rude references with meat, but that’s not for me to talk about as I haven’t noticed any of them. Of course.” Because Adam and Louise had neither come from musical backgrounds, nor been in bands before they joined forces with each other, their music “came from instinct and what felt right,” explains Adam, “I think we make an original sound. We use bass / guitar / mandolin / drums, with no synths or keyboards, but try and abstract the sound through octave and echo pedals to give them a dimension. We aim to find a line between experimental and pop, finding where they meet. It’s hard. There are easy options, but we try hard to avoid them.” I ask about the habitual processes they go through to get to new tracks. “We shout and argue a lot. ‘JAZZ JAZZ JAZZ, play JAZZ DRUMS!’ I shouted at my drummer earlier today. He complied and it sounded fucking terrible. Most songs are written on an acoustic guitar but end up somewhere completely different. Often a song can work on its first play, or after 200 attempts. Stupidly, it can become a matter of life and death in the studio.” And what about preparing to go on stage? Any sacramental rites to summon a great performance? “I ask the others, ‘Are you nervous?’ They say, ‘No’. I say, ‘I’m nervous’. Then I ask the other band, ‘Are you nervous?’ They say, ‘We don’t get nervous, don’t worry about it’. I say, ‘I can’t’. And this goes on and on and on. I have stopped drinking before I go on and it is working for me at the moment. I would drink a lot before to kill my nerves, but my playing and singing got really slack. So I have cut it right back.” They approach their live performances with pomp, ceremony and art school theatricality. “We try and create something different on stage. We disguise the fact that the audience is looking at a room they have seen countless times before. Flags, flowers or dummy children. We try and create a new world. So it’s not just sound stimulation. Maybe it came after accidently seeing a band called the Hank and Lily show gig. It was all masks and mermaids. And an entire living room stage set. Even though they were touring all the way from Canada. I was so blown away. Even though it was in a venue I’d been to 1000 times, it was a different world.” Bag of Meat will be the band’s third album. The creative procedure is described by Adam as a kind of mutinous ritual patricide. “Our albums seem to be a rebellion against the last. Our first
record was quirky angular art rock and we got tagged in with bands I didn’t like. So with our next record we became heavier / darker / weirder with less emphasis on pop. We have rebelled with this record against the heavy coldness of the last and it has a strong pop element and really quirky parts.” About the soon to be released album, Adam is animated. “We have a really great drummer now, which has opened up loads of different time signatures and great possibilities to take songs further. We recorded it in three sections over Summer/Winter/Spring and it’s the best stuff we have ever written. The recording went well, but I always feel always slight sadness to recording a song. Once they’re recorded they are finished and can no longer change or evolve. It’s like they are dead. That’s why we like to play new stuff. It’s the process that’s exciting. The mistakes and changes, not the replication of the solution. The band have had their fair share of mixed blessings, the gods of dark-art-pop-rock having showered them with equal measure of misadventure and providence. “Van breakdowns, missing the same ferry twice in a day….all stupidity related. We always leave too late, have one last pint, and as a result we always always run for planes.” Losing their original drummer also “felt like crappy luck at the time, it was grim. But it worked out as a blessing in the end. It’s helped us develop and get good. James is a great drummer, so it’s helped us leave behind the tin pop post punk stage we never wanted to be in anyway. We’re fucking tight now, there’s a pleasure in the music, and it can breathe and have life. In general, God shines on us. We’ve been all over the world, doing stupid music and getting away with it. It’s genius.”