MY FUTURE VEHICLE (I LOVE YOU): MICHAEL CABLE ON CRIME-POP, JAMES JOYCE AND GTA 4

Interviewed and photographed by LOUIS LOTA

January 22, 2026

Michael Cable, Leeds’ very own leather-clad cowboss, along with his trusty amigos of Vehicle have penned the sort of single that leaves you feeling like a dragon in the bathroom mirror. Punchy, surreal and a suspiciously accurate depiction of menaces to society, You Are Not A Cowboy / My Future Wife (I Love You) encompasses the wide-spanning imagination of a band perched between albums one and two. Louis sat down with Michael on the eve of its release to discuss what world the songs came from and the world he sees them belonging in.

LOTA: Now then.

CABLE: Hello.

LOTA: Still excited about the single coming out, or do you move on quickly when releasing songs?

CABLE: I am excited. I think the video you and Florence have done has made me excited again.

LOTA: Oh, stop it. We’ve just put titles on it. Kept them real simple, like Slacker. Have you ever watched that first Richard Linklater film, Slacker? I feel that’s a bit of you.

CABLE: That's one of my favourite films ever. I love that film.

LOTA: No way, I watched it for the first time two weeks ago at the BFI and I was mind-blown. The titles at the start are so simple but they just set the perfect tone for the film.

CABLE: Wow. I’ve watched that film probably more than any other film. That’s always been my favourite really, since I first saw it. I would have loved to have come down to see it there.

LOTA: They’re showing it again and I was gonna go back but it's on the night of your Manchester show.

CABLE: They’ll be doing instrumentals then…

LOTA: Haha. Knowing that they came up with one-liners on the spot, knowing that no one got paid… It's so raw. Other than my friend who I was with, I’ve never spoken to anyone about that film.

CABLE: I feel like my art teacher in school showed me that. He was great for getting me on to shit that I never would have found. I’ve only watched it on the 240p Youtube clip, but I've seen it loads. It’s like - have you ever read Dubliners?

LOTA: I have not.

CABLE: It’s almost like a film version of that. Dubliners is just scenes that blend into each other. They both have that strange mixture of funny and just weird and there's a real kind of nice feeling to every part of it. You relate to the weirdness of it. The weather, the time of day and the way everyone is just bored and hanging around, I love that feeling. It’s such a summer feeling. Everyone's a bit jaded with heat.

LOTA: You get jaded watching it. You don't realise that the plot is moving throughout it. All of a sudden you’re four conversations down the line, none of the characters are the same and you're half way across Dallas.

CABLE: That guy with the conspiracy theories, I especially love that guy. Everyone’s too busy these days. In that film no one's busy.

LOTA: People stop and listen to each other. I recently started reading The Third Policeman after you recommended it last time I saw you. It’s got the same wandering mind, stream of consciousness writing.

CABLE: That's also got that very strange and surreal but comfortable thing about it. The world it's set in is very weird, but the humour of it brings you back home. His internal monologue, as Joe - haha - I love that about it.

LOTA: When you’re reading a book like that, does your mind drift into thinking about writing songs? Do you sit with a pen and paper, or when you eventually go to sit with guitar do you think about how, say, Flann O’Brien would say this or that?

CABLE: I think with books, with fiction, I let it seep into my subconscious a bit more - without sounding too wanky. It’s with other songs that I’ll take notes. If I’m out and about I’ll take notes. But with novels, the way I read, it takes me a while to get into the rhythm of reading a book. By the time I’ve gotten into the rhythm of reading something, I'm passed being able to take notes because I’m really into it and focused. But I do get a lot of ideas from books without realising it there and then. If I do take from them it would be a word or a phrase.

LOTA: In The Third Policeman’s surreal humour, it makes sense to me that it is in the same universe that You Are Not A Cowboy came from. Especially in the bridge, there's something that taps into that perspective.

CABLE: It must be subconscious with that because I didn’t have them two together when writing that. There’s other songs that I would say are in a similar world. You are right though, the character definitely has a similar sense of humour. In the same way the character in The Third Policeman is someone who’s harmless but also has dangerous intentions. Because obviously, in The Third Policeman, it’s very nice voice but they have murdered somebody. And it's the same with Cowboy, it's someone who is very naive and bitter, but is also quite earnestly trying to defend something they love. But to the point where they’re, you know, trying to attack somebody. That’s where the song ends really.

LOTA: When you’re writing, do you just find a few lines and then amuse yourself by writing this absurd character. Or are you trying to get a specific feeling out of yourself?

CABLE: It's funny, because you always want to retrospectively put meaning to things, but really, the honest truth with that was that the words “you are not a cowboy” were just in my notes. I don't know where it came from. And it just matched the riff. So then once I had that title, the rest of it just followed. Alright, this is a character now that I can throw all of this other stuff that I like writing about at. It comes alive in this world that exists within the songs. I don't sit down and go “I’m gonna make this surreal”, it’s just the way the wind blows when I’m writing. 

LOTA: Well, I guess it allows you to sit on the fence between serious and unserious. The moment you feel you are taking it all a bit too earnestly, you spin into a line about laying in a bus lane or whatever. And then you can dip straight back in because you've got your fix of the wacky and have thrown the attention away from your vulnerability. I feel the whole band, the sound and the image that comes across feels like you are very aware of when you are getting too silly or too serious and keep both of those trains running parallel to one another.

CABLE: Definitely, I think as a band we're all just like that as people. We can’t take life too seriously, but also are all really into our art we’re making, the music and whatnot. It's always that battle. But I've never thought of image being a part of that. I wouldn't even know what kind of image we have. I've always thought we look like GTA 4 characters. Or like, the dirty Monkees or something. Me and Harry used to say we look like villains in a 90’s Coen brothers film. The mafia in Dumb and Dumber or something.

LOTA: I can picture you all lined up in the Usual Suspects line.

CABLE: Well, there are a lot of lyrics about crime in the new stuff as well. I think I've found that a lot of the characters in the songs have found their way into an underworld.

LOTA: It’s like that really early song of yours, I Don’t Want To Kill You Anymore - it's a sugary pop song!

CABLE: I’m always drawn to the absurd. Using that to create a love song. I love them sort of words. When you hear a word like dead or kill or murder in a song, there’s just something really stupid about it. I find it interesting that you can sing a word like that, for how serious they are in real life. I think they can lead you down funny paths if you put them in your art. Singing about funerals or stuff that's a bit taboo for emotional reasons rather than stigmatised reasons, you know?

LOTA: You can play around with extremes because of how short stories are in pop songs.

LOTA:  And then on the b-side, that's a completely different character? 

CABLE: That's definitely a completely different guy. That's a love song written from the point of view of someone who is institutionalised or maybe in prison for life and is never gonna see a woman ever again, but is just holding onto this collective imaginary woman that they’re never going to meet and fall in love with.

LOTA: How much of that is your voice speaking through him?

CABLE: I have to pull it from somewhere, yeah but my life thankfully isn’t like that. There are men like this everywhere, I was gonna say sexual, but it's not even a sexual sort of thing, it's more innocent than that. It's just someone who wants to be married. I like to think it’s taking the piss out of tradition as well. Men's views of the future when they're VERY single and all hungover and takeawayed out, thinking one day “I'll be married with kids and a family”. It's taking that and revealing the humour and bleakness of that kind of thinking.

LOTA: It certainly plays with what a song is expected to be. The structure of it seems to have a very short attention span. It starts dozy, saying “I love you”. Then when it starts listing things he wants, like his future house and future videos, he’s lost in his own wandering train of thought.

CABLE: Well it's someone who's not very well, isn't it? It's not even about love, it's about this idea of love that someone might have when they've grown a bit insane. And it's also about this fall of traditional pressure. So yeah, there's that mixed with someone who's lost their sense of reality. So they are going off on one a bit, seeing all sorts of things laid out in the future that are never gonna happen.

LOTA: The idea of these tales of crime and living on society’s peripheries coming out of a band is a funny image. Do you know Gary Moore, who sings Parisienne Walkways?

CABLE: Oh yeah.

LOTA: The album cover of that where he's just been released from prison, pushed out by the warden and the only possession he has is a hard-cased guitar. There's something beautiful about covers that make you imagine the band when you're listening. A band in prison, or just buzzing to get released from a ward, then all having a sing and dance about it. That seems very Vehicle.

CABLE: Like Jailhouse rock, sliding down the thingy. I like the gang mentality of a band. So I quite like having your own thing that not many other people are doing. I always prefer bands that are doing something out on their own but they’re in love with it and think it’s the best thing in the world. 

LOTA: A strong thing Vehicle has in that sense is that the ideas behind the band are to do with the writing, just as much as they are with the performance or the visuals. It's easy to make a statement with the way you look or the production style, but for that to run through naturally, it's got to cut deeper. With these two tunes, they don't sound remotely similar. Other than the tone of your voice, you would think they were two separate bands.

CABLE: I love that though, I love doing that. I love The Velvet Underground thing where every song is completely different, but comes from the same place. It's pop art put into a band form. Collaging everything. I like the idea that anything you can be influenced by can end up in a song, no matter what it is.

LOTA: Well it works on these two. 

CABLE: They are the poppiest things I've written before. Normally I write way more lyrics to things and I barely even repeat lines, but there's not many lyrics in these songs, you hear the titles a lot in each of them. I wanted it to sound like Dancing in the Moonlight or something, one of those early noughties songs, that kind of school disco sound.

I wrote it to send to the groupchat. Because we were laughing about that phrase “my future wife, I love you”. and then Jack said it would be a great line for a song. So I just recorded it and they were all saying this is actually really good. But because it was a song disguised within a joke, it allowed me to tap into influences that I would never have if I was taking it too seriously.

LOTA: It's beautiful to make things in a small world, where the only audience is the groupchat, or the room. 

CABLE: Well, everything now is written to be shown to the world, everyone has a constant platform with social media, so I think that the things people enjoy these days are more niche, personal accounts, rather than something that's designed to appeal to a massive audience. Even things that go viral, most of them are accidentally viral. Funny videos that you see online are usually things that are captured in the moment. It’s the same with music, you get things that are trying to be viral but I think people are good these days at not allowing the wool to be pulled over their eyes. So in that, maybe this will have a million views by February... Ten billion streams.

LOTA: “Did you know that hit was originally a b-side?” they’ll be saying.

CABLE: On Pointless. Within a year it’s a question on The Chase.

LOTA: B-sides that hit number one.

CABLE: Along with The Passenger.

LOTA: And Harness Your Hopes. That's the gateway Pavement song now. I think an answer on The Chase is a good marker of fame. You’re known enough to cause a family dispute in front of the tele.

CABLE: “That were a b side - ehh?”

LOTA: There's a sense of liberation b-sides have that I’ve always been drawn to.

CABLE: Yeah I like b-sides, they're a good way to try something out like that. I like subverting stuff, by giving them a different context. That song, in the context of You Are Not A Cowboy - they inform each other. Once you see those two tracks together, you're told something about Vehicle. 

LOTA: And it solidifies the voice throughout the band. It forces you to concentrate on the song writing because that's the only tangible thread through it. 

CABLE: I'm glad you’ve said that because with all my favourite bands, that's what is great about them. You don't think about what era they came out of or the scene, you just think about them as a band or a body of work. That's always just down to song writing. Going back to The Velvet Underground, you don't really think of them as a sixties band, like you would the Loving Spoonful or someone. Or The Smiths, you wouldn't think of them as an eighties band, you just think of them as The Smiths. That's how I'd like Vehicle to be.

LOTA: It makes you curious about them. Adds mystery. Everything's more attractive with mystery.

CABLE: Treat ‘em mean keep ‘em keen. That's the album name sorted.

LOTA: When you're making these new tunes, are you picturing them in an album? Are you lining it up in your head?

CABLE: With the new ones, definitely, I am writing it as an album. These two were also written specifically to be released as singles, which is also something I haven't done before. So yeah, I guess it's that thing where we've done our first album so we're into this swing of things where we can plan it a bit more. I guess when bands are forced to not plan things it’s because they don't write that often, whereas, that's mostly what I do. There's too many songs for the next album really. So it's more about trying to stick to a plan when I do write them, rather than getting too lost in ideas or whatever. 

LOTA: Would you sit down and rewrite all the lyrics over and over till it's perfect?

CABLE: Oh yeah, I have done. A lot of my songs, maybe all of them, lyrically are edited to the last minute. Musically, they're usually the same initially and don't change until we take them to the practice room where the band give ideas and write new parts. My musical ability is a bit repetitive. I’m bad for not realising I’m going down the same melodic hallways.

LOTA: That's the song writers licence though. You can do that!

CABLE: That's my defence, but sometimes it's good to be aware of it. It's good to have people that know a bit more about the way things are. With lyrics, I’m very specific and put a lot of time and myself into that. With music it's a bit more intuitive, a bit more feeling based. And I'm not using my head as much, I’m using my stomach. If it's doing something emotionally, then I’ll do that. But with writing it's not like that at all. I'm not really thinking about the effect of it. There's all sorts of things I'm thinking about.

LOTA: Well I'm excited to hear some of them on the tour.

CABLE: Yeah I’m buzzing man, to be with the label on the road.

LOTA: It's nice to bring everyone together properly on stage for the first time.

CABLE: That's what it's all about as well, just getting a big gang together, combing the shit you do anyway, like having a good time or getting pissed and having a laugh or whatever, but with art and with something that's exciting and we all really care about. That's all you really want out of life.

You Are Not A Cowboy / My Future Wife (I Love You) out now on Esco Romanesco Records

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