Twenty years after Bang Bang Rock & Roll turned self-awareness, pop obsession, and art-school chaos into an indie classic, the love for Art Brut hasn’t died. With Art Brut announcing their 2026 Bang Bang Rock and Roll Tour, a career-spanning box set, and a renewed creative pulse, the South London icons are stepping into legacy mode without losing their bite. We caught up with enigmatic frontman Eddie Argos while Art Brut were touring with Maximo Park to talk about memories, sincerity in music and why two decades on, the band’s music still strikes a feverish chord with their fans.
JG: Let’s start with celebrating the 20th anniversary of Bang Bang Rock & Roll. That album captured that electric moment when kids realize pop music can save them. Twenty years later, what still feels true about that record?
Eddie Argos: All of it, really. I mean, I’m on tour at the moment with Maximo Park, and they’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of their album. And we’re not quite doing that yet. We’re playing some other songs, but whenever we play songs from that record, they’re all true stories. Like Emily Kane is real, my brother’s real. There really was a good weekend with a new girlfriend. I can update the stories so they don’t feel old to me. It’s like a diary or something. I get to go over it again and say that in the song “Emily Kane,” for example. That song brought her back into my life as a friend, right? That’s the purest example I can think of the power of rock ‘n’ roll, you know? So it’s like playing those songs; they don’t feel old to me. They feel like they’re from now, because I update them all the time.
JG: No, that makes sense. You’re getting to approach those songs now from a different perspective.
Eddie Argos: Yeah. Well, I’m a parent now, right? It’s all that, “Why don’t my parents worry about me?” and all this kind of stuff. I’m a parent now. My son came to see us last year. He’s 11, and afterwards he was saying to me, like, “Oh, when you’re too old, can I be the singer in Art Brut?” Do you know what I mean? He wants to take over. “Well, you can, mate, but, like, all the lyrics are about family members. It’d have to be like, “My Uncle Colin just discovered rock ‘n’ roll, and my dad kissed my mum, and it felt like a hit.” Do you know what I mean? I see it from a completely different angle now, really.
That first record is when I really got into writing autobiographically. I mean, I still do. Everything gets updated. My little brother is 45 now, you know, he’s not out of control anymore. He’s in control. But, like, he’s a teacher. Yeah, so those songs, even though they’re old, still feel quite fresh to me. We toured in the States recently, in Germany and the UK. Bang Bang Rock ‘n’ Roll, I think it’s about 33 minutes long. When we were playing it in Germany, it was like an hour and a half. We added so many extra bits. “My Little Brother” gets stretched out, and “Modern Art” lasts forever, and talking in between, so it’s quite nice. It’s good value for money.
JG: Absolutely. When you’ve got classic albums and songs that you play all the time, but mean so much to people, does stretching them out and reworking certain things keep the music fresh to you as well?
Eddie Argos: I’m so sincere in our songs, like for example “Emily Kane.” In the UK, people thought I was joking, or they were quite cynical about it. But in America, people were like, “Oh, wow, you must have really loved that girl. And by the way, here, I love this girl called Sarah, and she went to Notre Dame,” and blah. You know what I mean? It’s nice that those songs mean so much to people. And when I’m playing around with the songs and the lyrics, I have that in the back of my mind. I don’t wanna spoil it for anybody. I wanna keep it sincere.
Even with “Modern Art” now. We play it for like 20 minutes sometimes. There’s a talking bit in it, and people know it. On this Maximo Park Tour, because we’re only playing for 30 minutes, we can’t play the 20-minute version of “Modern Art,” and people are shouting for it. I think people who like Art Brut really get that about us. I make sure the songs maintain their sincerity and their authenticity, no matter what I do with them.
JG: I feel like box sets and reissues can sometimes feel a bit like a museum piece or make something feel older and more formal than it is. How do you personally negotiate nostalgia versus honouring the past without becoming trapped inside the past?
Eddie Argos: Wow, that’s a really good question. I’m a huge music fan, and I collect so much of it. Even in our song “The Replacements” from my third record, I’m singing about secondhand records and reissues and stuff. I spend a lot of time buying those things and thinking about them. There is a museum aspect of it, we’re preserving something. I wanted it to be special.
I didn’t know it was going to the streaming services. I thought it was just gonna be a box set. So I put some pretty weird stuff in there. The earliest versions of “Formed A Band” and there’s this live thing we did with a horn section and stuff. I wanted to make sure it was museum quality. If we’re really gonna capture a moment, it should be as best as possible. Then on the second box set, because we’ve got two box sets, which is crazy, it’s literally everything we’ve ever recorded, and tons of unreleased things and things I had in my house in boxes and on tapes. It’s quite nice for me to have them out there in such a formal way. Like the boxes in the attic, I don’t need those anymore. I’ve got everything condensed into two seven-inch-sized CD boxes.
If you’re gonna capture the past, it should maintain the authenticity. It should include interesting things people would like to hear. There’s also a book in it that I wrote. I mean, actually, I had a plan. I wanted to do an Art Brut museum to launch it. It’d be really funny to have Chris Chinchilla’s guitar pick in a case or the lyrics from “Formed a Band” in a frame on the wall. We didn’t have time to do it. I thought it’d be very funny to actually do it as a museum.
We’re also writing songs at the moment. There are loads of new songs. We’ve got about 10 new songs we need to record. It’s nice to sort of draw a line under that bit about Art Brut, because it’s been a while since the last record, and then here we are again. We can be slightly different now. More mature, I don’t know. It’s nice to have a cut from the past, but to keep it nice.
JG: Something that I’ve always appreciated is the way that you’ve treated your pop obsession and your love of music as something both sacred and kind of ridiculous at the same time. Do you think loving music is still a formative identity for kids today, or has the algorithm replaced the record store?
Eddie Argos: That’s a good question. I’m a university lecturer, so I’m in touch with students quite a lot, and I teach songwriting and performance. I think there are still musical tribes. The lack of physical media has done that. When I was a teenager, people would come around to your house for a party. They’d see all your CDs and your vinyl, and they’d have a rummage or have a little look. And that doesn’t really exist anymore. At least, not in that way. I said this to somebody else yesterday, and they said, “Discogs. You can do it on Discogs.” But it feels less formal.
I was around some kids at a disco, because of my son, and they were asking for ’90s music. “Can you play us Nirvana? Can you play us the Spice Girls? Aqua? Pearl Jam?” And I was like, “Dudes, you can’t like all those things. Listen, I fought in a war. You’re not allowed to like the Spice Girls and Pearl Jam. It’s one or the other.” But then I thought about it, and growing up, I liked T.Rex, the Sex Pistols, and Abba. So, I don’t know. Maybe it’s always been a bit like that, and it’s just sort of coming back as time passes.
A little rambly answer. But tribes still exist, for sure. My son and his little gang, they all like hip-hop, you know? And grunge. There’s this theme there. With the young teenagers in his school, I think they sort of faction off. I miss it. I liked the idea of there being mods, rockers, hippies, and beatniks. But I think you’re right. I think it’s like a swamp of stuff now.
JG: It is. Speaking on that, it felt like Art Brut never really fit neatly into one particular box either. Do you think that maybe this is why the music and the band have held up so well?
Eddie Argos: Maybe a little bit. We were a bit too raucous and rock for indie. The Maximo Park, Bloc Party, and Franz Ferdinand stuff. But we were a bit too self-aware and clever with our lyrics and stuff for The Libertines side of it, so we were in the middle. And we were friends with Carl Barât (The Libertines), and I know Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand). We did sort of fit in the middle, but it’s been quite nice with this passing of time.
We’re supporting Maximo Park at the moment, and their audience seems to really appreciate us even though we’re quite different. We did the same with The Subways; their audience also seemed to appreciate us. Everyone who survived kind of did it on their own terms, and it’s nice to sort of be playing with them all now. We never really know what to do with ourselves. It was very rare for us until recently to support a band, because we don’t always click with other people.
Lots of my influences and things that I like were things like Jad Fair, Half Japanese, Jonathan Richman, and all this kind of stuff. In the UK at the time, there wasn’t so much of that about, or people weren’t into that. Do you know The Hold Steady? We toured with The Hold Steady in the US. That was one of the first bands I really felt like, “Oh-… this sort of makes sense. Like, he’s a singy-talker, right?” We both thought about the lyrics a lot, and we’re both leaning into rock cliches sometimes. And I never really knew what sort of music we were. People would ask, “Oh, what do you sound like?” We had a really straightforward sound engineer, and we were crossing the border into America. The security guy was like, “What does the band sound like?” Our sound engineer went, “Oh, they sound like a mix between post-punk and classic rock.” I was like, “Wow! Yeah. That is, that is what we sound like. We’re a mix of post-punk and classic rock.” It’s really hard to know what you are from the inside.
JG: Definitely. I guess you do kind of have to rely on the audience to designate what your sound is.
Eddie Argos: When we first started, I know I didn’t sing very well. I thought I was singing badly, and then I read all these reviews where they were calling it “speak-talking and anti-rap.” Like in my head, I was singing, but I guess I’m not. I’m speaking. So yeah, that’s what I mean, you don’t really know what you’re up to until someone else tells you.
JG: There’s always been humour in what Art Brut does, but to me, it’s never felt particularly cynical. Was that a conscious sort of resistance to some of the cooler aspects of indie culture at the time?
Eddie Argos: I’m not a very cynical person in my life. I’m quite open-hearted and sincere, so no cynicism really gets in. With the lyrics, I was always trying to make the lyrics be as conversational as possible. I like the idea of songs sounding a bit like a sort of conversation in a pub. I like the sincerity that that lends them. I might have gone through a phase of being a bit grumpy about other bands and things, but I’m over that now. But that was it. That was the extent of it, you know? I was more cynical about other people’s cynicism; that’s what was going on there. There’s no cynicism in Art Brut, really.
I wouldn’t say so. I can’t think of an example of it, if there is. And if there is, it was an accident. I didn’t do it on purpose.
JG: You’ve got a show at Horseshoe Tavern on April 13. Any fun Toronto stories?
Eddie Argos: I’ve not played there in so long. And my son’s just old enough now to know about Scott Pilgrim and stuff. He loves Scott Pilgrim. He got the books from my bookshelf. He was surprised Toronto was a real place. I was like “Oh yeah, it’s real. It’s in Canada.” Like, he knows that. He’s good at geography. Just somehow in his head, he thought it was a fictional Toronto. But it really looks like that. I’ve been to that shop in the movie. I’m excited to be back and to Scott Pilgrim about the city.
Follow Eddie Argos: Instagram, X
Follow Art Brut: Website, Instagram, Facebook
