'I just looked stupid with a guitar!'  laughs the unfeasibly tall and affable Mat Osman when TGM pops the 'why bass?' poser.  'It might seem petty, but I've always been this tall; when I used to play my friend's Gibson guitar I looked like George Formby.  I've always liked the bass though, maybe 'cos I'm not as musical as someone like Richard, and I desperately wanted to be in a band.  I couldn't afford drums, looked crap with a guitar, can't sing....... Bass it was.  There's a lot of bass players like that, I think.  It's something to with personality as well, I guess - guitarists always want to change stuff all the time, while bass players just want to go on and on and on.  Bass players are like, "why change the chord? I liked that one!"  hahaha!'

Osman's being unfair to himself, for he is one of the most melodic pop bassists around .... next to, say, Oasis' Paul McGuigan, Mat Osman is, erm, good.

'We never had a rhythm guitarist and we've never played anything that's just block chords, y'see.  I guess I learned a lot from Bernard really; he was always playing melodies, he'd never just go "dang dang dang," so I ended up absorbing that melodic side.  My influences are really corny, though… just Paul McCartney, really.  Every style, every way of playing bass, it's there on Abbey Road; listen to that and you don't need manuals or teachers.  When we first started out in the band, Mani(Gary Mounfield) from the Stone Roses was quite important for me purely because he was one of the few people around who could actually play!  The Roses' rhythm section with Reni on drums was great.  I liked Bill Wyman, too; that big wobbly bassline on We Love You.  I like a lot of reggae, particularly Robbie Shakespeare's playing on Grace Jones records.  Electronic music with natural bass is something I love.'

Osman's gear set-up is simplicity itself, his main bass remaining his slightly chipped green Fender Precision.  'Each time we do an album I hire in loads of basses and never like them,' he shrugs.  "The Precision's got one tone control but I just seem to be able to get more out of it than anything else.'  His standbys are a black '70s Jazz, and a Rickenbacker 4001 which he used on Coming Up's Lazy.  For amplification he relies on a Ampeg head and two 4x8" cabs.

'We spent a lot of time setting up mikes on this album - Six hours sometimes just trying to get the sound and then, when everything else was off, we'd hear the bass through the talkback mikes and just go, "that's the sound!" On the whole, we just mixed the DI sound and the live sound.  Some stuff was looped, too - the bassline to She was like that - but overall it wasn't too complicated.  It was all very compressed, though.'