What do you make of Lincoln, I'm presuming you've not been here before?
No we haven't, we were meant to be doing a gig, which got pulled. Our agent contacted the guy who puts on the gigs here and said 'look, can you put a gig on here this night' and he said yes so that's why we are here basically. I've got a lot of admiration for someone who would be somewhere like this and put music on because it's the only way to help you through places like this. On the other hand though, we played to about six people in Peterborough. I don't even fucking care to remember which venue we played to be honest coz it was such a fucking pain in the arse. It was ridiculous!
I couldn't believe it when I saw that you were playing here though. That's why there was a very poor turn out because most people don't even know this county exists.
Did you hear during the show someone making sheep noises? Was that a reference to Wales or a reference to Lincolnshire?
It probably was a sheep. If it was a reference to Lincolnshire then it was probably a reference to foot and mouth rather than anything else.
(Laughs) Oh, a socio-political comment, that’s pretty good.
It’s just nice to have a band I like coming to Lincoln.
Well that's a reason for us to come.
I actually saw it on Teletext!
I'm just glad you had Teletext then.
I've not been able to catch you in London yet though.
We're there next week, playing the Water Rats I think.
You played The Metro recently didn't you?
That was shite! That was a really shit gig. We played the ICA a couple of weeks ago on Jubilee day. Yeah, we've played there loads of times recently, supporting The Fall, supported the Liars downstairs at the Garage.
I can't seem to find any reference points when I listen to you, which is good obviously, so what do you listen to?
My favourite record at the moment is by a Sicilian band called Uzeda, they were recorded by Albini. We listen to the usual things like Pixies and Husker Du, The Fall And Shellac.
There's always one mistake when we read a review of us. I think it's good to have as many lies as possible. I mean the reviews generally speaking have been a lot better, like we've been getting album of the month, depending on how big the magazines are and everything, as opposed to the NME who gave it 7 out of 10.
Do you actually care what they say?
To a degree, yeah, because it dictates in a way how many people you actually reach. In terms of some little Goth tart's opinion I couldn't really care but when that actually stops you reaching more people then perhaps you should. I'm not saying we should be on the front cover wearing little Ballerina costumes but a lot of British rock that actually gets promoted by them is actually pretty shitty.
You've signed to 'Too Pure' who over the last few years have released some really good stuff, Billy Mahonie, Stereolab...
... PJ Harvey. That's how we know the name really. To be honest when we were about to sign to them we didn't really know a lot about them. All our people knew about them was that PJ Harvey thing. I'm not gonna pretend that we were having thousands of labels vying for us because that simply wasn't the case. We signed to 'Too Pure' because they were the only people willing to put their money where there mouth was really, and actually offered rather than sniffing round for about six months.
I guess it has worked out so far, you've got a great album out of it and you worked with Steve Albini. Was that a personal choice?
Not really, if someone had made it clear to us that it was as simple as a choice then yes, but 'Too Pure' sent him a copy of our first album.
It's a great album, especially the sound and that really distorted bass. And you know it's Steve Albini, even by how you sound live for some reason.
Yeah, well the thing is with Albini, he doesn't really dictate how you sound as much as just records it, do you know what I mean? We've always played really distorted bass and what he said to us is that when he got the first album and he saw the song titles, he said he knew it would be good and said he'd do it without even listening to it, which tells you how he works really.