by David Kirby

We copped to a lesson in humility with Gomez drummer Olly Peacock earlier this week. Back in the day, we caught the British combo at what may have been their first Fox show (sorry, I don't keep the stubs), and the crowd, a little spare, mixed liberally between the trans-oceanic buzz junkies and the merely curious, gave them an appropriately modest welcome. They closed with an oddly angular read of "Road to Nowhere," the Talking Heads' last decent single and parting shot at the receding Reagan-era boom days of the '80s, delivered with a dash of irony. Covers can reveal a band's genuine pedigree, except when they don't, and this one was perplexing.

But it was a good show, brave in its own way, even if a little unrevealing about the band's future.

By October 2002, two or three years later, the band returned to a sold-out night, wall to wall fans singing along with pretty much every lyric to every song. What the hell had happened with these guys? They weren't a jamband. They got decent but unspectacular radio play around here—if they were flavor of the month on college radio we didn't get the memo. Bugged the hell out of us... where was Mr. Bigshot Rock Critic as these guys grew from pigeon-toed rattlegeists to college-town club heroes, turning away the slow and luckless from sold-out showtime doors?

Peacock laughs a little hearing this confession.

"I guess that came from just touring, playing hard, getting better. I mean, that's what happens when you're out there long enough, you get pretty good. We matured a lot onstage, we learned about what we did well," says Peacock.

Then again, winning the fans (and most of the critics) was never their biggest triumph, since their songs are provocatively good and they had a lot of the music press in their court all along, ever since their wünderkind years of earning a big label contract with Virgin having played practically no live shows.

But after a round of label shakeups and let-goes, inconveniently timed just before 2004's Split the Difference, Virgin suddenly found itself strangers with Gomez.

"They just didn't know what to do with us. They didn't get behind the record; they didn't promote the record," says Peacock. "I mean, they said they wanted us to do more live shows, and then they said it would be nice if we got on the fuckin' radio. We said, well, isn't that your job?

"They eventually dumped us," he adds. "I think we were all a bit relieved."

The band signed almost immediately with Dave Matthews' ATO Records, which released a two-CD live set last year. And this year, the five-piece band returns to the colonies behind their fifth studio effort, How We Operate, produced by Gil Norton, best known for his work with Foo Fighters and the Pixies, both of which figure large in Gomez' sponge-like coterie of influences. Norton was the band's first outside producer in... well, ever.

"Yeah, we decided democratically, like with everything else, although I think we had wanted to do it some time ago and were just waiting for the right opportunity," says Peacock. "I think the move to ATO was that opportunity.

"We just needed someone to police us," he adds. "We actually rehearsed for this album. In the past we'd just go in, put some ideas down, throw the song together and add some bells and whistles and quickly move on to the next song."

That can get expensive, on studio time.

"It can, absolutely," he says. "This time, we went in mostly knowing the songs and knowing what we wanted to get out of them. Big change for us."

There were people, after the lackluster performance of Split the Difference, who were thinking out loud that you were done.

"Oh, yes, we knew that. But we're in a good place. The album's making it onto the radio. It's doing OK in Australia," says Peacock. "We're good now. I think the Virgin breakout kind of woke us up."

And the critics at home? The bileblister cabal of British music critics.

"It' so bad. There's all this emphasis on who's the new band or the new hot thing," he says. "The NME is just hilarious. They wrote something nasty about us and then said it would be the last time they would ever write about us. Then a few months later they said something about our haircuts. I mean, just ridiculous stuff."

They wanted to stop writing about you... but couldn't.

Peacock, beaming. "Exactly."

On the Bill

Gomez plays with David Ford at 8:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 16, at the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder, 303-443-3399.

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