Time apart keeps Gomez together

Gomez promise a great new show for NZ audiences. Photo / Supplied

The story goes that Gomez played its first public performance in Leeds in 1996 without a settled name. They stuck a sign outside saying "Gomez, the gig's in here" for a friend with the surname Gomez. The name stuck.

"It normally confuses the hell out of people, which is good, it was always meant to be a bit stupid and ambiguous, and it is even more appropriate that it confuses people," says the band's drummer Olly Peacock, from his home in Brooklyn, New York.

But there is no confusion when he says New Zealand fans will get a good show. Following their last visit here in 2007, Peacock promises something a little different.

"We are on pretty good form at the moment," he says.

The show will feature much of the new album (A New Tide) but they have done a lot of work on the older stuff.

The band has just toured with Pearl Jam in the United States, which some may consider an odd match. But Peacock believes Gomez held its own.

"I think we are one of those bands that can fit into many different worlds. We do have a lot of songs that are pretty rocky and Ben's voice is pretty potent when it wants to be."

Singer and guitarist Ben Ottewell, Tom Gray and Paul Blackburn still live in England but Peacock has lived in New York for about three years, with his American wife, while guitarist and vocalist Ian Ball is in Los Angeles.

The fact two band members live in the States has not proved disruptive, in fact it may have helped.

"We do so much touring it makes very little difference," Peacock says.

"And in terms of recording it's pushed us to be a little more inventive in terms of being able to work outside of the studio time."

That means a lot of work on computers, sending music files back and forth.

So Gomez, originally from Southport in England, are now firmly part-American - as they have often sounded.

"It's definitely an eclectic thing. It's different actors and that's the sort of the whole point of what we were doing in the first place, that it's indefinable to some degree, that and that in itself is original and interesting and the people that generally do that in my mind are far more entertaining."

Their music is now getting a wider American audience, thanks to television and movies.

Grey's Anatomy producers are apparently Gomez fans, while other songs have featured on movie soundtracks. It has helped the band find fresh ears - something which can be be especially hard at home in England now they are a long-established act.

"In England the nature of music has come to the point where bands are like a fashion item and unfortunately one week you are in and the next it's all over."

Peacock admits something similar happened with Gomez, after the band won the Mercury Music Prize for their debut album Bring It On in 1998, but is still one of the few bands that started out around that time and is still going.

"If we didn't think we had any value in what we did we probably would have given up by now."

Who: Gomez
When and where: Opera House, Wellington, Saturday October 17; Powerstation, Auckland, Sunday October 18.

- NZPA