Interpol’s “Evil” is a young, half-pleading track addressed to a girl known as Rosemary, and regardless of a long-running fan concept, singer Paul Banks has stated it’s not about serial killers.
It comes from Antics, the band’s second album, launched on Matador in September 2004 and produced by Peter Katis, who recorded the band at his Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that spring. “Evil” adopted as a single and entered the UK Official Singles Chart on 15 January 2005, peaking at No. 18, based on the Official Charts Firm.
It did even higher on the Official Unbiased Singles Chart, the place it reached No. 2 and stayed for 5 weeks. The only was backed with “Music Seven”, a observe left off the album.
The lyric has one particular person chatting with Rosemary about holding on and the hope of being saved. There isn’t any crime in it, and nothing that names a spot or a date.
The darker studying comes virtually totally from that identify. Many listeners join it to Rosemary West, who carried out a collection of murders along with her husband Fred at their house in Gloucester, and the speculation has circulated within the music press for years.
Banks has pushed again. In a 2024 Guardian reader Q&A, he stated: “Everybody thinks ‘Evil’ is about serial killers but it surely isn’t in any respect.”
He has by no means provided a line by line clarification as an alternative, and no public account of the track from the remainder of the band has surfaced.
So who’s Rosemary? Nothing on the document says. The identify isn’t related to a surname, a criminal offense or an actual girl, and each model of the West concept begins exterior the track itself.
The title helps the speculation alongside. A track known as “Evil” that’s sung to a Rosemary invitations the connection earlier than anybody has heard a phrase of it.
So the title and the identify collectively recommend one thing sinister, whereas the phrases themselves learn extra like a love track written beneath pressure.
The video made the track stranger. It was directed by the artist Charlie White, as the clip’s IMVDb itemizing data, and it’s constructed round a life-size puppet in a hospital room.
The animatronic puppet was made by Spectral Movement, the consequences firm behind the creatures in Hellboy, and it was operated by a group of puppeteers who have been faraway from the footage afterwards. It was White’s first music video.
The result’s a clip during which the one face on display screen belongs to one thing that isn’t alive, which solely fed the concept that the track was hiding one thing darker.
Followers named the puppet Norman, Stereogum famous in 2007, and White had commissioned it for the video.
The puppet outlived the clip. In 2021 its proprietor, John Kolbek, ran a crowdfunder to lift $3,000 for its restoration with assist from Lunas Puppets, NME reported.
Antics arrived on the peak of the early 2000s New York guitar revival, a scene with roots within the data Neon ranked among the many finest post-punk songs ever made, and its look has come again round within the present indie sleaze revival.
Interpol have stored going lengthy after it. Neon’s assessment of their 2018 album Marauder picks the band up 14 years later, and they’re nonetheless touring, with an intimate London present introduced after their Olympia dates have been cancelled.
For extra songs the place the story followers inform differs from the author’s, browse Neon’s library of track meanings.
Rosemary is the one particular person within the track with a reputation, and it occurs to be the one phrase that made folks cease listening to the whole lot else.
