A Few Words With...Sci-Fi Steven Clark from bis!

By John A. Wilcox

bis, you say? the punk/pop/funk/prog/too-many-genres-to-describe bis? The Powerpuff Girls end theme bis? Yes. That bis. I was thinking that I should reach out to the band and gain insight! Sci-Fi Steven Clark was up for a rigorous questioning and delivered an excellent and thoughtful interview. Do join us......



PS: What was the first album you ever bought?

SFS: Well, I think there was always albums in the house. Me and John's mum was very into ABBA and Adam and the Ants. We always had the singles and the albums and just played them in our bedroom. So that was always about the house. Adam and the Ants, especially, just a massive early influence. But I suppose the question is, the album bought with own money.

I was very into, as I said, Adam and the Ants. And I think that was all I really liked when I was like five, six years old up until I was about, I'd say ten. I do specifically remember seeing Infected - the film version of it on Channel 4 late at night. I was probably up too late. I seem to remember like around about probably the same time as Mexico '86 World Cup or something like that. I may be conflating events, but I remember seeing that and just being like kind of awestruck. Didn't really understand what it was, but I knew I really liked it. And around about maybe the year after seeing the video to True Faith by New Order, and again, I was just like, what is this? Like just mindblowing, like just opening up, you know, avenues away from just pop music. So, to get back to the actual question, I don't know. I'd like to say it was Infected by The The, or maybe Substance, the New Order singles collection. But I've got a terrible feeling that it was Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi. I briefly briefly liked the slick power pop of You Give Love A Bad Name and Living On A Prayer. I can now remember going to a record shop near where we lived at the time. I wonder in fact that I physically bought that, but anyway it'll be one of them. I do remember buying Substance by New Order on like the double cassette in the white box. I definitely bought that in Woolworth's in Dunoon when I was visiting my Gran. Whether that was the first one, I don't know. But it'll be one of them.

PS: What was the first concert you ever attended?

SFS: Again there's a sort of honest answer and then there's a sort of acceptable answer. The honest answer is we went to see the band Ta'Pau of China In Your Hand fame at the Exhibition Centre in Glasgow when I was about maybe 10 or 11 I suppose. I don't really think I wanted to go but I was definitely there so that does count as the first concert ever went to. Only the first one I went to that I really wanted to go to was to see Lloyd Cole and the Commotions in like 1988. Their final tour with the original lineup. That was the first one I really wanted to go to and I remember just like being way up the back of a massive room and not really been able to see the band and also remember leaving before the encore so we could beat the traffic. It's just things I would never do now. But yeah I think, I mean, the very first concert would be like live music, it's a weird one. But like going to summer holidays to Butlins in the 80s places like Minehead and Bognor Regis and just seeing like the kind of in-house band I don't think I've still got the record but I remember the band the Butlins band of the mid 80s whichever resort it was were called The Push Button Click. I don't know why I remember that I'm going to have to Google that later but The Push Button Click I feel like it was a real band real instruments rather than just somebody singing along to backing track and I'm sure they had a single. I suppose that was the first time I like saw a live band. So weirdly in-house Butlins bands probably did inspire more than going to first big concerts in a room that was too big.

PS: What was your first guitar?

SFS: I have always been a reluctant guitarist. John from the band is a natural guitarist and like did guitar lessons and did it properly and all that stuff. I was much more into synths I think in the 80s when we started making tunes, me and John, we just had like a Casiotone with inbuilt rhythm and like you could press a button and it just played a chord for you with a jaunty bass line and you play that with the left hand. Then the first two Octaves would just be auto chord I think they called it and then you play your melody over the top of it. So I never really had any interest in the guitar because it just looked difficult. Played it a bit at school but very rudimentarily. It just seemed really difficult whereas the synth keyboard or even piano I suppose was just much easier just to make something happen quickly. I know that the question is what's my first guitar but specifically I can't really remember because I didn't care. But our instrumental breakthrough was when we started when we were like I was maybe 14 and John would be like 11 or 12 and we started rehearsing at a proper rehearsal studio. We originally just still had this Casio but then the whole studio was going digital so all the analogue gear was just getting sold off really cheaply, and this engineer was just like "I'm selling a Juno 6 the Roland Juno 6 synth. It's not MIDI. It's not MIDI." We were like "Yeah, cool," and it made some amazing sounds. He sold us it for like 50 quid, which is, was quite a lot of money when you're 14 or whatever. And then we got a drum machine, a cheap Kawai one, and that was the start of the sound.

So anyway, yeah, guitar-wise, me personally, I only really started playing the guitar because Amanda joined the band and she played keyboards. To flesh out the sound I played the second guitar rather than the bass or whatever I don't really know why. I would just play barre chords. I just play rhythm stuff really and I thought I've always been a bit disrespectful of my own instruments which is a shocker and I just manhandled guitars. I've got into trouble with guitar repair people. I used to just fling guitars up into the air and just let them hit the stage, which I thought was punk rock, thank you. If John upgraded, it was probably like an Epiphone SG, I think I used to play. Then, when I got into guitars, the first guitar I remember choosing when the band started to break through was a Rickenbacker, which is totally pointless for my sound. But I did love getting a review from the Melody Maker once. Yeah, I think It was Dave Simpson. I can't remember. I'm pretty sure it was him. He was just like, I was playing the Rickenbacker. And I was, you know, I was just playing thrashy barre chords on it. And he just like said I was, I didn't deserve a Rickenbacker. So that made me want it more. But I did get rid of it because it was a bit bulky. So now I'm very much a Fender Telecaster guy. I've still got one American one from the actual 90s that I still use.



PS: How did the three of you first meet and what led to you wanting to play together?

SFS: Well as I've mentioned before me and John, brothers grown up in a musical house. Our mum was a music teacher, as well as having a decent set of records that we could pick and choose our favourite from and just play them all over again. And so we went to the same school as Amanda. When me and John were playing the occasional concert just as a two-piece at school, Amanda would be the only person that was really kind of interested. And so we just ended up sort of slowly starting to hang out together. Me and Amanda were like a couple when we were at school. And so we would just hang about, listen to loads of records, and she would mess about on the Juno 6 and the bass guitar. I had a four-track, a cassette recorder, so I would just make tunes. At some point I was like "You do a vocal on this." She would always be about while I was recording and then I think she was just messing about on the bass and I was just playing this riff over and over again and that that became Kill Your Boyfriend. That was the first sort of bis with Manda song, really. Maybe indie, slightly synthy, but fairly kind of standard Beatles-y songwriting type things.

Some of it was all right, but when your boyfriend came along and we'd just played it one night at a gig, so in between all our sort of standard indie-by-numbers tunes, all of a sudden there was this punk song and it was Manda singing. I just, yeah, just remember a couple of our long-term friends just standing up during the gig during Kill Your Boyfriend and being like "What the fuck is going on?" This is great. And so realistically, there would be no bis, as we know it, without Manda. And it totally just changed the direction. So we've always had this mad breeding ground of influences that we don't fit in anywhere and we'd never really had a set agenda of what we wanted to sound like. So there's punk riot girl influences but there's also synth pop influences. Then there's actual techno in there and then there's weird notes.

We all loved a wide wide range of music. John was into metal and stuff like that but we just adapted all little strands of influences into what we became - which is a band that I don't know how you would define us. I think that's that's held us back but it's also helped us and that is just the way the three of us coming together do it.

PS: Let's talk about a few songs. What was the spark for There Is No Point?

SFS: Excellent. It's good to be asked a question about a more recent song. I'll try to remember. I think, I kind of remember not making any music for quite a while. The band stopped in 2003. Then we did our Data Panic project, which was just the three of us, but with a full band and really we kind of gave that a year. I think the songs are really good just a little bit more rock. A little bit more straightforward new wavy rock. I think No Point was one of those unfinished Data Panic tunes musically. I think either I recorded a bit of it or it was just in my head. I finally got a computer with like logic on it and was like "Right. Okay. I just need to relearn how to do this. All our stuff was kind of in storage but I think I just had that part of a riff in there. I think I melded it with something else but anyway. I just I had a notebook of new bis, let's just do something. And it was the song title. It was the first thing that came is like "There is no point other than the point that there is no point" - which just kind of sums up doing music for me it's not really a choice anymore. It's there, and it has to come out.

Lyrically it's just all over the place. Manda has ideas and then I'll have ideas and sometimes we just kind of pull the two together and we create something that might not make incredible linear sense, but these are the words that fit this tune. We're usually tune first lyrics later. I love "There is no point other than the point that there is no point." It's a bit David Bowie. I kind of enjoy the weird structure. It does something twice then the next time it does it three times for no reason and then there's the middle bit where it just breaks down to build back up again. That's huge when we play it live. It's weird. I think it's a kind of classic best song even though it doesn't really sound like anything too much we've done before. It's good to talk about that one because that was kind of like the first song that kind of came together for what eventually became Slight Disconnects.

It could have been a Batteries song as well, but it felt like "Nah, this is a bis song." Weirdly, I think we did play it with me singing it once, and it was too high. So when we got round to doing it again, it was like "Let's try Manda on this." I really love Manda's vocal on this one. It's a really good one live as well. So yeah, there has no point. It feels like the start of the rebirth of bis. So it holds a special place in my heart.

PS: How did Robotic come together? It has such a great energy.

SFS: After we toured social dancing in 1999, we were in Glasgow for a long time. We had our own studio. A kind of vague budget and vague deadline for doing things. It turned out it was all vague because the record company was falling out with us. But we spent a lot of time in Glasgow and spent more time in the clubs, specifically a club called Optimo, which was just massively influential to quite a lot of Glasgow musicians. It was on every Sunday night, so it was full of people that didn't have jobs necessarily, or just worked in the pubs and clubs as well. So it was just musicians and, you know, pub and club people other DJs etc. So that'd be like 1999 and I think I think by this time me and John especially were getting into a lot of the Detroit techno stuff. There was a record shop called Rubber Dub which is still going strong in Glasgow, and we'd spend lots of time and lots of money in there, just researching and buying loads of electro records specifically.

Robotic is very much more 80s high-energy kind of rhythm. This was like in the year 2000. So it took ages for Robotic to finally come out. I think this is just a big classic Octave disco riff thing. And we worked on it for ages. It wasn't really a song, and then we kind of made it into a song.

I subsequently heard lots of music that sounded like it. I'm not saying that they ripped us off because Robotic was made in mid-2000 and didn't really get released until the end of 2001, 2002. There's a number one song called Loneliness by Tomcraft, which is just like virtually identical to Robotic in its tone. And like, did Tomcraft hear it? I doubt it. I wouldn't say we're breaking any massively new ground with Robotic, but it felt like we had a few bits and pieces like that. Protection as well. So we were quite close to making a whole album of just pounding techno pop. And then Return To Central is the one that I would say you know we rarely play any songs from it, but I'd be like this is their most complete bit of work. And Robotic's kind of crucial in that, because it is the straightforward dance tune, which just goes straight into the Brian Eno-like big sad ending type thing. So, Robotic came out of a kind a boredom with straightforward guitar pop music and an addiction to 909s and Juno Octave bass lines.



PS: Why do you think Kandy Pop made the impact it did when it was released?

SFS: This is one of the great mysteries. Never thought "This is going to be a hit single" but it was our main song at the time where we started to break through. I think this is like October 95. I think that Peel Session which was released recently on vinyl does capture us quite well. I think it's like yeah we're kind of on good form there, and I could sort of see why people would be getting excited about it. The actual recording for the single is a bit weird compared to the Peel session. Peel session one's just, like, quite aggressive. The guitars are up top. But I don't know why Kandy Pop made such an impact. It's kind of catchy and annoying, I suppose. It's not really about anything, it's one of our songs, it's kind of like"This is us." That's just a calling card. It's like me and Amanda just having a having a row like the band Prolapse, but just sticking a catchy hook onto it. Why did it make an impact? I guess it didn't sound like anything else in 1996. Towards the latter days of Britpop when Blur had just about, you know, stopped doing the brassy pop songs that were going to go a bit more Pavement. We just didn't really sound like anything. So possibly it was a wee bit like some kids that listened to John Peel and bought fanzines. It was there, punk rock. And maybe Kandy Pop was the song where people didn't like it, but it was inescapable. It's just like an earworm. I mean, we definitely got lucky-slash-unlucky with being on Top Of The Pops with it before it was even on the charts and that kind of helped. But it was a weird time where we were still releasing records on Chemical Underground which was like all the records got delivered to someone's flat. You're just so uncorporate and you know we just couldn't quite get enough copies out there. Why did it make an impact? I don't know. It's a good tune, really. We still play it, and it still goes down well, so it probably just made an impact because I suppose deep down it's just a good pop song.

PS: Have any elements of the band changed since the start, or has the vision remained consistent?

SFS: I think we constantly evolve. I think this is part of our problem - we can do so many different types of records. Even right now we're looking at the pool of material for recording another album. I've got lists where I'm like this is the electropop list, this is the XTC stuff, this is the more downbeat stuff, this is the punk stuff. And I just can never decide whether we make a cohesive record that's in one style, or we do our own mixtape essentially of just like, here's all the different things that we do, you know. So our vision has definitely not remained consistent. We didn't have a plan. Between the first and second album, we knew we wanted just to kind of upgrade the sound. The first album's pretty dry, it's underproduced, but in a chosen way. So I think we did know at that point the vision was like let's get drum loops in here let's get everything upgraded and let's make a shiny pop record. So Social Dancing is the time where we committed to a vision sonically. It's a shame that it just doesn't quite have enough good songs on it. It starts really well and then kind of loses its way slightly. Return To Central is just like we never have a vision for that, but it sounds the most cohesive. But it also sounds nothing like this. We're singing differently especially Manda. I would have to say the elements of this band constantly change and that's a good thing creatively but also it's confusing for the casual listener. We remain on the outlines and that's fine.

PS: The end theme for Powerpuff Girls brought bis to new audiences. Were you surprised by the success of the series and the song?

SFS: I don't know if we were surprised. I think it was kind of sold to us that this would be a big deal. Certainly it was kind of impressive to go touring the world at this stage and just see it. I'm constantly on the TV. Most TV shows, they'll just cut off the end theme. We were all a bit disappointed by that, but then it didn't matter. It was just catchy enough that people caught on to it. It's a strange song in our catalogue because we don't really treat it as a bis song. We very, very rarely play it. We do it when somebody emotionally browbeats into doing it. "Oh, that's my favourite song, and it's my birthday" or something. But we really, we just consider it like soundtrack work, which we thought we would get lots more of. We did do a BBC cartoon series. We did a song for every episode of this animated thing. It eventually came out. We released it as Music For Animations. It was just short, sharp punk songs. But that feels more like the Powerpuff Girls where it's just like we're writing to order a bit. But that said, I remember it being really good fun to do.

And it is nicely done, I have to say. And it's really weird. It's a weird song the verse is really strange we did a rebuild of it quite recently actually because we don't own the original and so we're doing a kind of 30th anniversary CD box set and for whatever reason I was like "Let's just do it again." But just listening to the instrumental of the original the guitar bits are just weird. It's just sort of odd little King Crimson/Cardiacs notes in there - really strange. So actually, it's quite subversive for a cartoon theme tune, but then that's not fair because the Simpsons theme tune is complex. In fact, lots of cartoon music is really complex and it's probably quite nagging and maybe we have ripped off quite a lot of that. so I think it's a pleasant surprise. It was disappointing when they brought the Power Puff girls back and they used a different song because the absolute gold mine would have been if they'd got like Miley Cyrus to cover our song that would have been great. That might have kept us in business. It's one of the very few songs that still reaps any royalty rewards, so forever grateful for that song.



PS: Any plans for a third Batteries album?

SFS: Well, not too many people ask me for this, John, I'll be honest. I've got some songs that are definitely Batteries songs. But I don't know. It was quite dispiriting just how little attention they got. It's kind of hard for an ego to take eventually. I think also I've said this before, but it feels like they must be the only albums in history to lose money despite costing nothing to make. It's a bit harsh. I mean, yeah, I'm immensely proud of the Batteries records. I think the first one is - I would never record it as badly as that again, but it has a charm as a result. I think the second one, it's weird that I just made them, like, in quick succession. The first one's a much more thrashy punk pop. The second one ventures into kind of darker territory. I'm very proud of them. I do listen to them occasionally. I suppose a song like Fallen Love Club should have been a bis song. But then there's other songs, like Pankhurst and Pigs that I'm just really proud of. I'm showing my prog influences in Pigs, especially, because the time signatures are all over the place. Those songs could not have fitted into bis. And to be fair, the bis vision's all over the place, but there's not really a place for that kind of darkness. I think bis has always got an optimism somewhere and Batteries was absolutely devoid of hope. So there should be enough lack of hope in the system for our third album but I would say it's unlikely. I think after the second album I did have a list of songs, but one of them was this bis song. The Batteries project was good for me just to make some music and get a few things out in the system, but unless something crazy happens I think it's probably done.

PS: Speaking of Batteries, tell me a bit about Flashbacks from the first album.

SFS: Wow, well, nobody's ever asked me about this song. Flashbacks, God. It's just a good kind of new wave riffer, isn't it, really? Lyrically, I don't know. I think it's probably as most of my songs are - it's probably about our life in music. "Somehow complicate the expectations you submit your resume." Yeah, it's probably just another moan about being in an unsuccessful band. I'm probably talking to the fans that have left us. I think so. It's a Batteries song about bis. Yeah, I don't recall exactly the inspiration. I think I'm probably revealing too much, but quite a lot of songs are autobiographical, but just about existence in a band. God, actually loads of them are. I'm thinking now, this is fake DIY. It's such a little insular world that we can't even write songs about other subjects. But Flashbacks, yeah, I really liked it as a song. It felt like, again, it probably should have been a bis song, because it's got that sort of energy. When we had the Batteries Live band, which is me and the three Michaels from We Are The Physics, who are now an excellent band called Slime City, we did Batteries live for like about a year and for no particular reason Flashbacks just didn't make it to the live set. I've never even played it all the way through but thanks for asking. It is a good tune. It's probably just more moaning about being a band.

PS: What inspired The Young Mothers?

SFS: Musically, I can't remember. I think that was the song that I had in a folder that I was going to do a solo project called He Thought Of Cars. All one word after the Blur song Yeah, it was, it was And I think it was much more electronic at the start. But yes, musically I can't really remember. But lyrically, I do remember this one and it's not moaning about being in a band but it is indeed moaning about life when the band sort of stopped in the early 2000s. I was pretty bad at being a business person so when our record deals fell through and we had to turn the studio into a functioning business I wasn't very good at it. I'm okay at business now that's what I do. I run pubs, so I'm managing people and managing businesses all the time. I ended up being okay at running business. But back in the early 2000s when we were struggling for business, I went back to working in a record shop, which is what I did when I was 18. This is maybe 2002, I worked in a record shop in Glasgow, and it was just a weirdly depressing period. Occasionally somebody would come up to the counter and just be like, whoa, why are you working here?

So it was a weird time where people just assumed that we were somehow rich and famous, but actually we were struggling. So I think it's just a dream and I'm okay, like all the young mothers. I used to go from my lunch from the record shop I would go to a cafe around the corner - Byers Road in the Glasgow's West End and I could just see all these visibly well off young mothers and having their sandwiches and meeting up for cups of tea. And just kind of being judgmental, a classist or an anti -classist thing.Oh, you're just rich and you don't know what it's like to be struggling. But it's probably, it's just a personal moan and a grudge against, people that aren't struggling. But I guess it's about the struggles of being an artist. So yes, it is about being in a band again, isn't it? It is. They all are. But it's a lovely tune with a weird kind of Iron Maiden guitar solo in it, which I overdubbed about 10 years after we first recorded it. Whoops. But yes, once again inspired by the artistic struggle.



PS: Who came up with that great groove for Eurodisco?

SFS: John it's it's probably the song that we're most proud of. We've played gigs recently and it's still one of our well-known songs but realistically we don't really have anything else that sounds much like it. I'd love to go back in time we when we wrote Eurodisco or when we worked on it in the studio. We should have realized how good it was and be like "Right. Back to the drawing board and let's just make an album around this. Stuff that sounds like it. But it's not in our makeup. There's a demo version - we demoed all the songs for Social Dancing - and there wasn't really any guitars in it until the chorus, which wasn't the chorus that's on the record. That's the Eurodisco bit that was the original chorus. So there was a germ of an idea there but it didn't sound like anything else.

When we were talking about getting a producer for the second album, which we kind of didn't want, we looked at some names. Tim Simonin from Bomb The Bass was a name that was presented to us that we were kind of keen on, but then we also saw Andy Gill from the Gang Of Four on that list. We were much more in tune with a late 70s post-punk kind of thing sonically. We gave Andy Gill the job. Eurodisco, when we started doing it, there's still no guitars on it. I'm pretty sure I give Andy Gill credit for just making John just go into the live room and just play guitar until something came out and eventually that sort of stabby guitar hook came out of it and so we had something. We had the gated 16th's guitar and all the feedback, so that was there. But I could tell he wasn't feeling the chorus. And at one point he went, he just kind of went "There's something in here. This could be a hit." Buthe told me go away and write a chorus for this. And so, that's the first time one has sort of said, sort of criticised our writing and kind of just throwing down the gauntlet of like, go away and write a chorus. And so I did.

So I did. We just took it back in the rehearsal room and to my mind, I wrote what was a fairly straightforward New Order chorus, but I felt a lot of pressure. And, you know, it's very much part of the song now. But it feels feels like it was sort of forced, which is a weird thing. Now I didn't think about it until you've asked me this question, but yeah, we have to credit Andy Gill, God rest his soul, for just telling us to go away and do something better. I wish he'd told us to make some of the other songs better. I definitely wanted to do a Blue Monday type thing just with, you know, more distorted, like Robotic, a distorted Octave bassline. I just realized that like, rather than doing aq more traditional chord sequence that starts with a root note it was like just mix it up slightly so actually it comes round to the root note at the end rather than starting with the root note. It's just a very subtle bit of game changeriness. I love to hear it. Andy Gill, I would say, made the groove for Eurodisco. We just had the bones of it and he made it swing.

PS: Bandcamp has been a game changer for a lot of artists. Has it brought new exposure to bis?

SFS: I don't know, a little bit. Bandcamp's a bit of a funny one. I know there's certain people that don't care for it. I can see that argument that it's a middleman that is taking a cut for doing nothing. But I personally have found new bands or acts through Bandcamp, looking for a certain band's things and then seeing similar artists or whatever so it's definitely more organic than Spotify in terms of actually giving people money for their work. I don't use it as much as I did during Covid. I think it was it was a really good way of just giving money directly or at least most of a percentage of money directly to artists. So I did use it quite a lot then. I don't personally use it as much.

I tend to support record shops where I can. I do spend a lot of money on records, on supporting music, live and recorded. It has brought a bit of new exposure to us, but It's not massive. It's like maybe an extra couple of hundred people. I think for exposure you just have to keep making music. Get it out there. It doesn't make any money. But you just need to be active and out there, just with the hope that something good will happen. So I guess Bandcamp is part of that. I can see when used wisely. I can see its benefits. I think there's still merit in traditional record labels. And Bandcamp It's almost like a big record label, really. So I've got mixed feelings about Bandcamp. But if it helps any musicians make any money that they're not getting from the streaming sites and just in general, then I'm all for it. If Bandcamp have somehow managed to build a successful model that helps sustain artists, then that can only be a good thing. But it certainly doesn't particularly help us financially. More people will spend more money if they come out and see us live. And long may that continue.

PS: What's next for the band?

SFS: Well, if I'd done this two months ago when I was supposed to, apologies again, then I would have told you that we were about to go on tour with EMF and Jesus Jones, but we have done that now. And it was great fun. Two bands from slightly before our era, But just really inspiring to see them still going and still doing it and still having the energy. It is quite inspiring because I think it's hard to keep the energy going. And I sometimes feel desperately old and it's like you should just stop. But genuinely seeing these people, they've done it all. They've really done it all. I can go at full energy for the entire duration of the concert. I think that did really well for us.

What's next is we're trying to arrange more dates with these bands as well. It was nice to connect with an audience that wouldn't necessarily have seen us at our heyday and maybe just heard a couple of songs. We've got such a back catalogue to dive into. I think we've made some new fans so it'd be really good. It's financially difficult to go on these tours and break even and that's not any of the artist's fault it's just that's the nature of it. We want to play to lots of people but also we can't afford to lose too much money so so touring is a bit difficult for that. But it's always great fun. What's next on the actual agenda is we're doing a split single with Art Brut who played with us for our 30th anniversary concert last year. It was meant to be done for that anniversary gig, but we're only a year and a bit late. It is finally at the pressing plant. So we're doing a split single with them where we cover one of each other's songs, and we've collaborated on a cover version of Paula Abdul's Opposites attract. I don't know why. I just thought it was a good idea. And also, Mama Cass's Make Your Own Kind Of Music. So it's a four track, squashed onto a seven inch, but that's coming out. It's just a bit of fun. It is good as well, I can assure you. It would be nice to get some more vinyl out there. Or even CDs. CDs are fine. It's just a thing. Basically, what's next is more music. We just have to make more music. We'll find a way to release it at some point.



PS: Any thoughts of playing in the US again?

SFS: Many, many, many thoughts about it. And again, I don't want to be overly bleak, but it's virtually impossible. Financially, but also politically right now, bands are not going, which is depressing. So, but, yeah, we don't even have a moral consciousness to deal with because we are so far away from ever being able to finance the tour. We don't have any record labels. We don't have an agent out there. It's in the pile of dreams that are just unfortunately unlikely. Our song Irrelevant Disco from the last album - it's another song about being in a band but it sort of lays bare the bleakness of being unable to get places and play to people.Realistically, yes, there will be small pockets of people that would come out to see. We can't afford to come out there and play to a hundred people and still be able to travel around. Sorry, it's a depressing answer. I can only apologise. But we just hold out the hope. The hope is the hope that kills us. We're just waiting for our own revival. And if that does, then we'd absolutely love to come back to America.

Certainly, we toured a lot in the late 90s, early 2000s. We had mixed results numbers-wise. But we also got a tour with The Cardigans and Pavement playing really big places. These experiences are memories for a lifetime. A lot of things, I'm delighted that we got to do them. Got to do all these things. I was totally guilty of not appreciating it. Not enjoying it as much as I could have at the time. But the fact that we we cannot ever really conceive of getting back to tour America does make me appreciate how lucky we were, and it's not impossible. I've seen lots of other bands that just have a second wave where they're somehow bigger than they were at the time. It's not happened for us yet. But we've got a weird back catalogue that still appeals to new young people. So we've just got to hope that we're somehow rediscovered for whatever reason. Please.

PS: Please tell me six albums you never get tired of listening to.

SFS: I mean, there's more than six. Yeah, I'm a total music addict. I'm always listening. I sit in my office - I've always got music on. I've always got headphones and I hate being too far away from music for any length of time. So you ask me six albums. I've got like 30 ,000 records in my house. So whittling it down to six is virtually impossible. But I've tried. The first one I've got in my list is an album called Eva Luna by a band called Moonshake from 1992. Just a barely appreciated band Moonshake formed David Callahan from the Wolfhounds formed a band Margaret Fiedler who I think was in Ultra Vivid Scene. They just come together and it's like it's a split personality thing. It's a schizophrenic record. It's Margaret's songs or David's songs and for some reason that it shouldn't work, but it totally does. It's a yin and yang kind of thing. Sorry for that bullshit term but it just marries together so well. The best part of it is the mixture of like Public Image Ltd John McGeeoch-type searing guitars but then just really aggressive drum loops and just innovative use of sampling. It's claustrophobic. It's harrowing. There's a song called Spaceship Earth on it, which is just like, it's almost too much. Like on a cheap system, it just sounded like the whole thing was going to explode. But I just love it. I never get bored of it. It's one of those that's cliche, but it's genuinely I hear different things every time. And I think it's totally underrated. It got reissued recently, but they just flew so under the radar. which has only been released.

LSD by the Cardiacs. It's just such a warm cuddle of a record, even though it's Cardiacs, so it's bleak. And obviously, Cardiacs. It's minus Tim Smith, the singer, who passed away. It's an album that was in the works before he passed away. So it's been taken over by the band. And so it's expansive, you know. It's classic Cardiacs in places. It's just got the total modular - he's pulled out all his usual melodic tricks. There's a song called Skating on it. It's all the best bits of Cardiacs including a middle section that's so off the scale progmental that it's hard not to laugh in places. It's genuinely quite funny in a great way. But it gets all the synapses twitching. I've been playing it non-stop since it first came out a month ago or whatever. So I can't imagine ever getting tired of LSD by Cardiacs.

Third one, for me I think it would be Infected by The The, ultimately. But I also appreciate Soul Mining very, very much. In fact, I love all the albums by The The. Just in different ways. NakedSelf is really, really good. It's just, when it came out, I'd moved away from that, you know, mature pop music. I was just listening to banging techno, so I appreciated it, but I didn't enjoy it. So it's tough, I could put all of the other albums and that would just cover it, but I think Infected is so important in my musical journey. In fact, you know, the bis name actually comes from our original name. It was just me and John. We were called Black Iron Skyline, which is a part of a lyric from the song off Infected called Twilight Of A Champion. So I couldn't really do this album thing without mentioning Infected by The The. It's just great. It's got quite 80s production in places, but it's somehow remained timeless. It's like the good bits of the 80s. Just the personal and political elements of the lyric have just always resonated with me. And of course, the accompanying film. It's just an All-round amazing piece of work, I think. There's a lot of the major and minor, just little descending figures that Matt Johnson uses that are little bits of musical influence in there, for sure. I hear it all the time. But, yeah, Infected. I'm going to go Infected. So that's three.



World Clique by Deee-lite of Groove Is In The Heart fame. I think this is a perfect hip-hop dance funk soul pop record. Groove Is In The Heart obviously everybody knows that does epitomize the record, but I just think the whole thing - it's genre skipping but it's melodic.I think they were vastly underrated. The hit was so big that I think they're just chasing getting another hit and maybe there's not really another strong single on it. The best song on it is called Try Me On...I'm Very You which wasn't a single and it's a bit long and the production's a bit sparse but if edited down it could have been a massive hit. I just it's another one I keep go back to and just marvel at the production and again hearing new things every time. For me it's the best example of early 90s genre mashing. No rules pop. I never ever get tired of it. It sounds relentlessly inventive even though you've heard it a million times.

I Never get bored of the album Love by the Cult. The Cult's just one of my all-time favourite bands. About the time when I was getting to the New Order, I had a sort of guilty pleasure thing about loving Electric by the Cult. It's sort of unashamedly heavy metal. So, I loved Lil' Devil and Love Removal Machine. I think it was okay. When the Beastie Boys came out and they had a similar sort of Rick Rubin produced thing but for whatever reason I didn't really know like the previous existence of the Cult so I was maybe 13 by the time that I bought Love. And it just looked different. But from the very start of Nirvana, the first song on Love by the Cult, that totally hooked me because it wasn't as AC/DC rock. And I just didn't know quite what it was. And I now realize it's that somewhere between a goth and hard rock type thing. But I didn't know that's what I wanted and what I liked. I'd never get tired of it. There's certain songs I'm not as keen on they just go on for a little. But it's got She Sells Sanctuary on it which I think might be my favorite song of all time. It's just so perfect. It's simple but so perfect and just the guitar sounds and never get bored of it. You hear Billy Duffy's guitar everywhere now. Like, it's just the sound. Chorus pedals were not allowed during the 90s and now they're super back. Love by the Cult. Very important record to me. It really sounds amazing as well. Production-wise, I never get bored of it.

I was young and I didn't have too many records so you have to really love a record when you've only got 10 albums so this is probably one of the other nine albums that I owned when I was like 12, 13 and that is Floodland by the Sisters Of Mercy which again I don't think is any Sisters Of Mercy fans' favourite album. But it's so informative to me. I remember hearing This Corrosion and just be like "What's wrong with that guy's voice?" I didn't know they were committing goth crimes by getting Meatloaf's songwriter in to help. I didn't know anything about that. But I love just the sheer bombacity of it all. It's like, is that a word? Lucretia My Reflection, just that bass sound. Never ever get tired of hearing that kicking in. I love the fact that it's just the same chord sequence in every song. I think it's a genuinely bold move to be like, not only have we got a sound, we've actually just got a chord structure that is our band's sound. And there's a real strength in that. It's a really strange thing. It's almost punk in its rudimentary approach. It's like, do not over-complicate things. And it does a really good job of that. And I never, ever get tired of it.

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Thank you Manda!




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