in the ocean on this non-polluting floating object.’ So if the universe wants a shark to get confused and come bite me, then what am I gonna fucking do about it?”
The end of the process culminated in the birth of his two children, who have changed how he works and conceives his career. “I think about what I’d want my son to think: Not so much would he like these lyrics, but would he like the effort that I’m making? Would he admire the sort of commitment to my craft? I think that becoming a father fully activated my soul. It’s not that the love you normally feel goes from a ten to an eleven. It’s something else. It’s like a room that you didn’t know was in your house, and now you discover this room, and someone turns the light on, and now there’s this extra space, and that’s how it feels emotionally.”
At the end of the interview he takes out his phone and proudly shows a photo of his children. They don’t yet know their father’s story, but one day they will. Is he worried about what they might think of him? “Do you mean because some of the themes are a bit weird, or that they’re sort of dark? I’ve thought about that. But from what I’ve heard from other artists who talk about their kids, they don’t care much who their parents are in the art world. Robert Downey Jr. will talk about his kids watching The Avengers, but they don’t care that dad is Iron Man: they like Thor. You just want to make sure that it doesn’t get in the way of any part of their life or that it doesn’t impact them negatively.”
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