Interviews

You spend the first five years trying desperately not to fail and fuck up and you spend the rest of your career desperately trying to find ways to fuck up, because that’s where it gets good.

Things can get quite tense in the rehearsal space creating the things we want..

Violence is certainly a fascination of mine. I think it is an obsession in art in general.

If a revolution comes I don’t believe it will be musical, it will be political. 

What was the catch phrase for Asda when they used to slap their bums?

But with a synth you have COMPLETE control. You can control if you want to de-tune it (which I do a lot) or you can get the perfect pitch you're searching for straight away. I just find synths more exciting to be honest!

That’s what was really noticeable with working with Andy Weatherall, the sense of space he brought to the recordings, as well as the level of detail over particular musical ideas or passages.

Talking about psycho-geography, indeed admitting that you like psycho-geography is a good way of making you sound like a complete twat. It’s a short-cut to being a twat.

There is a lot of music around that is fetishizing a lost innocence of folk music. There is a worrying preponderance of beards in folk music...

There are millions of bands at the moment and you do need people to take notice that you are different and I guess we’re undergoing an evolution and leaving lots of things behind, but that’s all part of the process.

When the Super Furries were huge, you had the absurd situation of bands from South Wales singing in the (very different) North Walian accent to sound more like Gruff Rhys.

I had a mate from Accrington who wouldn't go on holiday without a couple of boxes of Kellogs cornflakes. Do you have any similar tips for those bent on foreign travel?

I’m a rock’n’roller so I’ll get up at 6am and write straight through until 6pm and then get absolutely trashed.

...there were twenty-five Slovakian motorcyclists in this Little Chef and every one of them just got up and legged it as soon as we walked in...

...Why didn’t you run with the popstar thing?

JC: Because I was surrounded by cunts...

Julian Cope is lost. He went off on a mission to get some sandwiches, took a shortcut, made a U-turn and lost mobile phone contact with the crew.

...If you set yourself up to put yourself on the edge of human experience what comes forth is your uber-human side. It’s just a fantastic feeling.

Information overload has a numbing effect. One "solution" is to avoid as much "news" media as possible. Choose fewer sources of inspiration, not more."

The best gig we did was up in Cumbria in Barrow in Furness. It was really odd, all the locals and some artists, it felt like a youth group…

We are at music school, and 90% of the people there listen to Led Zeppelin, or some blues shit and they don’t want to make anything new. They only do guitar solos and drum solos and waste their time.