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They're all love songs, I've only just realised. Even the hate songs. The idea was to spiral away from pop innocence into the pure cynicism of noise, a bit like the first Velvet Underground album, but to come out of it at the end. Written and recorded late 1999, early 2000.

luv bite

Pure joy. About one night stands. That's the single! - people cry. (Wanna know a secret - F minor followed by A major, rising vocal line. That's it. It'll make you a fortune, I promise.)

mother night

My personal favourite. Buddhists will tell you that the secret journey to fulfillment and a liberation of the spirit is not through booze and pills and picking fights and screwing in alleyways. But I bet they're all at it, secretly. The Great British Friday night to the power of ten. Millenium Eve, maybe.

storm of unknown origin

A blues soundscape. Partly Underworld. I put this on because it sounds like a frenetic mess, being reigned in and controlled. Almost falls apart but makes it, like a great live set.

girl with the stained glass heart give it unto thee (hell yeah)

Rural hotel showband MOR, but with the emotions turned up a little bit too far for comfort, and a prog rock analog phaser going loopy in parts, and Johnny Marr's dad on guitar. Pure trash masquerading as class. Or is it vice versa.

itty bitty h bomb

A whoosh of Electric Ladyland chords and breakbeats and an analog synth sample or two. Energy song. This'll get you on your feet. I'm a bourgeois dad concerned about his wayward spoilt daughter. And a similar theme crops up in..

sissy's hot summer

Phaser-heavy kick-bass King Billy hillbilly. Originally about Tiffany Mynx, the Orange County sex star, but I felt I'd wasted enough energy on her already. I'm a randy old gardener in a bourgeois household and Sissy is the blossoming, untouchable daughter. Baby Doll.

i wanna get worse

Ferocious. Written in 15 minutes and then binned. Gradually people heard it on tapes and always commented. More people know this feeling than I imagined. I feel like this very rarely. You have to see the comedy or you've missed everything.

the revolution of everyday life

A proper simple love song. Sit down, press record and sing. Not out of keeping with the conclusions of the Situationist handbook by Raoul Vaneigem of the same name.

rohypnol

In the Sex Pistols "Bodies" John Lydon sings 'I'm not an animal' and the song turns almost metaphysical. Xfm wanted to play my songs but I sent them this, with New Labour references and now they won't return my calls. Allegory for political spin and manfacturing consent and dead clever stuff.

parliament of stars

We were all elected and we're still elected now. Yuppie disco. Prince. Revolutionary slogans secreted in there too. I'd love to hear people sing along to this in smalltown nightclubs.

atomic noir

I read a bunch of books about the origins of US biker gangs. How many were emotionally damaged WW2 pilots, bombardiers and atomic progam grunts. It was 1947 and America still felt the effects of the war. Many saw it as a Year Zero, when they could stake a claim that had previously been denied to them. But what the Hells Angels saw in the war had shifted their morality completely. Moral decisions became impossible. Nothing 'bad' they could do in peacetime felt 'wrong', compared to what their government had asked them to do with the bomb. Bankrupt and shell-shocked, almost profoundly ashamed, they lived, and were allowed to live, as outlaws. On rural sandy ranches, on their bikes. Through no desire of their own, they attracted new flyboys and runaways who confused their rawness for freedom, their cynicisn for strength.

When rock and roll music arrived, it mirrored urban teenage unrest. But a burgeoning pop culture industry passed much of the blame onto the bikers. Hollywood noted this press attention, softened their lifestyle into the 'Wild Ones', and twisted their story into a sell-able Middle American family morality tale. The mythology enflamed the imaginations of suburbanites for the latter part of the twentieth century. Leather. Black. Tats. Bad boys. Doing whatever the hell they wanted. Angry young men, drugs, protest, psychedelia, punk. The irony being that it started with a group of broken men who weren't freewheelin' or born to be wild at all. But had had the humanity burned out of them. Rock. Humanity burned out. Atomic Noir. The low point of the human spirit. It seems dated now, the western world seems fairly content with itself. But it's a sexy mythology and a sexual music and a shorthand. Dance music, dominating the past decade, tries to find a mythology. But it fulfills a timeless function. And it does it well. Many bands now move toward Wire magazine abstraction. Although I share many influences, it's still very .. neutral. So, the album was a shot at finding those atomic seeds of pre-rock and roll attitude and seeing what would happen if they had been planted elsewhere. Adopted by other people, at another time, in other locations.

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