Interpol frontman Paul Banks has ditched his Julian Plenti alter-ego and now, for the first time, is releasing solo material under his given name. entertainment.ie music editor John Balfe caught up with Banks ahead of his Dublin show this weekend for a chat about his solo work and the future of Interpol.

 

This is the first album that you have released under your own name. Does that signify any particular change of tack from your previous work, be it solo or otherwise?

I would say my solo work is very distinct from my work with Interpol. As far as my first record, the Julian Plenti record, it came as wanting to document the work I was doing in college under that name, my first performance name when I was like 19. I had songs written back then that I never did anything with, after they’d been sort of nagging at me for a decade after Interpol had kind of taken off, it became very important to me to make that record I had never made in college. I don’t expect to be anything that really makes sense to other people but I think artists often have a little OCD tick and I have some of them and that was one of those. Now I’ve pretty much released all the work I wrote in College either in that first record or in the EP before this record. So it felt like a very honest and natural thing to do the first time but had I continued with it it would have felt like a contrivance to me. The new record is not material written in college. It just felt like I’m a go back to doing something much more simple and much more easy to digest under my real name because I’ve documented the work now so Julian Plenti can kind of recede into the background.

So do you feel you can put the Julian Plenti phase of your career to bed, now that it has a beginning, middle and an end?

I mean maybe but it’s also that I don’t put too much distance between this record and that. This record is just a continuation of the last record but I’ve eliminated the alter-ego.

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Paul Banks will play The Academy on Sunday 20th January. Tickets are still available from usual outlets nationwide.