okay this was kinda  a weird interview, i missed the first time round, and had to remember to tape it when it was replayed.  It's like someone is asking them questions but you don't hear the questions, just their responses, so they're just saying all this random stuff.  Then they kept playing bits of songs in between the guys talking and in the background.

:: ren ::

Age: well i'm Adrian Palmer and I am the powerhouse drummer, some would call me, behind the band
Ben: the undeniable driving force behind Zed
Age: yeah, I sit at the back watching everyone else do what they do and I keep the rhythm going
Nath: I’m Nathan Ning I sing lead vocals and write the occasional tune, and play guitar as well
Andy: im Andy Lynch and I’m the lead guitarist
Ben: and I’m Ben Camplbell I play the bass guitar and do a little bit of singing and mostly backing vocals and a little bit of keyboards and stuff on the album and a bit of songwriting as well

::ren::

Nath: we started in 1996 as a three piece without Andy at high schoool and entered rockquest which is a battle of the bands type competition which is quite popular in new zealand  - the main one
Ben: it was 15 and 17 year olds at the time so just kids, teenagers starting off wanting to play in a rock band, growing our hair long and all that.

::don't you wish::

Ben: Nathan and I started off playing quite jazzy numbers, writing songs and crossing over to quite contemporary kinda stuff, middle of the road beatelesque, beach boys orientated songs and um, production as well a lot based around piano, keyboards and accoustic guitars and harmonies
Nath: sorta the style on of the songs on the album ‘dont you wish’ was about the earlier kinda style I guess
Ben: yeah, keeping the roots in their a bit

::don’t you wish::

Ben: it was always a drive and a bit of a goal, we’ve got high expections and we’re all quite ambitious guys, we weren’t about to just sit back and play music at high school, just for for playing music, I think we uh, actually had a direction we wanted to take it right from day one.

::drivers side::

Andy: I met the boys, in my father’s recording studio, in Auckland, they came up and we recorded some demos, and I gave them a hand
Ben: that was sorta 1998
Andy: yeah, so we hung out a bit then
Ben: we were very impressed with Andy’s engineering skills cos he was actually working in the studio twiddling the knobs, and he was our age…
Andy: tweaking the knobs
Ben: and we had no idea someone our age could actually do that
Andy: so 2 years later I was overseas and I got an email to do a tour, so I promptly returned and did that
Ben: it was a bit of an audition really, Andy didn’t know it at the time, yeah we made him learn about a dozen songs in 10 days and then go on the road and play to packed audiences through out New Zealand and he didnt really know the songs and was making up parts on the spot; jamming it out - he did quite well.

::drivers side::

Ben: Andy comes from  a very musical background…
Andy: yeah
Ben: and he doesnt really like talking about it all the time, he um, why Andy? Do you feel in the shadow of your musical background?
Andy: no, not at all, just,  I sound like a broken record - um, my mother was a singer in The Chicks, here in New Zealand, in the sixties. And my father was a bass player and he went on to play in Cat Steven’s band for a while in london.
Nathan: so that was Suzanne and Bruce Lynch
Andy:  Suzzane Lynch and Bruce Lynch
Andy: and um, then they came back here and were  still doing their thing and I’ve got a lot of toys to play with at home, put it that way.

:: drivers side::

Age: well we’re managed by Ray Columus, and he’s been our manger for about four years now?
Ben: he came on board at the beginning of the band, we’d been together maybe four months, put some demos down and sent them up to Ray.
Age: we’d been together about 9 months as a band and decided to get in contact with Ray and ever since he’s been slowly cranking the handle of the industry and getting people intersted in us, and he’s basically left us to our own devices.

::good man::

Ben: it was really good getting Ray in on the mix early because as young musicians it gave us an infrastructure and maybe just a real plan of attack, someone with a bit of experience and bit of knowldege to point us in the right direction.  As far as the business is concerned
Nathan: his job as been to sell the music, ours is to make it, um and there hasn’t been a lot of input from him to us or us to him in our own specific fields really.
Age;:I tihnk people often confuse good management with good manipulation maybe
and I think a good manager takes what’s there and manages it, and thats what Ray’s done
Ben: and I believe his biggest attribut is his absolute belief in the band um he
Andy he’s the biggest fan we have, which is cool
Ben: yeah if theyre's one pereson we trust as a group, and thats the way it has to be, entirely trusted, it would be Ray.  Because he deals with everything, he deals with all the sharks, everyone who is out to  try and take as much as they can from us or jump on the bandwagon.
Age; its quite funny cos some things that he’s done, or that he’s suggestd we do  with the band, we’ve been like ‘why do that’ but after 2 years we’re like 'oh thats such a good idea'. He’s kinda got a bit of hindsight, or foresight I guess you’d call it

::good man::

Age: well one thing he’s always insisted on is signing with a different publishing company to record company
Ben; so you don’t get trapped
Age: so you can play them off in terms of making sure that nobody’s cheating you with royalties… not that we don’t like our record company at all.  Just now we’re checking that up.
Ben: we’re starting ot get a few oyalties back, where is if we were with the same company we would still be recouping on both cases, instead of making  bit of cash for ourselves, which was a very smart move.

::come on down::

Ben we’ve worked really hard for nearly six, well over five yers now. Um towards the album, that has always been the goal, to realease an album and get it out into the public and hopefully have it successful. But that was the first big goal with the record company side of things and the publishing side of things. And I think through good management and playing our cards right and working pretty hard on the songwriting side of things and timing it worked out somehow.
Nath: the way it happened, we released our first single independantly and um with the success of that, it got to what on the charts?
Ben: it was top twenty, fouteen or something
Nath: yeah, and I really made a few of the record companies sit up and take notice of what we were doing
Ben: yeah cos there was no one pushing the single what so ever, it was sitting on its own legs, the radio just picked it up and played it.

::oh daisy::

Age: David Nicholas who was our producer, our collaborative friend on this project,
Ben: our fifth wheel
Age: he got involved, he flew over to Christchurch where we spent a couple of weeks going over the songs and pre-production working out structures and parts, and he left that session open as well so in between that and recording we can work out new stuff and practising.
Ben: at which point can I add, we were still practicing with broom handels for mic stands and blown bass amps and no guitar amps in my bedroom which Andy and I were living in with 6 foot high ceilings
Age: most schools could have probably had better equipment than us back then but
Nathan: David had to go away then and we sat, or stood, depending what we play, and went through the songs again and kept working on them after his input, did a lot of rearanging of the way the songs were writtin
Ben: more lyrics written, tempos adjusted sturctues played with
Nathan: we had time to let it sit with us and get comforatble wth how we were playing it. Then we made it to the studio in May of last year, we spent a month recording whch was good.  Good to have a decent time at revolver studio in Auckland and it was a matter of getting the live track done at once rather than over-dubbing
Ben: which has been the history of rock and roll, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have always recordied live as a band and got a live sound where as a lot of bands these days like, pull one out of the hat, the Backstreet Boys, or any other american pop acts or even a lot of actual bands layer it up track by track and cut it right up and make sure every thing is perfect.
Age: not to say that Andy was playing 5 guitars at once but there is 5 guitar parts on some songs
Ben; but the initial beds (?)were live parts so that the band felt like a band not like an overproduced…elephant.

::glorafilia::

Ben: of the year 2000 Silencer was the biggest New Zealand album, selling triple platinum copies which is just on 45000 records on the space of about 6 months
Age: so you can say that is a commercially successful album but I think we’re quite happy with it too, so its a success in that way too.
Ben: our greatest fan is my dad, and he’s 50 years old, sorry dad, and he listens to it every day, hes got it in the car, he absolutley loves it and he plays it for everyone, he probably knows it better than any of us and then we’ve got 14 year old girls and people right in the middle who say its their favourite album of all time.

::glorafilia::

Ben: I do remember when we got back from releasing the album and we spent a couple of months away from home in Auckland and in Sydney and then we came back to Auckland and promoted the album and pushed the album and released it and our faces were on every newspaper, every magzine, we were on the tv, we were on the radio and all a sudden we did have quite a high profile, going from not having such a  profile; going home I rememer going for walks up the hill wearing my hoodie and wearing my sunglasses *who’s surprised*  becuase I didn’t quite know what to do, how to deal with it cos there were people who were coming up and recognising me and stopping cars and its pretty weird to deal with at first, very weird to deal with at first

::i’m cold::

:: calling again::

Nath: we had opportunities earlier on where people came to see us and and we were gunning for the same thing we’re gunning for now but um,
Ben: the timing wasn’t right
Nath: the timng was not right, but the timing definatly is right now, and um yeah we're a lot happier now, we were only a 3 piece back then as well, and finding Andy was the last thing we needed to get sorted before we were ready.
Ben: and now we’ve just been solidifying our sound over the last year and actually learning each other’s musical contours.

::calling again::

Ben: we signed to universal records a acouple of years ago now, after the release of Glorafilia, and then toward the end of last year we started negotiations with Interscope which are a subsidary of Universal bascially the biggest Universal label in America and Universal international which covers Europe and Asia, Australasia
Age: it was good having a foot in the door but you’ve still gotta kick the door open and march in there and try to be allowed to stay in the house
Ben: which is Ray’s job
Age: which is Ray’s job, but its a hard job, but so far I think we've been welcomed into the universal house
Ben: we’ve made some amazing contacts considering where we’re from

:: s.p.s::

Age: Interscope us have basically committed to releasing ‘Silencer’ in the US
Ben: which is a big committment cos it requies a lot of money, at least half a million $NZ, which is a big committment.
Nath: a good thing is that its not just them distributing it without any financial committment  or real drive to get it into the charts.  They’ve said specifically that they’re realy keen for this to happen for us
Ben: on the interscope records website, we’re sitting there at the bottom under Z under U2, Weezer, Eminem, Dr Dre, bands which have just sold millions and millions of records and some of the biggest names in the industry and have been for the last 20 or 30 years, legends

:: unseen::

Nath: the best thing about playing live has got to be the sweat
Ben: and playing live has got to be the best thing about being in a band, cos its just so real
Nath: you do get instant gratification from seeing the audience reaction from what you do on the night rather than recording where you know you’ve done a good thing but it take a while to sorta filter out and everyone learns to appreciatiate it more
Ben: and hear it on the radio and you hear it over again and again and go ‘sweet, sweet’ but everynight you play live, things can change an the band can morph those songs and grow as a band
Age: and its fun when things go wrong cos you find ways to fix those things and it as bit of a challenge

::unseen::

Ben: we get along really well as a band, theyre’s been no fist fights
Age: we’ve kicked each other, but theyr’es been no fistfithts
Ben: I’v gotta say it though, we are brothers, none of us have got brothers, and these three guys are my three brothers that I never had, and we get along like brothers, we speak our minds
Age: I’ve got no sisters so I think of you guys as sisters

::unseen::

Nath:: well the ages of the band are all similar, three of us are 22 and one of us is 20, Ben’s the baby of the band
Ben: aww guys
Nath: but uh, its all good as far as emtionallyand intulectually we’re all similar, I mean we’re young for a band in new zealand to have this much success, we’re definatly young and I think that’s to our advantage cos we’ve got years on people who are only at that stage
Ben: although that’s gonna bring up the point that there are a few people who are a bit jealous and we have had the odd snide remark ‘well how long have these guys worked for it’ and ‘how long have they been in the industry’ ‘how hard have they work’ which really pisses me off cos we’ve worked very very hard for five years as a band and before that I’ve been playing music my whole life, Andy’s been playing  his whole life, *andy’s agreeing in the background 'mmhmm'* its always been about music and um, yeah
Age: its not like we did an audition and were famous the next day kinda thing its been a hard slog, which we’ve loved doing, its been a hard but fun slog
Andy: at the same time, my mum was was in The Chicks at 13, 14, she was doing albums, tv shows,  so to me its…
age: what’s the problem?
Andy: yeah, I mean look at michael jackson
ben: look we he is now…*laughs*
Andy: oh yeah, but if you’ve got the goods, and you’re ready to deliver them, age doesn’t mean anything.

::dont you wish::

Nath:  we want to take silencer around the world initialy the next five years, and record another album
Andy: and I wanna record it in Spain

::ren::

Age; maybe we’ll be reading Q or Select and they’re might be a little review of our album, I don’t know how it will stand up, but it will just be exciting to be in there

::ren::

Ben: I want to be the first band, the frist musician, to ah, play in outer space

::ren::

You can take our car, and you can take our keys, but you cannot take away our dreams!

Yeah, because we're sleeping when we have them!