If the rock’n’roll dream still exists, it’s best left in the hands of dreamers. Dreamers like James Allan, the leader of the extraordinary Glasvegas. For the first time in his life, James’s tendency to dream his days away is being celebrated rather than ridiculed.

“It’s common knowledge among anyone who knows me,” he laughs, his rich Glaswegian burr so familiar because it’s exactly the same as his singing voice. “And in the past I got a hard time for it, while I was at school, when I was playing football. But that’s how my songs have come about. So it’s quite weird that this thing about my personality that was always fuckin’ frowned upon... but now, because we’ve got records out and I’m in a band, people are encouraging me to be a daydreamer. It’s funny how things work out, know what I mean?”

I do know what he means. It’s funny that a band with a dodgy pun for a name should come from nowhere and become the most exciting new British rock band in a generation by blending fifties pop melodies, stadium shoegazer guitar noise, thunderous female Phil Spector-meets-Mo Tucker drums, and lyrics about the grainy realities of British working class life sung in an angst-ridden Scots accent thick enough to need subtitles. I put it to him that, on paper, his band doesn’t make sense. He laughs heartily again:

“My whole life hasn’t made sense, man! Believe me. There’s a lot of truth in what you fuckin’ just said there.”

And it’s funnier that the man behind this visionary proposition is a former journeyman footballer from a rough Glasgow suburb called Dalmarnock. Allan played as a winger for Falkirk, Queens Park and Gretna before being kicked into touch. “I wasn’t that disappointed,” he says. “My favourite times playing football were before anyone handed me any money for it. No matter what your job is... it takes a back seat once rock’n’roll comes into people’s lives. I find it quite embarrassing at times, because it makes me sound like I’m trying to say that I played football and I never really done that great that I could go around telling everybody about it.”

And it’s bordering on the bloomin’ hilarious that the group who are capable of single-handedly raising the Titanic of politicised, inspiring, communal rock’n’roll are led by a man who is the spitting image of Britrock’s greatest man-of-the-people, Joe Strummer of The Clash. Even if Allan didn’t favour a quiff and black rebel-rocker threads, the facial resemblance would still be bordering on the bizarre.

“The first time it was said to me I didn’t even know who Joe Strummer was! Then I saw photos of him and thought, ‘Yeah, I guess I do look like him.’ It’s funny... I met him just before he died. My cousin - the guitarist in our band - was playing the Barrowlands and put me on the guest list. We had passes to go backstage. It was strange... everybody’s convinced that he looked at me and done a double-take. We chatted for a couple of minutes. He was cool.”

I get my chance to chat to the very cool James a couple of weeks before the release of Glasvegas’s breathlessly awaited eponymous debut album. And the 28-year-old singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist’s reputation as The Nicest Man In Rock is well-founded... once you get past a marked reluctance to discuss the mundane facts of his recent past. When I ask him when he started Glasvegas, he insists he doesn’t know: “My memory’s really bad. You should ask the guitarist.”

What we can piece together ourselves is that Glasvegas were formed in early 2006 and comprise James, his cousin Rab Allan (aforementioned guitarist), Paul Donoghue, and iconic stickswoman Caroline McKay. Their first single ‘Go Square Go’ sounded like My Bloody Valentine, The Ronettes and The Proclaimers having a bundle in an echo chamber, and had a moving and true lyric about the rules of being bullied as a child. “The pressure to fight,” James recalls. “I was always quite confused about that. If I ever have a kid I’m gonna be saying, ‘Don’t fight! I don’t care if you look like a pussy to other people. Look after yourself!’”

Alan McGee declared Glasvegas the greatest thing since sliced Gallagher and NME writer Tim Jonze formed the Sane Man label to put out the massively acclaimed ‘Daddy’s Gone’, the best single about absent fathers since The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’ (or maybe Happy Mondays’ ‘Kinky Afro’ - you decide), in late 2007. James insists that he’d always been too busy daydreaming to have a pop masterplan, and that he began to feel a little freaked out about his lyrics being suddenly thrust into the wider world. “I’ll be honest, man,” he says, “if somebody had told me that the songs were going to be released as singles and all this stuff was going to happen, it would probably have affected the way I wrote it. I’d have probably been quite afraid of hurting people’s feelings that were close to me. The first thing to say is that the songs aren’t autobiographical. They touch on real experiences, but a lot of it is just about writing a poem about a certain thing. But I thought it would be easy for my family to get dead confused, and think it was about them... the obvious one was ‘Daddy’s Gone’. When we were making the album in New York, my sister moved house for me. And she found the original lyrics of ‘Daddy’s Gone’, and they’re written on a Job Centre application form! I had no job at the time; I was just trying to express myself. It’s not been very planned.”

No one is ever going to believe that that song isn’t about your own father...

“I know. And there are touches of that song that totally relate to my life. But I’m not thinking about my own dad when I’m singing it, y’know? And the song is basically saying that I don’t want to get to a point in my life when I’m regretting a lot of things ’cos that can really destroy people. You know how powerful guilt and regret can be. So... people can get hurt and that was never my intention. I love my family.”

Has your Dad heard ‘Daddy’s Gone’?

“Yeah.”

And?

“I’ve never spoke to him about it. And I don’t know if I ever will. This might sound quite harsh, but... I don’t need to explain any of my songs to my family or anybody. ’Cos that’s my art. And whatever I do, that’s my business. I want the freedom to express myself without feeling pressured.”

So you didn’t work between the end of your football career and Glasvegas being signed?

“No, I was on the dole. I was quite happy. I wasn’t being bogged down with all the shit that comes with jobs. It meant that I could just be a daydreamer and watch movies and listen to music. I wanted to give myself to writing music. The worst thing is that you have no money and can’t buy people Christmas presents or take your girlfriend out and you feel like shit about that stuff. But it was important to me, man.”

Is it true that you were sitting and listening to Christmas records all year round?

“Not every day, but... yeah, I do. I go through phases and last summer it was Christmas albums - the Phil Spector Christmas album - I listened to that every day and my neighbours must have thought I was a lunatic. I can’t decide between that and Elvis Presley’s debut as the best album ever made.”

And are you really going to put out a Glasvegas Christmas album this year?

“Yeah. Studios have been booked and flights have been booked so it’s too far down the line to back out now. Ha!”

You’ve relocated a lost art - a band making big, grandiose rock music with lyrics specifically about the realities of working class life, which has become the preserve of rappers and post-Mike Skinner pop acts...

“Yeah... when you say specific, I suppose we’re not very vague. In the current climate you hear a lot of things that are just words strung together. But the only way I can think about lyrics is to write about things that’s been on my mind a lot. The things I write about are things I’ve not been able to forget.”

Since the turn of the year, Glasvegas have signed to Columbia, supported the likes of Muse and Kings Of Leon, recorded their debut album in New York with Rich Costey, and been in prison. Their prison tour - where the band played at Glasgow’s Barlinnie, Polmont Young Offenders Institution, Edinburgh’s Saughton and Cornton Vale women’s prison in Stirling - proved that Allan’s songs about the rough end of working class life were more than a pose.

“I think a lot of people look at people who are begging in the street or who are in prison and get this arrogance that that would never be them,” says James. “And you don’t know the circumstances people grew up with. Falling on the wrong side of the tracks. There’s no black and white way and people can be in prisons for a lot of different reasons. They’re not necessarily evil, although some are. I’m sure a lot of them didn’t plan on being there. And I don’t see my art as being exclusive to anybody. I don’t like to get in other people’s space and impose my art onto them. But I like to put it out there, man.”

And what were the prison shows like?

“Just really different. I mean, we played with Kings Of Leon last night, and they’re for real. But these prison guys are for real in a totally different way. The electricity in the room can be quite far out, as you can imagine. A hundred prisoners in front of you, all wearing the same t-shirt, all sitting with a packet of crisps; grown adults. There’s a real sadness in their eyes. They’re all lost and alone. When you leave all these emotions that you never expected hit you.”

James’s ability to mainline those unexpected emotions into Big Rock while remaining specific in his subject matter illuminates Glasvegas. ‘Stabbed’ is a poem about being attacked by a gang, backed not by raucous guitars, but by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. James is being attacked by a local gang called the Baltic Fleetos, and, just as he’s thinking of fighting his way out of it, they produce swords. True story? Or one of James’s poetic licences?

“No, that’s quite a common thing. But it’s never happened to me personally. The Baltic Fleetos are a gang in Dalmarnock. They never chased me ’cos I was from Dalmarnock, so the song is not about me. They used to fight against the Parkhead Rebels when I was younger. They’d stand in this big bit of waste ground and fight. When I was 10, I used to go down and watch. I wasn’t much of an aggressive person, though. If there’s a fly in a room I can’t hit it with a newspaper. So the chances of me hitting people in the street... Don’t get me wrong, man, if anybody is in any way invading my space, I don’t take that too well. But the idea of harming someone else is quite strange to me.”

Album opener ‘Flowers And Football Tops’ is inspired by Kriss Donald, the Glasgow teen who was the victim of a brutal murder in 2004. Sadly, because Donald was the white victim of a racially motivated attack by Asians, the song has been misinterpreted by some on the extreme right.

“What can you do?” James sighs. “There are a lot of nutcases out there. You put stuff out there and there’s always gonna be some who read into things the wrong way. The thing is, I don’t think there are massive subtleties in my music, so it’s hard to imagine how anybody could fuckin’ misinterpret it. The exact idea of the song is... I thought about that boy Kriss and his family quite a lot. There still isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think about him. And, at the time I wrote the song, I was seeing a lot of distressed parents in the press and on TV. And like most people, I was thinking, ‘Fuck... what if that was my kid?’ But because I don’t have kids, I was thinking about how my mum would handle that. It’s so unbelievably gothic and gruesome. Kids shouldn’t be leaving their home at night and not returning... it just should’nae happen. The flowers and football tops... I know people leave them as a tribute, but they shouldn’t even be there. It’s just a fucked-up world. I bet you any money that you were hurt when you read those things, man. The only difference is I wrote the song. So I’m the guy who cares, as if nobody else does. Everybody fucking cares. I don’t know the boy, but that boy is me. He’s my neighbour, brotherhood of man, compassion for other fucking people. It’s a big part of my life. All these things that I’m saying are pretty simple.”

But in case there are any lingering doubts about Allan’s attitude to multiculturalism, perhaps these lines from album closer ‘Ice Cream Van’ will put them to rest:

Destroying the ground where gruesome lays
Sectarianism and the hurtful racist ways
Bring back the glory days
Active citizenship
And pure community

Don’t mean to be the jaded old fly in your ointment, James, but which “glory days” were these exactly? Did I miss them?

“Maybe they just in existed in my imagination! But it’s basically saying that I’m sure there is still room for those glory days. It’s no’ fucked, man. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But I don’t believe it is.”

James Allan pauses. Maybe he’s just taking a second to think about how he must sound, being so socialist and impassioned and openly idealistic in a pop world so dripping in cynicism. But then, that’s why his band might just have made the best and most important debut album since The Smiths; that sense of being naked and unashamed about believing in a better world. So he doesn’t pause for long. He just spits it right out:

“Those lines... they’re the sun and the moon, man. They’re my personality and what I dream about. They’re everything.”

They used to call him Tricky Kid. They still could. The 40-year-old Tricky still looks ridiculous fit and ridiculously young in his black, skinny-fit t-shirt and khaki combats. His hair is a mass of dreadlocks, piled on top of his head. He is enthusiastic and extremely talkative, as if he's been bottling up conversation since 2003, and is just desperate to communicate.

We are at the west London offices of Tricky's new record label, Domino, also home to Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand and The Kills. He's kicking off the promotion for his first album since 2003, Knowle West Boy, and he's already done one interview with me on the phone from his current home in Los Angeles.

Knowle West Boy is his best album since 1998's Angels With Dirty Faces, and his most accessible since his much-loved 1995 debut, Maxinquaye. It's his most varied and frivolous record, with a range of different (and previously unknown) co-vocalists, a cover of Kylie's 'Slow', and self-confessed tributes to favourites like Tom Waits ('Puppy Toy') and his beloved Specials ('Council Estate').

Knowle West is the area of Bristol where he grew up as plain old Adrian Thaws, and the album is a deliberate attempt to re-connect with his roots as well as his English audience after living in America since 2001. The likes of 'Council Estate' and 'School Gates' are acutely autobiographical, and contrast neatly with the likes of 'Cross To Bear', which is inspired by Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ. It's the first Tricky album which could legitimately be described as fun.

Both on the phone and in person, he answers every question revealingly, without pausing to think about how he might be perceived. The only time that he betrays interview technique is when I compare him to fellow nineties Bristol scene graduates Massive Attack and Portishead: he very quickly and cleverly distances himself completely from what they do.

Some of his quotes, in the cold light of print, sound like hip hop braggadocio - about girls, money, his work. But they don't come off that way in person. His description of his working process is the most unpretentious and self-deprecating of any musician I've spoken to, and his staccato West Country accent takes much of the edge off of his more declamatory statements.

He says a lot of funny things, but never laughs at his own jokes. His energy and honesty are disarming - the polar opposite of the moody, paranoid hardcase that the media presented him as in the late nineties. He immediately makes you feel like his mate, and that you're having a chat in the pub, although, very occasionally, his attention wanders, as if there's something important he should be doing. "I'm a very fish'n'chips sort of guy," he insists. "It's easy once you meet me to see there's no difference between us." And this is sort of true, except for the unconscious eccentricity that often separates geniuses from the rest of us. For example, on the one hand, he has total recall of events from 20 or more years ago. On the other, he's so flaky with the present that two of the Knowle West Boy songs - 'Veronica's Song' and 'Joseph' - are named after the vocalists, because he's lost their details and doesn't know how else to track them down. He couldn't do the same with the female vocalist on 'Bacative' - she's the sister of a friend of a friend who was passing by the studio. Tricky doesn't even know her given name.

The two lengthy interviews give me a lot of material about the new album. You sense that first single 'Council Estate' means more to him than anything he's done before, partly because of the autobiographical lyrics, but mainly because it pays musical tribute to The Specials, and it's The Specials that first made him "dream I was in a band", as he puts it. He also talks at length about the film that he's directed to promote Brown Punk, the label he co-owns with legendary ex-Island owner Chris Blackwell, which he hopes will be in cinemas next year.

But space is limited, and I decided to sacrifice a lot of the stuff about his latest projects in favour of the hilarious, poignant, occasionally angry and occasionally scary anecdotes about his past. It's these stories that give you a real insight into why Adrian Thaws grew up to be such a maverick, and why so many journalists have found him difficult. It's all very well wetting yourself over corporate American gangstas, but when the real, British, working class thing is sitting in front of you, middle class boys are inclined to be intimidated and more than a little disturbed by the less glamorous realities of a genuinely tough upbringing.

Pigeon: The early signs suggest that Knowle West Boy is attracting more attention than any album you've made for a long time. Are you relieved?
Tricky: I'm satisfied with it, so I don't really give a fuck what anybody else thinks - fans or music people. I think it's a good album. After five years... it ain't a comeback album. I've been doing stuff. But it is five years and I really wanted to make my presence in England known again. The fact that people are interested in me is a bit of a relief, in a way. But I'm still quite naïve about the business. If I only had two interviews to do, I'd still believe there was interest. My ego, you know?

Pigeon: You moved to New York in 2001. When we spoke before you admitted that England had made you jaded.
Tricky: Yeah, jaded. My life had become a cycle of album and tour. And I was tired of people looking at me. Tired of people asking me stuff... a guy in the street just now asked me if I was in The Fifth Element. Tired of that shit. I missed the times like when I was a kid growing up in Knowle West, and I was just one of the crowd. There's a lot less pressure on you. It starts making you paranoid, walking into a club and everyone's staring at you. I come from a place where you didn't wanna be seen. We used to steal cars and break into stores and put on leather jackets and do runners. Coming from that to everybody recognising you... I get real paranoid if someone looks at me - I think they want a problem with me. So you're always on guard. Always on guard.

Pigeon: So you went to stay with family in The Bronx...
Tricky: I was living in New Jersey, I had a cousin in The Bronx. That's where I chose to hang out. We hung out with this reggae soundsystem. One of the guys is Rod - or Rodigan - who is the reggae singer on 'Bacative' and 'Baligaga' on this album. They had a house with a wall knocked down in-between and a studio, and people used to just come in and chat. We used to hang out outside this Jamaican restaurant. And I had a few friends in Manhattan and it was just clubs, bars, parties. I had three or four girlfriends - a girl in New Jersey, two girlfriends in Manhattan, and a girlfriend in Connecticut. And it was just like... chaos. But the main thing was that, apart from the core people I was with, no one knew who I was. I was just a kid hanging out on the street. So no one would really give a fuck. There were 30 of us going to a club so no one would notice me. Just smoking weed and drinking.

Pigeon: You weren't making music at this point?
Tricky: No. Then I went to LA to make music for [blockbuster Hollywood producer] Jerry Bruckheimer. He's such a good guy. He set me up in a studio in Brentwood. I'd go there every day, make five real dark tracks, and five more commercial tracks. And every time, guaranteed, he'd choose the darkest. I thought he'd be quite different. And I got kinda stuck in LA because of 9/11. Then I made Vulnerable in 2003. And then I didn't do anything - not recording, not writing lyrics - for about three years.

Pigeon: What made you start again? Was it difficult getting back into it?
Tricky: I got to a point where... I've got a kid who's in school. It costs a lot of money. All of a sudden it's like, you'd better start working! I'd been living off my money and just partying.

Pigeon: Have you done well enough out of music to just take three years off, then?
Tricky: Yeah. But I was doing crazy things. I used to have a car service what cost me 200 grand a year in New York. From New Jersey, it would take me to a club, I'd come out of the club at six o'clock in the morning, the car service would take me home, I'd sleep for a few hours, shower, get back in the car service and do it all over again. I had a house in New Jersey, two apartments in Manhattan, and a hotel room for partying. Buying an ounce of weed a week. So I've done very well out of music. I bought one of my cousins a £16,000 bracelet, sent my kid to a good school, bought Martina [Topley Bird, his former musical partner and mother of Tricky's daughter] a house which she rents out. But it still reached a point where I'd better start working.

Pigeon: So was it hard motivating yourself to work again?
Tricky: Nah! Because I still love being in the studio. When I sit around, I tend to think too much. When you're in the studio, you don't think about your problems, so it wasn't hard at all. And my fanbase deserved another album from me. I owed people. But it took me a long time to find the right label. I had some really terrible meetings. Executives saying things like, 'This is a hit song if you have a middle-eight!' You just pick up the CD and walk out. A year went by. Epitaph [the US indie founded by Bad Religion on which Tricky made two albums and that also signed Tom Waits] was a great label but they never had no presence in England. This is my home country. I'm moving back at the end of this year. So Domino seemed perfect.

Pigeon: How do you go about composing? Do you play many instruments?
Tricky: Keyboards. But I don't really play. I'm still very naïve. I don't really know about music - I'm a one-finger guy. I remember I was in Japan once, and all the press wanted to come into the studio, and I'd never done that. They were watching me make this track and were all waiting for something magical to happen. And at the end, one of the Japanese guys comes up and goes... 'Ah! Golden finger!'

Pigeon: Listening to 'Council Estate' on the new album made me wonder what it was like for an unusual black boy growing up in what you've described as 'a white ghetto'. I mean, you like wearing women's clothes, for example. Did you get a lot of hassle from the kids around you?
Tricky: No, ’cos I've always been weird. So my friends didn't expect any different. The first time I wore a dress was at 15, out to a club in Bristol. I wasn't the toughest guy among my boys, but I was the leader. I was always with loads of people, but by myself. I had no inhibitions. I think that was a lot to do with my grandmother as well. She never forced me to go to school. She let me go to clubs at 14. I come from a criminal background, so the first thing she'd say to me is, 'Take anything out of your pockets that can ID you'. ’Cos I'd be out robbin', and most people get caught by leaving a school report behind, or something. She taught me criminology! I remember Martina saying to me once, 'You've got no discipline.' In my family, getting caught was bad, but going to jail wasn't bad. So you think that was normal. Putting on a dress... I didn't give a fuck what people thought. That comes directly from my family.

Pigeon: Where did the name Tricky come from?
Tricky: Krust! Do you know Krust? [Yes: Bristol drum'n'bass veteran and member of Roni Size/Reprazent.] There's a place called Broadwalk Shopping Centre, and when I was about 15 I was supposed to meet him there. But my uncle from Manchester had come down and I got in the car and drove straight back to Manchester with him. About six weeks later, I come back. My uncle dropped me off at Broadwalk... and Krust was there. It was like he'd been waiting there for six weeks! So he says, 'You tricky bastard!' And that was it... I got the name.

Pigeon: The whole Wild Bunch-derived Bristol scene of the late eighties/early nineties - Massive Attack, Nellee Hooper, Smith & Mighty, Roni Size and Krust, Portishead - did it feel like you were in the centre of a creative hotbed?
Tricky: Nah. Because not everybody... Smith & Mighty and Wild Bunch were the biggest things. I remember Rob from Smith & Mighty wanted me to do a track with him, but 3D [Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja] was against it. Everybody was very separatist. So it didn't seem like there was a movement. It wasn't competitive, but it was cliquey. Also, they didn't want Knowle Westers in certain clubs. I saw a different kind of racism. I saw my friends being beaten up by the police and they're white guys, and I'm a black guy but I haven't been touched. It was a class thing. So I always felt like a bit of an outcast. Knowle Westers were stigmatised. We weren't wanted anywhere. When I joined Wild Bunch, the likes of Daddy G [Massive Attack's Grant Marshall] and 3D couldn't go to Knowle West... they would've got robbed.

Pigeon: You spent time in jail, is that right?
Tricky: Hmmm. For Forgery Of The Crown. I had all these forged £50 notes and had all these kids going round to stores. I did one myself, stupidly. My uncle got murdered, and at the funeral I went into the store. Plain clothes turned up, punched me in the stomach and cuffed me up. One of my friends grassed me up and I had to go to Horfield Prison. But only for a few months. I was in youth custody, so I must have been 18 or 19. When I first got back to Knowle West it was like a coming of age... I felt good. But I didn't have a good time in there. It wasn't the violence or whatever. It was little things. Like the food. And talking to someone and asking, 'How long have you got?' and them saying, 'Three years,' like it was three minutes. What was scaring me was that you could get used to this. The food, the boredom. It wasn't for me. I never went back.

Pigeon: When you were getting bad press in the late nineties, do you think it was because the largely middle-class journos just didn't understand someone from your background?
Tricky: In a way, yeah. A mixed-race guy who people saw as black, talking about Kate Bush and crossing-over. People didn't know how to handle that. And people were putting everything down to race. There were misunderstandings and a bit of fear. People still have a perception of me as a moody, dark dude. The press made me look hardcore. It takes a while for people to warm to me because of that. But the press have done great things by me too, so I can't complain.

Pigeon: There were incidents at the time that made you look bad. Weren't they true?
Tricky: I was somewhat to blame. I don't regret anything, and I was responsible. But I'm also bright enough to know that they were responsible, too. Like the guy from The Face magazine [Craig McLean, who was assaulted by an associate of Tricky's in the late nineties]. This was outrageous! He came to Atlanta to interview me... I don't even remember his name anymore, but the guy did not like me. He started to fuck with me. He asked me things like, 'Why do you hold Martina back?' And I told him the truth, which was that when we first signed to Island, me and Martina were going to be called Maxine Quaye. Island were very against that ’cos I was already known as Tricky. That's why it was, my name. So the press wanted to talk to me. I tried to fob press off on Martina, but they wanted to interview me. So there's your answer. Then he started on, 'She's a one-parent family. You've basically abandoned her.' I still pay for my kid to go to school. Me and Martina talk every day. I just didn't like the way he treated me. So... I see him at Glastonbury. He starts arguing with me. He's drunk as fuck. He called me an animal. Now, I had people with me - people from my family who don't know about this music industry. They didn't understand it. So one of my family knocked him out! Then in the press it's like, 'Tricky knocks out editor of The Face!' But if you're fucking with the bull, you're gonna get the horns. I was standing behind my uncle waving at the kid, going, 'Don't!' So I couldn't do anything right after that.

Pigeon: But, ironically, Maxinquaye was labelled a 'dinner party' or 'coffee table' album...
Tricky: It was weird to me. Not so much the coffee table thing, but... it was seen as intellectual. I'm far from being intellectual! I thought I'd be a ghetto artist.

Pigeon: But the music you made and make sounds nothing like R&B or 'urban' music...
Tricky: Yeah. But I saw what I made as totally natural. I listened to The Specials, I listened to Public Enemy. Really, I had a different upbringing with music. The first time I heard Bob Marley was from a white kid in Knowle West. When I was growing up I would stay with my cousin and Miles Johnson from The Wild Bunch. And while they were getting ready to go clubbing - and I was too young to go out - one minute they'd be playing David Bowie, then it was Funkadelic, then it was Marc Bolan. My music background was very diverse, and I took it for granted that everybody's like that. If I like Kate Bush, everybody does. Realistically, people from where I come from don't know who the fuck Kate Bush is. It's all an accident.

Pigeon: When you started working with Massive Attack, were you aware that this was The Big Break?
Tricky: No. It went from fun to... not so much fun. When we got a record deal and my friend Miles left the band, the music changed. Suddenly people were worrying about what you said on the mic. I wanted to do some Jamaican cursing on one track and 3D wouldn't let me. To be honest with you, when Massive Attack signed a deal I was getting £200 a week and a pager, which meant I didn't have to go out and thief. It was just work. After a while, I didn't turn up in the studio. They did a video once called 'Where's Tricky?' I was hanging out with my old friends and still getting into a little bit of trouble, even though I'd done the prison. But to me, Massive Attack were a hustle. I wasn't interested in being famous or being a star. It was just... survival. I didn't like the manager Cameron McVey. I didn't understand what he was about and I don't think he liked me from the first time he seen me. Coming from my background, I was still suspicious of everybody. It was Miles Johnson and Claude Williams who got me in the band and they left... Mushroom's the only person I hang out with now and again. They weren't really my mates. When I was in a court case for two years in Oxford, not one of them came. Not one of them visited me in jail.

Pigeon: It does seem like everyone from Massive Attack's early days has fallen out with them one-by-one...
Tricky: It's 3D. The only guy left in Massive Attack now is 3D. He's always wanted to be a pop star and The Wild Bunch weren't like that. Shara Nelson wrote some of them songs and it would have been good for them to keep doing singles with her. But 3D got threatened, thinking she's gonna take over the band. She got fucked over. Mushroom got pushed out. 3D's very ambitious. He's a control freak. He wants to be a superstar. I ain't got no beef with 3D ’cos I left of my own accord. But I could totally see what was happenin'. As soon as Shara blew up on that single, he was threatened by that. She was still on wages. That's why he's the only one left. Why would he get rid of Mushroom and Daddy G? [Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall has rejoined Del Naja for the new Massive Attack album, to be fair.] Originally, 3D was brought in by Miles. He was a kid that used to hang out with them and try to get in the band. He loved The Wild Bunch and used to do graffiti and stuff. All of a sudden he was in the band. And then his ambition took over the band. So really he's left on his own. But I don't know if that can be a great life. He had all his mates around him making music, and now he's by himself. Pretty depressing, in a way.

Pigeon: 'School Gates', on the new album, is about you making a girl pregnant in your teens. Is it about Martina?
Tricky: "No, it's about a girl called Malika. She's half-Jamaican and half-Spanish. Basically, I met her when I was a kid, about 15. And at that age I wasn't really into girls - I was into money. I was always looking for somewhere to rob. But my mate liked her mate and asked me to get off with her while he got off with this other girl. Next thing, I'm with this girl. We were going out with each other for years and I used to wait for her outside her school. She got pregnant when we were 16 or 17. She said to me that the kid was mine, but told everybody else that the kid wasn't. I've only seen the kid once, when she was three, and she looked exactly like my daughter, funnily enough. Some people still think she's my kid. And I don't really know how to handle that. Do I just turn up? Does the kid know I'm supposed to be her father? I'd like to find out, but it's kinda hard. This is something I've really got to sort out. I don't wanna just turn up in this 23-year-old girl's life and say, 'I'm supposed to be your dad.' I need to go and see her mum, when I have some time to go to Bristol.

Pigeon: Blimey, I don't know what to say. Let's go onto another song from the new album, 'Puppy Toy'. It's a duet with Leeds chanteuse Alex Laws, and if you just take the lyrics you sing, it's a typical 'all women are gold diggers' hip hop theme. Except that you give the woman in question a very funny and aggressive right-of-reply all the way through the song.
Tricky: Yeah. I was brought up by women. A lot of the men in my family were in jail. I was disciplined by a woman. I grew up watching the women in my family having street fights. I've seen my grandmother fight men outside grocery stores. My Uncle Martin did 30 years in jail, on and off. My Auntie Maureen, she got remarried, and this guy was not from the world we were from. And my uncle kept going round smashing up their house, drunk. So one time, Maureen came out, threw pepper in his eyes, and stabbed him in the stomach. Twice. So women, to me, are just as gangsta as the men. A lot of my lyrics are written from a woman's point of view, like 'Broken Homes'. That's why I need female vocalists. I wish I could sing like Janis Joplin or PJ Harvey. But I can't. The female singer on 'Past Mistake' and 'School Gates' is my ex-girlfriend who I've just had a horrific break-up with three months ago. And it's funny - we wrote 'Past Mistake' when we were good, but it had started going bad. Her name's Lubna Mhaer. She's a French-Moroccan from Nice. One day we were in bed listening to it and I'm like, 'Wow! This is about us!' It's like I knew this was gonna... I hurt the girl, know what I mean? Sometimes I write songs and it's only later I know what they meant. There were a few songs on Blowback that could've been talking about 9/11, but were made before it. But with 'Past Mistake'... I didn't really love her properly. I loved her like a sister, not a girlfriend. And I was willing to stay with her because she's family. But we kept arguing and arguing. Even though I weren't in love with her, I changed for her. I wouldn't fuck around with other girls. I was thinking of having kids with her and marrying her. I was happy. But for some reason, she wouldn't give me a breather. She won't speak to me now. So 'Past Mistake''s about me and her.

Pigeon: Who's the male vocalist on the haunting 'Joseph'?
Tricky: He's a busker! He's a young kid, around 22, just trying to earn money to stay in LA. I met him outside a food shop and he just played me something, right there and then. And Queen Latifah was sat there! It was very weird. I said to him, 'Call me tonight. Here's my number.' And Queen Latifah was like, 'Wow! You're different.' ’Cos apparently you don't give your number to buskers. She is the coolest lady... I've got to know Latifah since then and she's a beautiful person. Anyway, he came round, I gave him lyrics and a melody to sing, he did it. I've called the song 'Joseph' ’cos I'm hoping he'll hear it and get in touch. ’Cos I've lost him and I want to work with him again.

Pigeon: Fidget house don Switch co-produced a couple of tracks on your album, including 'Council Estate'. What's he like to work with?
Tricky: He's a good guy. But he'd listen to these tracks with live drums and say, 'Do you want me to change these to electronic sounds?' And I'd say, 'Why would I want that?' People have a perception of me that I'm the Electronic Kid or something. But I wanted live sounds. He does things like M.I.A., which ain't really my thing, to be honest. She's a talented girl but I've never been into all this trip hop shit about new music. I don't know if there is any new music and I ain't trying to chase anything, or be part of any scene. I'm not a dance artist. So then he started to understand what I was sayin'. He probably didn't think I was right, but that's his world - the clubs. And I don't give a shit if they play my music in clubs. And he was like, 'But your fanbase...' and I was like, 'I don't care about my fanbase. If I make an album I like, my fanbase'll like it.' I was once talking to this hip hop guy, suggesting things he could try. He said, 'Nah, my fanbase won't like it.' I said, 'Well, get another fanbase then!' You can't be dictated to by your audience.

Pigeon: So what do you listen to?
Tricky: Hip hop. Earlier today I was listening to Capone-n-Noreaga. Public Enemy and Rakim. I still listen to The Specials and Kate Bush a lot. Some of the Britney Spears new album. Fucking wicked! A band called Paleface - a very underground band from Nevada. It's like white NWA. Not a lot of new stuff, to be honest with you. There's a girl called Hope who's done a wicked track - you can only find it on YouTube - it's like a traditional love song... beautiful. I like some Arctics stuff. I still listen to The Stone Temple Pilots. And Nirvana.

Pigeon: You, Portishead and Massive Attack have all made 'comebacks' this year. Suddenly, nineties Bristol music is on everyone's radar again. The Portishead comeback was an unexpected commercial and critical triumph. But still people refer to what you all do as 'trip hop', a term all of you hated...
Tricky: Well, that doesn't bother me because I'm so different to Massive Attack or Portishead. And my fans seem to realise it. I haven't heard the Portishead - it's not a band I listen to. I don't listen to Massive Attack. So I'm in a totally different world.

Pigeon: Is it true that Portishead's Geoff Barrow engineered your very first single?
Tricky: No, he was the tea-maker!

Pigeon: Do you wake up sometimes and wonder how a teenage criminal from Knowle West managed to become a globe-trotting pop star?
Tricky: Yeah! Especially as my grandmother's 85 now and she's never even been on a plane! I've always felt like I shouldn't be here but somehow I got my foot in the door. It's a bit of a piss-take, in a way. Like it's all some surreal movie. Sometimes I feel like I don't deserve it. That's why I needed to take time out after Vulnerable. I'd started to take it for granted. I needed to be taken down a peg or two.

Earlier this year, MTV got hit with ‘Pro Nails’, an ode to nail salons that features the entirely-too-massive Kanye West, world-champion scratch DJ A-Trak and a well-versed girl from Chicago who few mainstream heads recognised: the sassy, fresh-faced Kid Sister. The colourful video weaves in and out of chart-friendly and underground ideas, flirting between a chopped and screwed chorus and A-Trak’s housey banger of a beat, and there’s even a tease of ‘Switch Board’, Kid Sister’s all-out juke assault (a frenetic beat relatively unknown outside of Chicago’s 312 area code), at the end of the video.

It left a league of MTV viewers doing the switch board themselves and wondering who exactly Kid Sister is. The abridged answer: sister of Josh ‘J2K’ Young (half of club-tearing Chicagoan DJs/producers Flosstradamus), girlfriend of A-Trak (who happens to be Kayne’s tour DJ), and damn straight living proof that anything is possible. Just over two years ago, Kid Sister was a job-juggling retail manager. Now she’s hip hop’s queen in waiting - a fiercely witted rapper already touring globally and gracing red carpets, and she may soon be offered her own MTV show.

“Whoah, EGO TRIP!” she hollers. “My first show was Halloween 2005. So things are really, really crazy. Back then, I was working three jobs. I feel blessed. It’s completely surreal - I feel like I’ve won the lottery every single day.”

Kid Sister’s very appeal is that she’s not trying to appeal to anyone; she’s just being herself, and having a big old laugh while doing so. “I tend to do what comes naturally to me, and that means being real silly and acting a fool,” she says. “You should look on my MySpace page; you’ll see a picture of me at the Sex In The City premiere chunking up a DEUCE!” She creases up at the recollection of throwing the paparazzi a sideways peace sign. “I’m not trying to be the skinniest bitch, I’m not trying to be the sexiest bitch, I’m trying to be the girl who has the most fun.”

Kid Sister, known to her friends as Melisa Young, grew up on the southside of Chicago. It’s hard to imagine a girl as uninhibited and open-minded as her attending a predominantly Polish Catholic school and listening to WFMT (Chicago’s classical music station), but that’s exactly what she did. It wasn’t until she moved to a much more culturally mixed school that her ears and eyes took a dive deep into the underground. “I started getting into house music,” she says. “I went to my first club when I was 12 and that’s when I first heard ‘The Percolator’ [Cajmere’s Chicago booty house classic] and bought the Percolator mixtape. My two girlfriends back then were really bad. I was the good Catholic girl and they were the bad girls.”

In the nineties, house music and its various offshoots still reigned Chicago’s clubs and airwaves. In particular, around 1992, Roland 808s and 909s paired up with wild, sexually charged lyrics, and booty house and ghetto house (otherwise known as juke) were born as Chicago’s answer to Miami bass. Like every other teenage girl in the Chicagoland area, Melisa was hooked. In her songs today, the influence is absolute: references to Chi-town are glittered throughout her verses and juke party vibes ooze through each beat. But there’s a difference. “I feel like, out of the artists out there, I’m not as dirty,” she explains. “Even though I grew up listening to house music, booty house, ghetto house... I grew up with bang, bang, skeet, skeet, skeet, and that’s pretty dirty, you know?” She laughs. “It’s just one of those things where you may like something but it doesn’t necessarily reflect who you are.”

Melisa was born in 1980 to an Irish mother and an African American father. When discussing her upbringing, she scoffs: “People forget that African American is African A-MER-I-CAN. At the end of the day, we were a very American family - we went to the Carnival, had cable, watched America’s Funniest Home Videos on Sundays... And let me tell you - my dad, as black as he is, was in a Talking Heads cover band when I was little. I consider it a blessing to have been raised that way because I feel like I’m culturally connected to more people. There are a lot of people who haven’t had that experience. I think that’s why I’m as social as I am, because I can relate to a lot of different people.”

Perhaps that also explains how she managed to effortlessly enjoy slinging retail for as many years as she did and, strangely enough, she doesn’t feel like her job today as an MC is much different from her days selling lotions at The Body Shop. “The number one objective for me when I was managing retail stores was to meet the customer and establish a connection,” she says. “Every now and then, I’d get a really cool customer that I’d just hit it off with. I have one-time customers that are now good friends and I want my shows to be like that - how it was in my retail days. I’m trying to establish a connection with my audience, and it seems like my audience are all cool customers now - people I’d be friends with.”

So how did she end up making the move from clipping tags to ripping mics? Fed up with riding a bike to her three jobs during the Chicago winter (weather comparable to the Arctic) and tired of watching her brother hustle more dollars through music, she decided to give it a go herself. “My first song was called ‘Crush On You’ and it was really, really bad,” she says, laughing. “I played it for my brother and he said it was good but he was ly-ing. He lied to me until he felt he could actually tell me the truth.”

The truth is that it wasn’t long before her developing style became flawless. She spits fire between melodic Southside drawls and an unmatched double-time flow, using shit-hot delivery and rhythm as an outlet for her hilarious hood-linked musings. Her attitude and lyrical flair turned out to be the perfect companion for Flosstradamus’s no-holds-barred DJing style, and it soon became the norm for her to jump on the mic at their gigs in the dingy Town Hall Pub. Each month, Melisa would pump up the volume as the wildest range of people (even for Boystown - Chicago’s diverse, rainbow-covered neighbourhood) got down: hipsters p-popping to Ludacris, hip hop heads getting buck with Weezer, art school geeks jumping on each other to the tune of Alice Deejay... A few months later, shortly after she’d lent her vocals to the Flosstradamus-produced ‘Let Me Bang’ (a DJ Deeon remake), Melisa found herself pictured between her brother and Curt Cameruci, Flossy’s other half, on the cover for Urb magazine’s ‘The Next 1000’ issue.

Her fateful meeting with A-Trak at the Pitchfork/Intonation festival in the steaming hot summer of 2006 was round the corner. “I was very shy,” she confesses. “We met and got talking for a minute and he was like, ‘I want to work with you!’ I was like, ‘Hey, look at that dog over there! Isn’t that a nice dog?’ I was saying the worst things possible. But eventually I overcame my shyness and we made ‘Damn Girl’ ...in my closet. It was in my CLOSET, because we didn’t have a studio.”

They went on recording what would become ghetto gold on the underground, in the middle of the “dog days” of that scorching Chicago summer. “We only had one window air conditioner!” she remembers. “But we got it done and then that was kind of the beginning of everything.”

Beyond being a starting point for Kid Sister, ‘Damn Girl’ also brought A-Trak out of the pervading pigeon-holed title of scratch DJ and straight to the forefront of the buzzing club/Bmore/electro house scenes, à la Ed Banger and Mad Decent, as both a producer and record label owner (he co-runs the Brooklyn-based label Fool’s Gold with the Nick Catchdubs). The track additionally cemented the relationship between Kid Sister and A-Trak, a blogger’s dream come true. But wining and dining isn’t always easy for the two international-bound trendsetters. “Touring together isn’t really ideal because we’re working,” says Melisa. “Sometimes we’ll do shows together and that’s always fun, but it’s not exactly quality time - we’re always running around doing interviews, trying to get to soundcheck, to dinner, to see all of our friends... So we like to go on vacation.”

Living by today’s pace, where her relationship with A-Trak is perpetually idolised and scrutinised, and her tracks are picked up by blogs around the world the second they’re finished, it’s often difficult to keep up. Moreover, Kid Sister is trying to navigate a sensationalised world in which women are continually trapped in a persona - be it a girl-gone-wild substance abuser, a posh-girl-turned-street, a skin-baring lesbian. But, refreshingly, Melisa’s innate star power is strong enough to break any shackles. Onstage, her natural charisma is overpowering - even more dazzling than her sparkly outfits - and if each performance looks as though she’s having the time of her life, it’s because she genuinely is. “I want my whole show to just be me having fun and joking onstage,” she says. “I don’t want there to be some weird aesthetic or some impossible ideal to aspire to. Really, it’s not about that.”

The sense of something special has buzzed around Kid Sister since her very first show: a blink of the eye and she was touring Europe’s club circuit, with only four songs to perform. Now a mainstream takeover seems to be inevitable, especially considering she’s nominated for a BET Award for ‘Best Female Hip Hop Artist’ alongside Missy Elliott, Eve, Lil’ Mama, and Trina, and she hasn’t even released an album yet. The highly-anticipated album, which features producers as widely ranged as Trackademicks, A-Trak, Diplo, Spank Rock’s XXXChange, and Infamous and Develop (the Miami duo behind the Dipset beat), is out this summer in the States, autumn here. “It’s called Koko B. Ware,” she proudly says. “It’s named after my favourite wrestler on WWF - Koko motherfucking B. Ware. He’s like this big black man drag queen.”

From now until the album’s release, the name Kid Sister sits on everyone’s lips, from club freaks (her re-take of The Count and Sinden’s ‘Beeper’ is still blowing up the underground radar), to MTV fiends, to pop royalty. “I went to go see Kanye on tour the other day, and Chris Brown came up to me, like, ‘I’m so honoured to meet you!’” she divulges. “Chris BROWN!? And then, a couple hours later, Rhianna, separately, comes up to me and is, like, ‘Oh my god, is that Kid Sister?’” She stops for a breath. “I’m freaking out!”

But with the future looking so bright - it’s near blinding - at least she’s still at ease. “I’ll just keep cruising through,” she laughs. “With nails on.”

“You’re making me miss him, man!” says Danger Mouse down a transatlantic phone line after a barrage of questions about his Gnarls Barkley partner, Cee-Lo Green. “In fact, soon as we’re done, I’m gonna call him.”

Positions. Danger Mouse: Los Angeles, California. Cee-Lo: Atlanta, Georgia. And in the feeding frenzy to speak to this odd couple ahead of their new album release, press duties are being divided. Cee-Lo did early week; it’s Good Friday now and Danger Mouse, despite suffering from bronchitis, has taken over. He leans away from the phone on half a dozen occasions to hack up half a lung, then returns to finish his sentence. He’s friendly, accommodating, maybe fractionally austere, and clearly a little tired. This is his first interview of the day. Imagine how hard the poor bastard who’s got the 6pm shift is going to get it.

If you were offered the chance to speak to either Cee-Lo or Danger Mouse for half an hour, who would you choose? Tricky. With Cee-Lo, you’ve got the extraordinary story of an insanely expressive singer/ MC/writer from Atlanta who’s the son of two ministers, both of whom died long ago - his father when he was two, his mother when he was 18. His mother’s death, two years after she was paralysed below the neck in a car accident, deeply affected him and he often says he sings to be closer to her; that he feels the music he makes is a penance.

Cee-Lo, now 33 to Danger Mouse’s 31, had a psychotic youth. “I was reckless, I was a bully, I was a violent guy, I was a pyromaniac, I almost burned our house down once... and I liked the fire I was causing,” he alarmingly said in 2006. He was even sent to military school to calm down. There, he discovered acid. Bam! But, like his junior high colleague, André Benjamin of OutKast, Cee-Lo was also a music nut. His hip hop group Goodie Mob coined the phrase ‘Dirty South’ and was part of Atlanta’s eccentric and legendary Dungeon Family, along with OutKast. The first Goodie Mob album, 1995’s Soul Food, is a gem and the two others they did with Cee-Lo before he left them are goodies too.

Cee-Lo’s first solo album, the appropriately titled Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections saw him emerge as a fully tweaked-out, inked-up ‘Sly Stone meets Sam & Dave’ figure. He followed it in 2004 with the equally well titled, more organised Cee-Lo Green... Is The Soul Machine, a successful and brilliant record that won him deserved plaudits for the quality of his writing as well as his singing. He also penned ‘Don’t Cha’, smash hit for the Pussycat Dolls, although it was originally meant for OutKast backing singer Tori Alamaze. Kerfrigginching!!!

So, Thomas Callaway, aka Cee-Lo: massive talent, fascinating guy, likes dressing up and, despite his propensity for singing about necrophilia (‘Necromancer’ from the first Gnarls Barkley album, St. Elsewhere) and bludgeoning people to death (‘Would Be Killer’ from the new one, The Odd Couple), his general rep is that of a sweetheart. Danger Mouse: “I was a total fan of the Goodie Mob, and especially Cee-Lo. We have a very special bond now. Sometimes it’s hard to explain. We’re very different but we share something.”

Danger Mouse, a vocal doppelganger for Grandmaster Flash, is the Phil Spector to Cee-Lo’s Tina Turner; a Tony Visconti to Marc Boland; the nerd behind a superstar. Actually, not really. In some ways he seems like a RZA or Dr Dre for the new millennium - a DJ/producer who becomes a star in their own right. But there’s a difference: his ambition, vision and taste seem to know no boundaries. Racial lines, class lines, musical lines mean nothing to him: one week he might be searching for a perfect beat for MF Doom, the next he’ll be in the studio with a little known swirly pop band from south London. It sounds crass, but you’ll read in one interview that he’s black, in another that he’s white. Perfect. Everything in music seems like a fusion of some sort at the moment and you have in the middle of it all a man who even looks like a bit of everything. “I don’t mean to sound corny,” he says when asked what drives him, “but I’m just very affected by music - all kinds of music. I love it and I’m very affected by it and I always have been. To be able to do it makes me feel lucky, but it feels right.”

We’re not even halfway through 2008 and it’s already looking like this will be Danger Mouse’s year. Of course there’s the new Gnarls Barkley LP, which may not contain a new ‘Crazy’ but still pulls off the task of being as substantial and plain odd as its predecessor, but there are also a slew of other projects just out or soon to arrive: Danger Mouse-produced, soul-injected albums by The Black Keys, Deptford’s The Shortwave Set, former Tricky singer Martina Topley Bird, and Beck. And if you needed any more proof he’s the man with the golden touch at the moment, know that the four of those that are completed would be up there in a top 10 or 20 of the best albums of the year so far. It’s staggering. The 2005 The Mouse and The Mask album he did with Doom is a proper and inspired hip hop record and yet he’s just at home with a two-piece blues rock band from Akron, Ohio. To misquote OutKast, the dude’s poo poo really does smell of roses and in the toss up between getting half an hour on the blower with either Cee-Lo or him, you know that right now it has to be Danger.

Those other projects first. “We’re mixing the album right now and it’s sounding good,” is as far as he’ll go with Beck, but about The Black Keys, he says: “I’ve been a fan of theirs since around Rubber Factory [2004 third album] and I approached them about doing some music for this Ike Turner record I was working on. For obvious reasons, that didn’t get finished, but we decided we should carry on and do an album together. I think it turned out well. It wasn’t very difficult - they were great to work with and we had a good time doing it.”

So you didn’t meet any resistance to your ideas for the record?

“Not at all. It wasn’t like I had to force them to do anything - they were happy to try something new and I was really happy to be part of that process.”

Danger Mouse knew Martina Topley Bird from her trip hop days and he remains a massive fan of the genre, saying he bonded with Cee-Lo over their shared love of Portishead. That he would end up working with The Shortwave Set, who also managed to scoop Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale for the record (not bad for a then-unsigned band), is more of a surprise. “I got their debut from Rough Trade - I think it was Album of The Week when I went in there one time - and I thought it was great,” he says. “So, when the time was right, I said to them, ‘I’d love to do a record with you.’ They came out to my studio in LA and it was fun - we had a good time - and, again, I think it came out great.”

Riding the wave of international recognition that the lead Gnarls Barkley single ‘Crazy’ brought him in 2006, Danger Mouse would say in interviews, sometimes pretty pompously, how he thought of himself as an “auteur”; how he couldn’t find a career in music that he wanted and how he looked to film directors as models, particularly Woody Allen. “If you put Jay-Z on a record with Radiohead, it’s a gimmick, because there’s no central person you can depend upon to contextualise the ultimate product. But you can easily put two different actors in the same movie and still have it make sense - if the right director does it.”

Today, he claims to think slightly differently. Asked whether he still imagines himself in the film director’s role, he pulls back: “That’s not too far off. It’s not always exactly that way but I definitely feel like I have a kind of overall vision for what I’m trying to do.”

And you find more of a precedent for that in movies than music?

“I think so.”

Do you believe you’re doing pioneering work?

“Um, ‘pioneering’ is too self-satisfied, but I’ve always wanted to do things differently from other people and not really because of any specific reason.”

If Danger Mouse is less keen to define himself as an auteur now, it’s possibly because he’s worked out that his principal gift as a producer is not for trampling over a band or artist’s existing sound, but getting into their headspace and working with them to create a different, unforeseen and often singular musical shape. He might need to be in control and he does have signatures (a cinematic sheen, round-sounding drums, bass upfront, even with the bass-less Black Keys), but he’s a team player. There’s always depth and detail in his productions but he’s a “big picture producer”, as Andy Pettitt of The Shortwave Set said recently. In this age of single-song downloads and quick fixes, that also marks him out as being unusual. When Danger Mouse first played Cee-Lo some of the music that would end up becoming the basis of the first Gnarls Barkley album, Cee-Lo said, “We should hook up and do a few tracks.” Danger Mouse responded, “Well, I don’t really do tracks.”

Whether it was with The Grey Album, his mega-boffin mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album, the Gorillaz’ Demon Days, or any of his recent productions, Danger Mouse says he has to be fully immersed in the project he’s working on and none of them take priority in his own mind. He might have reached his biggest audience with Gnarls Barkley, but Gnarls Barkley would be no more important to him than doing something with a Hawaiian slack key guitar band. “Every record, when I’m done with it, I think is going to change the world,” he says. “And I think you have to think like that. I feel great when they’re done and I feel like that for quite a while afterwards. I always think a record’s gonna hit; that something’s gonna happen with it. And, of course, I like when people get excited.”

But surely you can’t have anticipated what happened with ‘Crazy’?

“The thing was that it all happened so slow. I wasn’t super new - I had a lot of hype behind me - and then that [‘Crazy’] happened,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily expect it, but things were going on for me day after day after day. It wasn’t something that just suddenly happened all at once.”

Danger Mouse, real name Brian Burton, was born in upstate New York and moved to Atlanta aged 13 with his schoolteacher father and social worker mother. He was a thoroughbred hip hop kid who claims to have not listened The Beatles or Pink Floyd or hardly any rock/pop music till he was 18 or 19. He was bright and won a scholarship to the University of Georgia to study telecommunications. “I started out with it, then I discovered music and I didn’t really care so much for school anymore,” he says. “I never did graduated - when I left for London, I had one class left - and I’ve got no regrets: if you know really what you want to do, you should go do it. A lot of people do things to satisfy their parents or because they think it’s the right thing... doesn’t matter - you should go and get it if you know what it is.”

By the time Danger Mouse arrived in the UK in 2001, he had already released two electronica albums under the name Pelican City. He moved to London to become a DJ and seriously indulge in music. It didn’t exactly work out. He hated it here (“the rain, man, the rain!”) and found himself working in a pub called The Rose near London Bridge. By 2003, he was back in Atlanta, but not totally separated from Britain. Some low-key tracks he’d produced in London had found their way to Warp and his debut release as Danger Mouse - 2003’s Ghetto Pop Life with Brooklyn MC Jemini - came out on the label’s hip hop offshoot, Lex. The Grey Album followed, which in turn led to Damon Albarn asking him to come in on the Gorillaz and, later, The Good, The Bad and The Queen project. “I was really lucky to be part of Demon Days,” he says. “Damon, musically, is one of my heroes - he was a big influence on me - so it was an honour to be asked to come to London and work on that record.”

Danger Mouse met Cee-Lo as far back as 1998 but they didn’t work together until 2003, when Cee-Lo was asked to sing on a Danger/Jemini remix. It was then that Danger Mouse played Cee-Lo some early examples of his ideas for a ‘psychedelic soul’ record and he claims he knew almost instantly, by the way Cee-Lo moved to the songs, that he’d found his singer.

St. Elsewhere has sold well over two million copies to date. The Gianfranco Reverberi-sampling ‘Crazy’ did nine weeks at number 1 in the UK, same as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, before the pair decided to pull it from the shops in a rather belated attempt to preserve its magic. They began work on The Odd Couple at the beginning of last year, Danger doing most of the production alone and Cee-Lo writing the lyrics, as before, most of which they recorded together.

So Brian, any different ideas for The Odd Couple?

“Do it better. We could have done a better job with the first one in the way that... I don’t know. We didn’t know each other so well then - we didn’t have the chemistry we have now. I’ve got better too, because I’ve been working with a bunch of other people and so, naturally and hopefully, I’ve developed a bit on this record - found ways of getting to what I’ve always been trying to get to, sound-wise.”

And is it better?

“Initially I thought so, but I look back to the other one and I think it’s still a good thing.”
If anything, Cee-Lo gets more personal on The Odd Couple than he did on St. Elsewhere, directly addressing the memory of his mother and encouraging more and more darkness to creep into his words. I suggest to Danger Mouse that it must be flattering to have a singer expose their soul so acutely to music he’s made. “It’s very personal for both of us,” he says. “We’re very honest with each other - as much as I am with anyone. He says what he says and he knows that I’m there to back him up and understand.”

So Cee-Lo isn’t afraid of giving so much out in his lyrics? Millions of people will hear them.

“I don’t think so, because I don’t know many people who can’t relate to what he says. That’s why they’re affected by the songs; that’s why they’re aghast or happy that someone else is singing something they understand. It’s not such a strange thing for an artist to write about the way he felt at the time.”

Time is almost up and Danger Mouse’s hack is getting more violent. Before he hangs up to call Cee-Lo, he happily announces that, yes, there’s a costumetastic Gnarls tour coming and, yes, there will be a third album: “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet but I’m already psyched about it; to have people already asking, ‘What’s next?’ I just don’t know and I’m excited by that.”

He’s confident, driven, relentless and convinced he’s hardly started on the journey to implement his new musical vision. “I’ve still got tonnes to do,” he says emphatically. “It’s going well but I’ve still got a lot of things I plan to get on with. Little by little, they’ll get done and then I’ll think of other things to do.”

Penfold, shush!

Things didn't look especially pretty for The Kills after their second album, No Wow, came out in 2005. The idea behind it - to write and record the whole damn thing in just three weeks - could have worked out great for them and their stripped-down, keep-it-simple aesthetic, but didn't. Not really. The record was by no means a flop... it's more that it had little of the crunch and sting of their debut, Keep On Your Mean Side.

The Kills toured the album for a year or so to an audience that hadn't grown much, then disappeared. To those that gave it a second thought, it seemed their time was up; that they were a classic example of a band who only had one good record in them. Let's be frank here: a lot of people wanted to think that too. Perhaps because they've always been darlings of the fashion press or perhaps because they sometimes come across as being a bit snotty and elitist, supposed real music fans have been quick to write them off as style over substance, including us. We gave them a proper pasting after No Wow came out, accusing them of being spoilt and pretentious. That was cruel, especially since No Wow was a real record with real ideas, even if the execution wasn't perfect. And it shouldn't be a surprise that The Kills are back with a brilliant third album, Midnight Boom. It's a genuine victory; an album that achieves everything Jamie Hince, aka Hotel, ever wanted for the band: to continually think ahead and create records that re-write the rules of the previous ones.

And so it was that the dogma of their first two albums was cast off and they spent two solid years working on Midnight Boom. They went on quite a journey - physically and emotionally - starting in London and ending in New York, via LA, Michigan and Mexico. Scores of songs were written and discarded, they argued and suffered bouts of paranoia, ran completely out of money, hired one producer and sacked him, then asked Spank Rock's beat creator, Armani XXXchange, to help them finish off the 12 short, sharp songs that make up the album.

Bringing in Armani XXXchange was an inspired decision: he's a musical mastermind and he was right on side with what they wanted to create: a crisper, fuller, taughter, more fun, poppy even, album. Is it their best? For our money, yes, although they both say here that they like their debut equally. They're back and they're going to become a much bigger band this time round. That Jamie is going out with one of the world's most famous women will help that, but that doesn't mean shit if you haven't got a tough record out.

The Kills - Jamie, an Englishman originally from Andover, and Alison Mosshart, aka VV, an American originally from Florida - met in London and began their creative partnership by sending unfinished songs to each other across the Atlantic. Both had played in bands before and both worked to a Beat ideal - with their songwriting, art, photography and lo-fi filmmaking. Distance being an obvious enemy of spontaneity, Alison left America and moved into Jamie's flat in south London eight years ago.

People have always been intrigued by their relationship and whether or not they were lovers. The official line is that they are soul mates only, but that doesn't mean there isn't an intense sexual charge to both their recordings and, particularly, their live show. It gets almost pornographic at times and much was made of it at their sold-out comeback gig in London on January 17, especially since Jamie is now going out with Kate Moss. Theirs is a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, even Jack and Meg White in their early days, kind of partnership - a man and his muse. But it's not a case of 'I've got the brains, you've got the looks, let's make lots of money'. Massive fans of the Velvet Underground, Suicide and Fugazi, they remain steadfastly anti-commercial and they intentionally operate in a parallel universe to the business of music.

The Kills still live together, in a studio-style flat in east London rammed full of guitars, old amps and keyboards, Jack Kerouac books, over-flowing ashtrays and Polaroid photos. It's quite a place and, no, they don't share a bedroom. Also, countering the long-held belief that their world is clandestine and insoluble, they opened up their home to us for this story and allowed Mattia to take photographs whenever he pleased. You cynics might think that was a thought-through attempt to appear more reachable. It wasn't. Really. Greatly misunderstood? Yes. Snobby? Not in the slightest.

The interview took place on Thursday January 10.

Pigeon: The last time we spoke, three years ago, you said you were just beginning to get a proper fanbase. How it is now?
Jamie: It's hard to tell really. I hope we have one. We've got a show next Tuesday and it's been so long since we last put a record out that I've got no idea whether 30 people will come out or...

Pigeon: Are you pleased with the new record?
Jamie: It was pretty torturous getting there but, yeah, we're really happy with it.

Pigeon: Is it your best one?
Alison: I think so.
Jamie: I think the first one's the best one.

Pigeon: Really?
Jamie: No, I'm just saying that.
Alison: I really love the record, but I like the first one too.

Pigeon: Give us the story. When did you start writing and where?
Jamie: We started at home - the HQ - way back in January 2006 and we were just coming out with folk songs. I was spending a lot of time trying to find my feet - some thread to start the whole thing off - and we weren't really finding it. I was panicking about it but she was quite relaxed. I was like, 'This is just not happening - we're just coming up with gentle, acoustic songs.' Then suddenly it dawned on me that that was how we started the band - with no sense of what we were going to be or how we were going to sound... It just fell out. And that's when I realised it was going to be a long journey.

Pigeon: With the last album, No Wow, the aesthetic was, 'write it, record it, soon as possible'. But this time there were no rules?
Jamie: We put so many restrictions on both those last two records and I just didn't want to do that this time.
Alison: I wanted it to be more like it was when we started - when we didn't have pressure and we had fun. We did so many things before we were The Kills - we wrote so much stuff and went through so many phases, long before Keep On Your Mean Side or even the 'Black Rooster' EP. I felt like it was time for that again and I never really cared for how long it was going to take. It was sometimes stressful, though... I'd be like, 'Alright, it's been a year and I don't know what we have.' Without meaning to we went on a journey and travelled around. And we worked really really hard - the whole time.
Jamie: I always wanted to be a band that evolved and made every record different. And with this one I always wanted the strength of it to be in the vocals and the style, much like Royal Trux always came out with really diverse records but you knew they were always undoubtedly theirs. I knew I wanted this album to be something really different and I guess it dawned on me that it was gonna take a while to find it. I've shouted my mouth off so often about rock music being so retro and reverential... we wanted to shed our influences and do a really forward-thinking record as much as we could.

Pigeon: Did the songs that ended up on the record come late or had they stewed for a while?
Jamie: They came from across the whole period. 'Tape Song' is the first song we wrote; 'Sour Cherry' was one of the last ones.

Pigeon: When did you think about getting Spank Rock's Armani XXXchange in?
Jamie: After we'd recorded the record.
Alison: A bit late!
Jamie: We'd started with the idea of trying to use a producer because we wanted to do everything the opposite way to everything we've done before. We got this guy in and he lasted four days. It just didn't work.

Pigeon: That was in Michigan?
Jamie: We started in LA and we just hated LA, so we moved to Michigan and he came out to Michigan. But it was over by the fourth day.

Pigeon: Who was he?
Jamie: I can't say.

Pigeon: Why not!?
Alison: It was a bit of a disaster.
Jamie: It really was - the worst way you can possibly imagine starting off a record.

Pigeon: He came in with ideas that rubbed against yours?
Jamie: No, he had a fucking breakdown. But it did help me realise what we wanted to do. The only advantage of having a producer is being able to hear yourself argue and realising that you are sure about what you want to do. Once he left, I guess I...
Alison: It took us about a week to get over the shock of the experience first.
Jamie: We were definitely a little tainted by it, then we got lost in the process of writing and recording. It took us about seven weeks and, even then, I couldn't tell whether it was finished or not. I love that Spank Rock record, so I got into a conversion with Alex [Armani XXXchange]. He said, 'I think your band is really cool,' which was amazing to hear from him because I thought he was the coolest thing. So I was like, 'Do you wanna come over to Michigan?' He came over for four days and listened to the stuff and it was a massive morale boost that he was so into it and so excited by it. He helped us... he didn't write any beats or anything, but he worked on things I'd come up with and helped us move things around. He's just a genius at making things work: he would move the drumbeats around the guitar so they would speed up slightly and things like that. He just made it sound more chaotic and I like that [laughs]. I was working on this MPC60 - this old hip hop drum sequencer - and he fucking hated it... he thought it sounded all clunky. So the boys had a big argument about that and I got really paranoid... I was going through all the files because I kept thinking he was going to delete them.
Alison: We're not good at working with anyone else. That's just the way it goes [laughs].
Jamie: And, by then, we'd written some more songs that we wanted on the record, so we went to Brooklyn and went into a studio with Alex for a couple more weeks. Again, that was pretty hard. We're really obstreperous.
Alison: Especially since this was the very first time ever we'd recorded anything on a computer. It was so weird: 'Where is the music?' 'Where is that thing I played?' You start getting really paranoid that people are getting rid of things, or that you don't know where things have ended up. I really didn't enjoy working in Pro Tools.

Pigeon: Did Alex play any instruments on the record?
Jamie: He played live drums on some tracks. There's MPC on everything, but we backed it up with live drums.

Pigeon: It sounds like you're using a bass on some tracks too.
Jamie: No, it's a guitar with an octave pedal. I'm not very good on the bass - it just feels fat, like I'm a painter and decorator. I guess on this record we wanted to embrace the technology that we'd always slagged off. When the Velvet Underground were doing stuff, they used everything new then. They wanted to be forward thinking. Same with Beefheart and many other bands that blow me away. We wanted to do the same thing, even though my heart said it was ugly.

Pigeon: The irony of hearing you say all this is that the record sounds very natural and effortless.
Jamie: Previously, on No Wow, I can hear all mathematics - we'd work on one song and change it and go back to it and try and improve it. Whereas with this, everything eventually came out in one go, but the process was across 45 songs. We didn't stop and work on a particular song, we just wrote a new one.

Pigeon: The lyric in the song 'No Wow' goes, 'This ain't no wow no more,' like the premise of the record is that you were feeling uninspired; that it's about searching for excitement. Is that right?
Alison: We were in a darker place then. We were really happy making this record, when it all came together.
Jamie: We had a laugh making this record. It really was like we were back to starting the band again. On the tapes, there is laughter at the beginning of pretty much every song.

Pigeon: How come you fled to Mexico at some point during the making of the album?
Alison: We didn't think we were getting anything done and we'd run out of money.
Jamie: It's the classic, stereotypical place to run away to. We thought we'd go into hiding there. I was happy to never come back.
Alison: But we went there during hurricane season. Everything was boarded up and there were sandbags everywhere.
Jamie: That was a low point. We'd lost our way. We'd listen to the sessions we'd done by that point and they were terrible, absolutely terrible. But that was when we started to get an understanding of things.

Pigeon: Was there pressure from Laurence Bell, Domino records' boss, to deliver something quicker that you did?
Alison: Not at all. He'd come over to our house, get drunk with us, listen to our demos and get really excited. He'd always say, 'Take as long as you want.' But we'd run out of money, so there was pressure to finish because of that.
Jamie: There was a point when it went from, 'Do you have enough songs for a record?' to him going, 'You're really onto something, keep going.' That really fired us up. With every record we make we always feel like we're onto something, but when you've got Laurence Bell telling you it make you feel great. He's become such an amazing friend of ours. We were playing him songs in really, really terrible demo state and he was just getting it, and getting really excited.

Pigeon: It always seemed with you that the band was all-consuming - that it was far more than a hobby or a bit of fun. Even more so now than ever?
Jamie: Making Midnight Boom we took that to the absolute furthest extreme possible. We were doing it 24 hours a day and not working jobs or doing much else with our lives.
Alison: We had no social life. At all.
Jamie: We had no money or anything. I lost my girlfriend... all we had to see us through was The Kills.
Alison: We hadn't toured or done anything like that to make any money and studios are really expensive, so you go to a cheap one and end up staying there for longer... It's really stressful being that broke. We really owe a lot of people a lot of money and it's only these little moments when we ever have any money anyway - it always goes away.

Pigeon: Did circumstances put pressure on your own relationship? Did The Kills want to kill each other at lot of the time?
Jamie: We fell out a few times, but we've always had a volatile relationship. I've got a serious cigarette habit, so I wasn't much fun to be around when we couldn't afford to buy tobacco.

Pigeon: You've always seemed like a global band - you're well known across Europe and America...
Jamie: Yeah, I’m very grateful for that. It's not like we sell millions of records, but the people who buy them are spread out.
Alison: It's so nice - we can go almost anywhere and have a good time.
Jamie: I just wish you could survive on selling 200,000 records...

Pigeon: Do you involve yourselves with what's happening in the music industry - downloading and so on?
Alison: We don't talk about it at all unless someone asks us about it.
Jamie: It sounds awful, but I'm just not fucking interested.
Alison: Me neither.
Jamie: I just wanna play music, you know? I always say that we'd be playing music whether we're on a label or whether the internet didn't exist. We never thought anyone would be interested anyway; we thought we'd be playing in my bedroom forever, and we would have been more than happy.

Pigeon: There's already stuff online saying that the poppier sound of Midnight Boom is you going for the pot of gold...
Jamie: Flatly denied!
Alison: How could you plan for something like that?
Jamie: With the kind of music I listen to being commercial and accessible is an insult. I feel like that too.

Pigeon: Since you've been going out with Kate Moss, Jamie, have you noticed interest in the band coming from different places?
Jamie: Yeah, obviously, but interest on a level that I'm not interested in. It's just word association and none of those people really care about what I'm doing musically, and I don't care about them. Occasionally there might be someone who comes across us with that, but... I don't know.

Pigeon: What's it like having paparazzi people following you? Do you manage to hide away from it?
Jamie: I hate it, I really hate it. It's so ridiculous. It's such a surreal, ridiculous thing that you can only respond to it in that way - try and block it out. I hate it, but you can't help the circumstances.

Pigeon: Are their no benefits?
Alison: It's just a real mind-fuck.
Jamie: Obviously people are telling me that we're getting loads of publicity.
Alison: You hear that the whole time. Jamie's in the papers almost every day. I honestly look at them and I don't understand it, because I know him. It's super weird. And I don't know how it can help. Maybe someone reads that shit and likes our band a little bit...
Jamie: You can't get caught up in that. You become a cartoon - a clown. That's why it's torturous - I know I'm becoming a clown.

Pigeon: Your live shows always seemed to be ruled by nerves and fear. You don't seem like flamboyant, show-boaty types. That must make the attention double hard to deal with.
Alison: We pride ourselves on being secretive. We always have been, naturally. I can't even imagine what it must be like for him: I've seen how ridiculous it is - I've seen him walk down the street. I was shocked.

Pigeon: How close do they get? Do they know where you live?
Alison: Yeah, they know where we live, but they don't come to the house...
Jamie: We've had some journalists there...
Alison: Some came by and said they were someone else.
Jamie: But the thing is that they're not really interested in me because I'm not really anybody. It's just an association thing. It says a lot more about the media than it does about me and Kate.

Pigeon: Another thing that must bother you is that you're often referred to as a fashion band...
Alison: I think that's because music magazines wouldn't cover us. But the fashion magazines would.
Jamie: We really struggled with No Wow. We weren't getting any music press. It was a time when we were associated with the garage scene, which seemed to run its course about a decade before.
Alison: And it's because there aren't any really good music magazines and there are lot of fashion magazines that cover music. But I don't feel like we're a fashion band. In fact, I don't know what that is. What is a fashion band? I don't know.
Jamie: I'm terribly cynical about the fashion/music crossover, but a lot of those style magazines came up with things we wanted to do - ideas for articles that sounded exciting. And there was a time when it wasn't that common. It's different now - there are so many style magazines. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seemed like when No Wow came out we were doing things that were new.
Alison: And then it suddenly seemed like every band was a fashion band. Those magazines did open something up - they did take an interest in music and feature some bands that weren't getting the coverage they deserved.
Jamie: I just don't really care that much about it. It doesn't matter if we're seen like that. You only really worry if deep down in your heart you think you are a fashion band and I'm very confident we're not.

Pigeon: Has it been different this time? Have you been speaking to more of the music titles?
Alison: It's been totally mixed. We're doing you now, but we did Vogue this morning. They turned up at 11 o'clock. I was still in my pyjamas and I stayed in them for the first part of the shoot. I just woke up 15 minutes before.

Pigeon: Were Vogue interested in you because of Kate?
Jamie: Nah, we've always done things like that. Fashion wants to take something from rock music and it always has done - it finds rock music inspiring. And Alison... the way she looks - she's kinda model-like and they're desperate for a girl in rock to be a fashion icon.
Alison: But then we did an interview with someone from Teletext. He's a really nice guy. Jamie's talked to him before on the phone.

Pigeon: Do you find that the same writers come back and interview you each time there's a new record coming?
Alison: A lot of the time and that's really great. It means we don't have to cover all the old stuff again [laughs].

Pigeon: You're good friends with Stewart Lupton, insanely talented former Jonathan Fire*Eater frontman, who could have been a huge star but he lost a decade of his life to heroin. Is he an inspirational character or just a fuck-up?
Jamie: Fuck-up! No, of course not. And I don't think he fucked his chance up. What does that really mean? That he didn't become a commercial success? That's so important to everybody right across the board now. People don't think you can have a fulfilling life in any way if you don't have money or sell records or products. Stewart's a genius, but there is a fear that he's going to open up those books he carries around with him and they're going to be blank. There's that fear, but I have total faith in him. He's a fucking throwback. It's like he's from the eighteenth century - he sees things differently and it's such a rare thing. He has a genuinely different set of morals - he's a proper libertine. I think that's great in a world where however libertarian you are, you probably just want to make money. I genuinely think that Stewart doesn't want any of those things and I love being part of that when I get the opportunity.

Pigeon: Do you think he's a romantic figure?
Jamie: Yes.
Alison: Yes.

Pigeon: But he told us when we interviewed him for a cover story a few issues back that he was pining for money, and he was jealous of the success that his former bandmates went on to have with The Walkmen?
Jamie: That's true - he does think he's owed something.
Alison: But he's looking for financial independence in life, which he doesn't have.
Jamie: Like anyone involved in art, they want to leave their mark and I think he feels like he hasn't yet. He's definitely not in it to keep his ego satisfied. It's a struggle for him because he feels like he hasn't made it.

Pigeon: You speak of him like he's your comrade in music. Is there anyone else that you feel like that about?
Jamie: Scout Niblett. She'll be making music the way she does, no matter what happens. If she has an audience of five, like she sometimes does, she doesn't give a shit.
Alison: She's so good.

Pigeon: No one else? You're a big Suicide fan, aren't you Jamie?
Jamie: I am, but with the new record we attempted to clean the slate. I just think that rock music hasn't done anything new is so long. It all gravitates back to sixties music.

Pigeon: Any different aspirations for the new record?
Alison: I want to go to Hong Kong. And Russia [laughs].

Backstage at Amsterdam’s Paradiso venue, Foals’ 21-year-old singer-guitarist Yannis Philippakis is chain-smoking cigarettes, swatting away the flies that infest the cramped dressing room, struggling with an untimely cold he’s picked up, wondering when his tour manager’s going to bring him the food he ordered, and telling me about Karpathos in Greece, where he lived until he was seven and where his dad (and brother) still live.

“I used to go back all the time to see my dad,” he says, over the din of Clocks, who’ve just struck up upstairs. “My dad builds instruments and stuff. Very traditional folk... In fact the thing we’ll open our set with tonight is an old Byzantine song that my father used to sing. All the men in the village sing it round a table: it’s like a song-poem, a saga, and they used to make it last an hour. We only do the first two lines. But I was brought up with a very weird, peculiar musical tradition. They play bagpipes there. They have arranged marriages. It’s a very strange place... very rural. It’s on top of a mountain. It’s called Olymbos, it’s 300 metres up on the side of a cliff. A lot of the women still wear traditional folk costumes. Very untouched. They speak a Doric form of Greek. It’s very, very traditional; like, very traditional. Athens is very modern, very metropolitan, but not where we’re from. In-breeding and weird shit going on. But I love it.”

Byzantine song-poems? Traditional Greek folk? Maybe I’ll hold off on the questions about math rock, Battles and Bloc Party, for now.

The Paradiso is what you might call a storied venue. Glen Matlock played his last gig with the Sex Pistols here. Nirvana filmed a gig here as the storm broke in November 1991. A widely circulated Joy Division bootleg was recorded here four months before Ian Curtis died. Tonight, this converted church is the setting for the latest milestone in what’s been a year of them for Oxford five-piece Foals.

London Calling is an annual, weekend-long festival that showcases young British bands to noisy, appreciative local hipsters and indie kids. This year, Foals are headlining a Friday night bill that includes the likes of New Young Pony Club and The Maccabees. Over a thousand people will watch them, and that’s only a tenth of the capacity of the Dublin venue they’re playing with Bloc Party tomorrow night.

It’s been quite a journey to this point. When The Stool Pigeon last caught up with them, in January, Foals were newly signed to Transgressive Records, giddy with excitement after recording their first BBC session and plotting their first release, in which they hoped to fuse “clinical techno” with “raucous rock”. Since then it’s all kicked off. They’ve released two great singles (plus a live EP), played South by Southwest in Texas, taken the Reading Festival by storm, recorded an album in New York with their hero Dave Sitek, headlined a sold-out UK tour, been invited onto Later... with Jools Holland, guested on Channel 4 yoof drama Skins, reportedly signed to Sub Pop in America... you get the picture. Yannis is aware that his band seems to be on the cusp of something, but he’s keeping cautious: “Being the buzz band in 2008 is gonna suck in 2009.”

It’s not just Foals’ popularity that’s changing. After all, it’s only 16 months since they first formed, and even as they grow up in public their sound continues to evolve. Neither ‘Hummer’ nor ‘Mathletics’, the two records that created the juggernaut currently powering Foals forward, will appear on the debut album due in March 2008. “Those have been released,” shrugs Yannis. “We write quite prolifically, and also, re-recording things is a pain in the arse. And, like, those were the first bunch of songs we wrote... With ‘Hummer’, we were trying to do a very clinical, very precise German techno Steve Reich-tYP:e thing, where all the notes are perfectly placed. We don’t want to keep repeating ourselves. I understand people who like to be accustomed to a band’s sound, who like to return to a band that kind of repeats stuff - it’s comforting - but we’re not the right band for those people. The bands we like are bands where they fuck with your head a bit.”

To this end, Foals have made an afrobeat record.

It’s time to talk about Dave Sitek. Guitarist with TV on the Radio and producer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell and Liars’ They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, Sitek was selected by Foals as someone who would help them take risks and frustrate “anyone expecting us to be some sort of Bloc Party-tYP:e band or Klaxons-tYP:e band”. The result of the collaboration is an album that, as Yannis enthusiastically puts it, “a lot of people will probably be disappointed by”.

SP: How do you think it will differ from expectations?
YP: “We had a couple of phone calls with Dave before we went out, and he said, straight off, ‘If you want to make a commercial record, if you want to make some big glossy pop record, then don’t work with me. It’ll be the most expensive mistake of your life.’ And his other thing is: ‘Why mess around when you can fuck around?’ The final thing that he would repeat quite a lot would be, ‘If Jimi Hendrix or Arthur Russell had Pro Tools, what kind of record would those progressive-minded individuals try and make?’ They certainly wouldn’t be making records that sound like Joy Division. That’s why we brought in this whole afrobeat element. We’ve got brass, but it’s still poppy in a lot of ways. In my mind, it’s a lot less fierce than the live show - it’s not as relentlessly dance-y at all; it’s much more diverse. Things are a lot slower, there’re no synths and no electro edge left. Everything’s done on a Rhodes piano now, so it’s got a much more organic style.

“There were very direct references for the record: The Flowers of Romance by Public Image Ltd., a lot of Talking Heads stuff, a lot of afrobeat from the sixties, like Ethiopiques, which we all got into just before we went out. That very much influenced the record, and making it in New York influenced the record. Our band is about us stretching ourselves. We won’t make another afrobeat record after this and it’s not like this album is a statement of intent - this is the thing where we feel slightly alienated from our peers who play in the indie sphere. It’s like, the next record we make genuinely might not have any guitars on it, it might not have any drums on it, it might all be brass, it might all be electronic, it might be ambient, it might be whatever the fuck it has to be, but it’ll still be about communicating things to people. It’ll still be a pop record. It’ll still be Foals.

“We’ll see what happens. This year’s just been weird. I never thought we’d be in this position now, when we did that Stool Pigeon interview [in January].”

SP: What position did you think you’d be in?
YP: “I just didn’t think that we’d become as popular as we have. I don’t really like thinking about it because it adds a whole other level of pressure and there’s pressure enough already within our band. The way that we work is very self-critical, and I’ve got pressures in my head from everything else anyway - just real stuff, family things and life. The moment you start thinking about, ‘Are kids going to dig this song?’... why bother! I’m just trying to have fun.

“This will probably sound a bit goonish but for us it’s very refreshing that people have gotten into a band like ours that isn’t about hanging out with the cool people. We’re five pretty unpopular boys from Oxford, which doesn’t have a particularly cool scene, doesn’t have particularly cool affiliations. We were all at university. We basically formed this band to piss off a load of prog friends of ours, because that’s the background we came from. I remember writing songs like ‘Balloons’ and ‘Two Steps Steps’ and being like, ‘That’s too poppy. We can’t do that. All our friends are going to hate us if we play that.’ And then we did it, and they do all hate us!

“We formed to play house parties and to try to make some dance music because it was the thing that was most alien to us. And that should be the hint as to what we will do in this band. The reason that we formed this band was to do something that we were totally unschooled in. We don’t come from a dance background. None of us were real ravers. We got into techno about a month before we formed, and so the next record might be a Mongolian drum record because it’ll be like: ‘We’re not going to be able to pull that off; let’s try that.’”

SP: You set yourself a challenge each time.
YP: “Yeah, exactly. That’s why doing stuff with Dave Sitek and doing stuff with Four Tet is so important for us. That’s what we feel like the core of the band is - doing something that’s artistically fulfilling [a Four Tet remix will feature on the ‘Balloons’ single due December 10]. It might not be what the label want but it’s what we want at the end of the day.”

SP: Is there a constant push and pull with the label?
YP: “Not really, because they know that we’ll just kick their arse if they try to fuck with our shit. Seriously. This is something that’s actually evolved since we did our interview. There’s a whole gang now. Dave Ma [Stool Pigeon photographer, director of the ‘Balloons’ video] is, in my mind, part of the band. Tinhead, who does all our artwork, he’s part of the band.

“Dave’s doing all our videos from now on: he will do them all. We take a load of money from the label, and they’re like, ‘There’s this trendy MTV dude who’s going to make you guys look like total pop stars,’ and we’re like, ‘Sod that: let’s give it to our mate.’ And Tinhead as well. He was a binman - he got rejected from every art school, he’s a failed model, he’s got a lot of severe Aspergic qualities to his personality. And it’s like, ‘Tinhead, man: come along for the ride.’ It’s about keeping everything in the family, and the less we get involved in the architecture and the tentacles of the music industry, I think, the happier we feel. That’s how we keep grounded, because if you don’t do that the music industry and being in a band can turn you into a knob...”

To step into the world of Foals is to get tangled in a web of contradictions. They’re an avowed pop band with a taste for wild experimentation. They’re earnest and serious about their music, yet they insist they started the band as a joke. Their songs are meticulously crafted and they’re a tight, forensically precise live unit, yet when it comes to organising themselves - catching flights, preparing visa applications, being on time for Stool Pigeon interviews - they’re a 10-legged disaster area. They appear to bicker constantly, but it’s plain that they’re fiercely protective of one another. Mess with one Foal, and you mess with them all.

At the centre of it all is Yannis Philippakis: polite provocateur, hater of authority and tireless mischief-maker. The first time I met Yannis, he kept lighting cigarettes in the no-smoking dining area of a Maida Vale boozer, to the mounting irritation of the staff. Each time he was reprimanded, he’d pretend he simply hadn’t understood the previous time. Then he’d light another cigarette. The same spirit of impishness carries through everything he does and, by his own admission, leads him into trouble occasionally. He had his earring ripped out in a fight at the Reading Festival, and cheerfully admits that he deserved it.

Yannis claims to “dislike people more and more as time goes on”. When I ask if he was a super-aggressive teenager, he replies, perfectly, “Why, do you think I was?” Gentle probing reveals that, as a teen, he had a habit of getting busted for weed and suspended from school for fighting. However, he must have excelled academically, since he ended up landing a place at Oxford University to study English Literature (his favourite writers include Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams). He hated it at Oxford and has no regrets about dropping out after a year. “Full of squares,” he shrugs.

Within Foals, Yannis’s chief sparring partner is technical whizz-kid guitarist Jimmy Smith, the band’s resident loose cannon, who recently enlivened a house-party gig by chipping his tooth on his own guitar, spitting the chip onto the carpet and playing on. “Me and Jimmy particularly egg each other on to get in more trouble than the other one,” says Yannis. This dynamic is evident when Foals play live. The two guitarists play facing one another, sidelong to the audience, and their duelling melody lines and spasmodic dancing are huge parts of the sound and the spectacle.

It’s drummer Jack Bevan that has the longest-running friendship with Yannis, however. School friends, they shared a pre-Foals existence playing together in Oxford trio The Edmund Fitzgerald. Technical and unapologetically self-indulgent, The Edmund Fitzgerald were rooted in the math rock genre and their largely instrumental songs would sometimes run to 20 minutes. Though one Edmund Fitzgerald track survives - having been reworked for use as a Foals live intro - Yannis regards his alma mater band as a youthful folly, and claims not to have copies of any stuff they recorded, apart from the two split singles they released: a 12” with Bilge Pump on Noisestar and a 7” with Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies (now Youthmovies) on Vacuous Pop.

Youthmovies frontman Andrew Mears is Foals’ Pete Best. A founding member, he sings and plays guitar on the first release under the Foals name, the ‘Try This On Your Piano’ single issued by Oxford indie Try Harder in April 2006, which introduced Foals’ trademark knack of making guitars sound like eighties computer games. However, it was only after Mears left that keyboardist Edwin Congreave joined, Yannis took on vocal chores, and a pop sensibility took root.

Back to Jack. The ex-Edmund Fitzgerald drummer’s role in Foals is critical. Making heavy use of his hi-hat, he underpins each song with a driving dance beat, ensuring that there’s more movement on the floor at a Foals gig than any indie or even nu rave contemporaries could hope for at theirs.

Bassist Walter Gervers is a school friend of Jimmy’s and the band’s oldest member, though only two years older than Yannis (its youngest). Reckoned by Yannis to be the best singer in Foals, Walter forms a white-hot punk funk rhythm section with Jack, and he’s everything a bassist should be: tough, reliable, a perfect gentleman. It was through Walter’s friendship with staff at Truck Records that Foals first got serious, the latter having thrown down the gauntlet by offering the band a slot at the annual Truck Festival. Foals also recorded their first demo at Truck’s studio.

Completing the circular formation in which Foals play their shows is Edwin, whose stage presence is somewhere between Sparks’ Ron Mael and a pre-lobotomy Bez. Edwin differs from his bandmates in never having played in a band, or even played an instrument, before joining Foals. By Yannis’s account, this is the beauty of him. He listens to music with an untrained ear and offers a different perspective to that of a jaded math rock veteran.

“I was working with Edwin making Martinis for rich, unappreciative people in Oxford,” recalls Yannis. “He introduced me to techno basically - and all of us to techno - and we all started going to the same parties and then we were like, ‘Let’s make a band.’ If anything is testament to the lack of seriousness about the band, it’s the fact that we invited Edwin largely at first as a fucking joke. It was just like, ‘We need a keyboard player, you don’t have a clue what you’re doing: let’s make it work.’ I think for Edwin it’s been the weirdest, out of all of us. There’s no way that he envisaged himself being in a band. He was just my friend, we used to go out and we used to go dancing and get drunk and make really bad mistakes with ex-friends’ girlfriends.”

These, then, are the five disparate men of Foals. “The five of us are just this travelling, really dysfunctional family and it’s awesome,” says Yannis. “A couple of us have got autism, a couple of us have got asthma... You need to ask our tour manager. I know he finds it hard dealing with us. He sees it like a school trip gone wrong. That’s how this band operates.”

An experiment in communal living in Brighton didn’t work out (“We didn’t really make any friends, we didn’t really ever go out, we just ended up sitting at home watching Devo videos and getting high and stuff”). Yet for all their dysfunctionality, Foals are not afraid to assert themselves. In fact, they recently did so in circumstances they would dearly love to have avoided.

It’s time to talk Dave Sitek again.

SP: In a recent MySpace blog, you talked about mixing tracks on days off from touring. Has it been difficult getting the mix right?
YP: “Basically, what happened was, we left New York and we left Dave Sitek to mix the record and he did something to the record that we hadn’t envisaged at all and that we weren’t comfortable with, so we had to remix it. Which is a real shame, because he’s pissed off with us... Well, he’s not pissed off with us, but I feel almost like we betrayed him in some way. I don’t think we did, but that’s how he feels. He tried to make something very cinematic and very... almost cosmic-sounding. It was just too much for us so we decided we’d remix it.”

SP: Were the tracks too long and spacey?
YP: “Not long; just a lot of reverb. I’ve never been a massive fan of reverb. It just felt like, we were in New York and we did everything that he suggested because we were up for experimenting, and... the mix that came back didn’t feel like the record that we had left. It felt like it had taken a tangent. He executed his vision perfectly - it’s not like it was sloppy or anything like that. But it just felt like it wasn’t our record any more. It’s difficult: the balance between a producer and a band is really difficult. Particularly with someone like David. He’s got a big fucking personality. He’s very charismatic and very opinionated, in a good way.”

SP: So was it a hard phone call to make?
YP: “It was definitely one of the hardest phone calls I’ve ever had to make. To me, he was more than a producer. It was more like, while we were out there, he was a mentor for our band, in terms of everything: his attitudes towards the music industry, towards what’s important about being in a band, how you deal with touring for 14 months - this is all stuff that he’s been through. He’s made hundreds of records, and he’s a very intelligent human being. It almost felt paternal, his role with us, so it almost felt like dethroning your father or something. It was very unpleasant.”

Yannis tells a funny story about Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner listening to a Foals playback while on a visit to Sitek’s studio and not having a single thing to say about it. His confidence, however, has plainly not been dented. Nor have his energy levels: you can be sure that he’ll keep working on the record until it exactly matches his vision for it. But what, exactly, does he want it to communicate? Foals lyrics have always been opaque, to say the least. It’s hard enough to make out what Yannis is singing, let alone what it might mean. I’d always assumed the chorus of ‘Hummer’ to be a repeated “I command!” When I look it up online, I find that it’s actually “Oh, come on!” Unless, that is, it’s “Pokemon!”

When, after tonight’s gig, I ask Edwin, “What’s that song where Yannis keeps singing the word vessels?” He has no idea which one I might mean, and cheerfully admits that even he doesn’t know what Yannis is singing a lot of the time.

In the occasional flashes of clarity, the intrigue only deepens, thanks to Yannis’s intriguing turns of phrase. ‘Hummer’ offers this: “Your quiet heartbeats shine like millions,” while ‘Balloons’ repeats the line, “We fly balloons on this fuel called...”
Inevitably, Foals’ lyrical ambiguity turns out to be calculated.

SP: Is the album a confessional record? Are there a lot of personal demons exorcised?
YP: “I don’t know. It’s up to you to decide, I guess. There are no narratives. It’s very divorced from the current trend of lyric writing, which is writing about a boy who’s been wearing the same jeans for four days. It’s not really about that. It’s mostly about emotional things. I’m not really very into dealing with the day to day... I’m interested in cultural stuff a lot, ‘cause I feel personally very alienated, and I think a number of the band feel alienated, from 21st century western culture and consumerism. The last thing that I want us to do is become a political band, but I think even just on a personal level we feel quite alienated from things that are going on in our culture and in terms of a lot of our peers, and a lot of that feeds into the album. There are a lot of things about escapism on the album.”

SP Do you intentionally keep things ambiguous in your lyrics?
YP: “Yeah, of course. I think that’s what lyrics should do. Otherwise I think people become stale very quickly. If you listen to a song twice and you’ve totally nailed what’s going on in a song... I like the idea that it’s almost like a relay or something. You pass on the baton and the listener takes it somewhere different. I find that far more exciting than if I were to sing about the specifics of my childhood or about one of my friends who’d been in a car accident. It’s gotta be in some way more abstract, because I think it suits the music.”

SP: Does the band have to be ultimately a benign dictatorship with you having the final say? It seems like you’re the one mixing the record, for example...
YP: “If anyone ever has a problem with the mixing we just change it. I mean you could call it a benign dictatorship but it sounds quite horrible. We all just agree. Because even though we are all quite different, we all have the same aims in this band. We all share the same fundamental background in the kind of music we like. There’s not one of us that likes The Horrors, for example. None of us like music like that. We all have the same bedrock in terms of our tastes and in terms of the attitudes we have and the ethics and aesthetics we have towards music. The enjoyable part comes from the idiosyncrasies from different people. That’s why it’s more fun being in a band than spinning in space, like a solo musician: ‘Wow, this is my brain in sound form!’”

SP: With The Edmund Fitzgerald, obviously you were more within the math rock genre...
YP: “I find it funny that people still call us math-rock now. I did this interview for a Danish paper that seemed to think we were a math rock band. I was like, ‘Man, if only you knew what people who like that sort of music think of our band... To them, we’re dirty pop sell-outs!’”

SP: Is ‘Mathletics’ a sarcastic comment on that?
YP: “It might be... What the fuck is math rock, anyway? I don’t know what it is. I do like a lot of bands that are considered technical; I still like a lot of that music. My favourite band in the world, pretty much, is Sweep the Leg Johnny. They certainly don’t call themselves math rock but other people probably would. I grew up listening to Don Caballero and stuff, but it’s like... We formed Foals to piss off the people who are into that. Not piss them off, but just, that’s what we wanted to get away from.”

SP: The Oxford scene?
YP: “We just wanted to get away from it and actually have some fun. Because it had become very, very academic. I like where this band is now, because it’s pop but it’s not pop, and it’s kind of stupid but it’s kind of clever. To me, it just became a bit too purist, all that stuff. ‘Oh, you can’t have a chorus in your song because it’s all about the math. It’s all about the stop-start.’ It’s just like, ‘Back off, man.’ I like pop music. Please don’t shoot me. I’m not interested in DIY ethics any more...

“There isn’t even a math rock thing going on in Oxford anymore. Now you’ve got loads of noise bands, which to me is kind of interesting. It’s almost like prog then punk; in Oxford you like all this technical shit and now you’ve got just these crazy kids making fucking noise. That’s cool!”

SP: Has it been stressful recently, trying to mix the record between bouts of touring?
YP: “The touring is kind of relentless... I think we all get homesick quite a lot. We all deal with it by basically just destroying ourselves slowly... There’s a fair amount of recreational escapism. There’re just ways you have to deal with it. This is all quite alien to us so often we probably do act a bit obnoxious - I wouldn’t be surprised. We were obnoxious before, anyway. I wasn’t that pleasant a person to begin with. I don’t think I’ve got any worse but it certainly hasn’t made me any easier to get on with.”

SP: Does the on-the-road excess get, um, excessively excessive at times?
YP: “I don’t want us to be some cliché. I was never into Guns N’ Roses, put it that way. We’re not like real jockey tYP:es... To me, the alarming thing that’s happened in rock music is the infiltration of it by (a) fashion-tYP:e people and, (b) jocks. Like, guys that have blatantly played rugby for the last 10 years and all of a sudden they’re wearing tiny skinny jeans and these ripped t-shirts and passing themselves off as The Futureheads... They’re not who they say they are - they’re not like these weird people - they’re just average suburban kids passing themselves off as this thing.

“I understand the way that a lot of pop music works: Prince wasn’t born like Prince. A lot of it’s about myth management, effectively. But I think that, for me, what I always used to love about bands like Nirvana or whoever is was that you’d know they’re real and they are who they say they are. And we’re who we say we are and think there are a lot of other bands who are like that. But, to me, there’s no filtering in the press or by kids who get into bands: they’re duped. It’s not their fault. Bands have become incredibly clever at packaging themselves.

“I just find it very calculating in a way, and almost the opposite of everything that I ever thought music should be. Music should be a sanctuary away from calculating marketing and popularity contest-tYP:e stuff. If our shows are busy, we’re happy in some small way that 10 kids will go and read an interview about Q and Not U and Sweep the Leg Johnny, or they read about the fact that we didn’t have girlfriends at school because we were too busy smoking cigarettes and smoking pot and listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and all trying to grow beards when we were 15 and failing miserably.”

SP: Are there other bands out there that you feel an affinity with?
YP: “Yeah, loads. Absolutely loads... The very fact that we got signed and that there’re bands like Hot Club de Paris and Metronomy - bands that, in my mind, come from a sincere place - is a really hopeful sign. On a larger level, you’ve got bands like Radiohead... I think it’s a very impressive thing that they did with that record [In Rainbows]. I hope that maybe in the not-so-distant future it’ll get back to the point where bands are basically functioning off patronage and working with producers and just splitting profits off things and the more voracious industry element of it does get damped down a bit. And once that happens, we won’t get these prefabricated bands in such quantities. Or bands with the wrong motives. A lot of what’s created or reinforced the ability of bands to be fake is the trappings of the industry itself. They’re interested in snorting coke and getting laid and hanging out at fashion parties. If that goes, what are they going to do? They’ll do something else. They’re infiltrate the art world or the literary world.”

Yannis, it turns out, has a lot of time for the two bands to which Foals are routinely compared: Battles, who like the man himself have abandoned math rock for something more accessible, and Bloc Party, to whose singer Kele Okereke he is sometimes a vocal double (check out Foals b-side ‘Big Big Love’). Indeed, Yannis once personally promoted a Battles show in Oxford, and in mid-December his band will support Bloc Party at their massive Ally Pally shows. He’s grateful for the invite.
Plainly, a lot of Foals’ manic energy derives from the warm, fuzzy feelings they have for each other and for like minds. Equally plainly, a lot of it derives from hatred for swathes of the contemporary British indie scene. Yannis is never slow to vent his spleen, and tonight’s London Calling bill almost seems designed to provoke him. “There are certain bands who are playing here tonight who are just super-driven: if the music industry was school, they’d be the head boys, and yet they try and pass themselves off as rock’n’roll and nonchalant. It’s like, ‘Man, I know you go to bed at 10 o’clock and you’ve never done acid.’”

Who might he be referring to? Well, the band playing below Foals tonight is New Young Pony Club and, in a boon to sub-editors everywhere, a feud seems to be brewing between the two. Last year, obnoxious behaviour by the Pony Club at a gig in London led to Foals (and others) trashing their dressing room. Tonight, their sound engineer shows up in Foals’ dressing room to offer some brave talk about returning the favour. It’s hilarious.

Oh, and that comment of Yannis’s about “guys that have blatantly played rugby for the last 10 years”? That, it emerges, was a reference to Look See Proof.

It only damns them with faint praise to say that Foals dispatch the competition with ease tonight.

As they’re setting up, it occurs to me that Yannis might have been winding me up when he spoke of opening the set with a snatch of a Byzantine song-poem, and I’m relieved when he does. It means that the talk of a Flowers of Romance-influenced record featuring the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra might also be true.

Tonight’s set is more a document of progression than of any sudden shift in direction. Like all Foals sets, it’s intense, danceable and exhilarating. The jerky, propulsive rhythms and mantra-like French-language vocal of ‘The French Open’ send a shudder of excitement through the packed room, and there follows a dazzling sprint through the choppily malevolent upcoming single ‘Cassius’ (due January), the commercial money-shot ‘Red Sox Pugie’ (to be released as a single after the album) and the portentous pop of ‘Balloons’, which thanks to its video may usher in a new dance craze we’re calling ‘The Hummingbird’. Elsewhere, album tracks ‘Heavy Water’ and ‘Olympic Airways’ point to a deepening of Foals’ artillery.

Edwin breaks out the maracas for ‘Mathletics’, which cues up a bone-throwing closing trio of crowd pleasers, the other two being ‘Two Steps Twice’ and ‘Hummer’, retooled to reflect Foals’ changing aesthetic. By this point, the atmosphere in the room is such that I’m loudly berated by a drunk Dutch girl for not dancing enough. It seems I stand out.

I’m reminded of something Yannis said earlier, about the UK tour: “The shows have been really good and really wild as well - like, violent! This tour was almost like what I imagined the early nineties to be like. There’s just been something very special about the atmosphere - just people reverting to this primal state where they’re not worried about looking cool or anything and they’re just going fucking mental and getting onstage. Kids who would normally be all moochy moochy at the back of a gig are onstage ripping their shirts off. That’s the kind of thing that gives me a genuine connection which I think is great.”

There’s certainly nothing ‘moochy moochy’ about Amsterdam’s response. Though everyone’s kept dancing tonight, there’s a ferocity to Foals that emphasises the ‘punk’ in punk funk. Another Yannis quote flashes to mind: “I like bands like The Butthole Surfers and Swans and Skinny Puppy. Bands that have problems. Those are the bands that are fun.”

SP: And you’ve got enough problems in Foals, you reckon?
YP: “Mmm. Yeah. We’ve got plenty. It’s fine. We’ve got plenty to deal with for the next couple of years at least.”

Why? Bluefinger is sonically close to the Pixies - so consciously so it’s like a message to the band, who Charles says refuse to record again - but he claims that’s only one reason and he doesn’t understand all the others. He’s guided by instinct, so he just did it and that indeed is what people have come to expect of this most complicated man. Famously, he announced the Pixies were over live on BBC radio, unbeknownst to the other three members, and since then he’s cackled in the face of expectation, releasing a slew of solo material unequivocally on his and no one else’s terms. You can’t blame a bloke for working, but to many Pixies fans his productivity (Bluefinger is his 14th album in 12 years) is perplexing, even saddening: they think the majority of Frank Black records are rushed, hammy, and mask, as biographer Ben Sisario believes, “aimlessness and frustration”. Charles is a fan of live-to-two-track analogue recording - an honest, cheap and potentially perfect method for making albums, but a commercial suicide and all this from an artist who still seeks success and knows damn well that the best selling and most adored Pixies record is the one that was most produced, 1989’s Doolittle.

Bluefinger was actually recorded digitally, but that has more to do with circumstance than a change in ideology. Charles, 42, lives now in Oregon with his second wife Violet, her two children from a previous marriage and their own two (to be three next year).

As he explains below, for his wife’s sake, he needed to find somewhere locally to record.
Also unusually for a man who despises potential pomposity in music, Bluefinger is a concept album, or rather an ode to the Dutch musician, artist and hell-raiser, Herman Brood - a legend in Holland but largely unknown outside, other than for his 1979 hit ‘Saturday Night’ and relationship with German artist Nina Hagen. Charles became consumed and inspired by Brood, often called the “Dutch personification of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”, saying: “John Lennon and Yoko Ono claimed the Amsterdam Hilton in 1969. The Pixies headlined their first big rock show in Holland in 1988. Herman Brood reclaimed the Hilton for his country in 2001 [he took his own life by throwing himself off it], and now I feel he has even claimed back the Pixies, or at least me, Black Francis.”

If these different characters and obsessions sound confusing, know that they confuse the shit out of Charles too. For a while now he’s been in therapy and it’s had a marked effect on his songwriting. His early lyrics, often drawn from his Christian upbringing and life-long fascination with outer space and UFOs, were ambiguous, eerie, sexual, sometimes violent. Show Me Your Tears, from 2003, and his two Nashville records were far more emotionally sincere and direct. Bluefinger, expressly about someone else and the heaviest album he’s done in ages, is something different again and will do little to dissolve this age-old idea that Charles is a musician ruled by his own contradictions. Indeed, an excellent fly-on-the-wall documentary on the Pixies reunion, loudQUIETloud, presents a man who seems astoundingly self-aware and (still) amazingly bad at communicating; generous but egotistical; affable and fierce; open-minded and defiant. The reunion was a gigantic commercial and critical success, yet he’s still jostling for position as the leader of the band 20 years after they formed. It’s surprising.

Charles says that not much has changed in his solo career since the Pixies reformed, although he did have roadies for a jaunt round Europe this July. If Pixies fans give it a deserved chance, Bluefinger will keep the momentum going. If they don’t, the re-born Black Francis will simply start on something new. That’s just his way, and fuck you if you don’t like it. As he once told the Washington Post: “How can I complain? Because I don’t have a bigger pile of money? That’s a bad attitude when you make a living as a musician. Hey, you’re in the club, you’re on tour, you make records, you get to sing with David Bowie on his 50th birthday. What more do you want? An island?”

SP: Final show of a short European tour last night, and at a venue you’ve become pretty familiar with - London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
BF: And I sold it out at last! At last. How many times have I explained this to people who put shows on? I don’t care if I’m playing in a tiny, tiny room, I just want it to be full. Every artist wants the room they’re in to be full. It has to do with architecture. If the room isn’t full of people, and especially if it’s a room designed for performance like a theatre, then the people who are there, including the people on stage, get overwhelmed. It’s not like the agent’s or the promoter’s cut of my little gig is really gonna make any difference if they go from this room to this room. We’re not talking Wembley Arena here, not with Frank Black. Just fucking put me in the right room! Half the time: great, like last night. The other times: why the fuck am I in here?

SP: Who was your band for the tour?
BF: This guy Charles Norman who’s the brother of this Christian rocker guy I used to be really into when I was a youth - a kind of rebel character called Larry Norman. By coincidence, I ended up living in the state of Oregon, down the road from Larry, and I’m acquainted with Charles. For Bluefinger, I used this drummer Jason [Carter], who’s also from Oregon. He came on tour, but originally I told my new manager that I wanted an all-English band because I thought they wouldn’t be a bunch of yes men; that they’d be nice and attitudey, like, ‘Fuck you, we don’t care about you anyway.’ It ended up being one English guy: Ding from Manchester, who’s played with The Fall and PJ Harvey, along with Charles and Jason.

SP: Was there a reason for the tour? The dates were two months before Bluefinger’s release.
BF: Well, that’s the thing: I didn’t really want to do the tour because it was ostensibly in support of this ‘best of’ compilation [93-03], which I couldn’t give two shits about. My manger convinced me to do it and because he’s a new manager I didn’t want to totally tie his hands: I’m already gonna be difficult enough for him because I’m opinionated and a little bit head-strong, so I said, ‘You wanna do the compilation, let’s do the compilation.’

SP: Why did your manager want to do it?
BF: I suppose he was saying, ‘You’ve been doing this a long time, you’ve got a lot of records, it’s time for a retrospective,’ from a reviewers’ point of view or whatever. This is your life up to now! So I said, ‘You choose the songs, I don’t care.’ There are no hits, so he couldn’t base it on that and the songwriting, in my opinion, tends to be on the eclectic side - I don’t mean avant-garde, just that the basic ideal was never to come up with the most poppy, commercial sound - so what’s the point? There are no ‘best’ songs, they’re just songs. So I said, ‘You pick ’em, I don’t give a shit.’ Originally, it was two CDs - too long, so he said, ‘Let’s go for 10 years - 1993 to 2003. That takes you from the end of the Pixies to the end of your beloved Catholics [Charles’s band from late 1996 to 2003].’

SP: And right up to the Pixies reunion, too.
BF: Yes, and it avoided the whole Nashville thing. I like those albums, but they’re different to the other ones.

SP: The compilation plays fine as a record by itself.
BF: I haven’t heard it yet.

SP: You released nine albums in those 10 years, but over a third of the songs are taken from the first two. How come?
BF: Those were the most popular. Like most artists, you have moments when you’re hot for a couple of years and then there’s a descent, maybe a crash, maybe a slow decline. For me, there were two records when I was selling more than X artist and those two records, right after the Pixies, represent the beginning of the sales descent. More people have those records than the others, so there are more songs from them on the compilation.

SP: You may have been against doing the compilation, but it nonetheless set in motion your new album proper. You were asked to do a bonus track and that became the genesis of Bluefinger.
BF: I had a bad attitude about the whole project from the beginning, but I knew I wanted to record above and beyond the compilation, so I needed to find a studio in my hometown, instead of always flying to Nashville or Los Angeles. I can’t always be leaving the wife and kids like that, so I had to put aside my high-falootin’ ideas about analogue recording and, you know, certain types of recording atmospheres. I found a little digital place - cool place and the guy knows what he’s doing - and I ended up working with a couple of good musicians [Jason and bassist Dan Schmid]. I went in and instead of making just a bonus track, I made a record over the course of 10 days or something like that. It became this concept album, which is strange because I never believed in concept albums. I mean, who cares about Tommy? People remember the songs - they don’t care about the concept.

SP: How come you did a concept album, then?
BF: I don’t really know, but this young guy I asked to produce the record [Mark Lemhouse] came round to my motel room, which I’d rented to work in - I can’t write at home because as soon as I sit down with a guitar three kids wants to play too - and we were having a couple of glasses of wine and chatting. I said, ‘What are you working on, Mark?’ and he says he’s working on a concept album about this serial killer from Texas. A light bulb didn’t go off - it went in one ear and out the other - but I’ve been wondering whether, psychologically, that triggered something. Suddenly, it all became this Herman Brood thing and it was really exciting for me.

SP: Does your interest in Brood go back a long way?
BF: No. He was on my list, of course... [phone beeps] It’s the satellite re-sending a text I sent to my wife earlier. I got this the other day with my therapist. I don’t talk to her when I’m at home much, but when I’m on the road I actually have a little bit of privacy and time once in a while. I get to call her up and have a chat. We’ve been doing it on a weekly basis and we were trying to set it up a couple of weeks ago via text. Suddenly, I was inundated for two days by one she sent me: ‘Thursday.’ ‘Thursday.’ ‘Thursday.’ I couldn’t get it to stop... Anyway, Herman Brood: heard about him a long time ago - think I heard the old Pixies tour manager talk about him once, and I think I may have been in town when he died. I may be making this up, but I have some weird memory of being in Holland with a rock promoter guy who I’ve been working with for years and him saying, ‘Herman Brood, you probably don’t know him, but he just jumped off the Amsterdam Hilton.’ So, as with all music geeks, I’ve got a little list and Herman Brood was on my list. And there I am, the kids have gone to bed, I’m sitting there with my laptop and I’m like, ‘What shall I look up on YouTube tonight?’ No rhyme or reason, but that night it was Herman Brood. I saw a performance of his, fell in love with it, and decided I wanted to cover this particular song [‘You Can’t Break a Heart and Have It’]. And I was looking at this scrap of an interview he did on a train in ’76, and then I’m finding out about how much they loved him in Holland, in the same way that New Yorkers loved Frank Sinatra. Herman is like the king in Holland. They love him and they’re passionate about him, so part of the record is to do with that - why they love him. Anyway, for about a week, everything I read about Herman Brood, and all the clips I saw of him, and all the songs I heard, were connected; all the dots joined up. Every time I stumbled onto a new little piece of information, it was like, ‘But of course!’ He made sense to me. Every little bit.

SP: Were you picking up parallels between your own life and character and Herman Brood’s?
BF: I don’t know. I’ve thought about it - he’s the same age as my father, same kind of generation, died about the same age, he’s an under-dog character and maybe I think of myself as an under-dog kind of character... I don’t know if it was what was going on in my mind, or is going on in my mind, but certainly I feel like I have a lot of empathy for whatever the reason, and it’s not just the charisma and the music and the art. There’s this almost humorous suicide at the end and there’s the tragedy of the monkey on his back. I usually don’t like to sing about these things because I find them too grim or something, but there’s something about him. You know, there’s the cultural domination of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, which is not as prevalent now as it was during his generation. You can imagine being a Dutch rock’n’roller in the seventies: you know damn well you’re never gonna fuckin’ make it into the bigger circuit, but that’s where a lot of your references are coming from. These guys love the blues, they love American rock’n’roll, they love Little Richard, so why the fuck shouldn’t their music be just as valid as some guy from Texas’s? I had empathy for that kind of situation, and the fact he was always getting kicked out of bands. His life had all this dramatic, small-time drama because he was a junky. He was the piano player in a popular band in Holland called Cuby and the Blizzards and they kicked him out because he was on the smack or the speed or whatever he was doing. I would kick someone out of my band if they were a junky, but the writer in me had empathy: I started to feel his own frustration with life and the business and everything else.

SP: It sounds like Brood truly kicked something off in your imagination.
BF: I started to write some songs and I was excited about them, and I was already in the studio, going to bed at three, but I was waking up at seven because I wanted to keep working. I just got this thing going and it was extra electrifying because no one knew I was doing it - they were just expecting a bonus track. It was kind of emotional for me, getting in Herman’s story and finding all this feeling for him. And I didn’t want to know the guy: I could have called people in Holland - his old tour manager and others who actually knew him - but that would have been too much. I wanted to sit in the same space as his fans who loved him. I talk about the drugs, but it had to be about the art and the music because that’s what we have left. That’s the story. I didn’t need to know the particulars.

SP: Did Herman Brood resurrect Black Francis, or had you already gone back to your Pixies stage name?
BF: I had decided to do that about a month before. In fact, I did it a month before but I’d been thinking about it for longer. I’d got this new manager... the old manager was the Pixies manager and I’d been with the guy for almost 20 years. It was kind of like a divorce - we didn’t end very well at all. That was disturbing, and I think probably because I was out with the old band doing these reunion shows and I couldn’t get them into a studio, and I was aware of certain criticisms coming from fans, or writers, or even my former band... I felt like, and maybe I’ve read into it too much, that I could be the most successful guy on the planet right now and they still wouldn’t want to make a record. I don’t know. With that band, as with any group of people who have known each other for a long time, there’s a lot of baggage. So, for whatever the reason - probably because I broke up the band way back when and just said, ‘Fuck you, see you later’ - they’re still mad at me. They’re like, ‘Hey, this reunion thing, let’s keep doing it, let’s keep doing it,’ and I say, ‘Okay, let’s make a record,’ and they don’t want to do it.

SP: There was one new Pixies song, Kim Deal’s ‘Bam Thwok’, and you recorded a Warren Zevon track for a tribute album...
BF: I was excited at the time. It was like, ‘Okay, we’re back!’ and we kind of sounded the same and it felt the same, and certainly a lot of interpersonal relationships slipped back into their familiar patterns. So I guess I was hopeful and, I have to admit, we were selling out places and making 10 times more money than we did the first time round... it felt good to be successful, not just to be making money. I thought we could continue, but the only way we could continue to do these tours was to have some new material. We couldn’t just keep going out there and doing ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ every night.

SP: You did write some songs that you gave to the band in demo form. What happened to them?
BF: They weren’t interested, and I kind of botched that whole operation because I played poker with them and I lost. The reunion tours were getting shorter and shorter because we’d played more and more places. About a year ago we were gonna do two or three weeks in eastern Europe and Spain and I was like, ‘You know, this is bullshit - we’re gonna go out there for two or three weeks and we could be going out and working for two or three months if we just go into the studio and make a mini album or something.’ I kept trying to convince them: ‘Okay, so you don’t want to spoil the legacy of the band...’

SP: ...that’s the main argument?
BF: That’s the main argument and it’s a valid argument, but I don’t give a shit. We should go and do waltzes or something. It’s our band, who cares? We’re not nation-building here, we’re just making records. You know, I think it may have been an attempt to finally seize control - leadership - of the band again. I wanted to be the leader of the band like I was 18 years ago. So I said, ‘I’m not doing the summer tour - I think we ought to make a new record, here are some demos.’ So, of course, they were like, ‘Demo schemo.’ They weren’t even going to listen to them and when they finally did they said, ‘They sound a little bit like homemade demos - a little low-fi.’ Jesus Christ, they’re demos! Fill in the blanks with your brains or something! Anyway, they weren’t gonna have it - they weren’t impressed - and so I guess that was sort of the end, although we did play Australia earlier this year. That felt like the end.

SP: So there are no plans for any more reunion shows?
BF: No.

SP: Was there a point when you felt like taking Bluefinger to the other Pixies?
BF: No, but I was taking it to them psychologically. I was hoping it was gonna sound cool: ‘Oh yeah, so you think I can’t write rock music? You think I’m just an old fat guy stuck in Nashville? Fuck you!’ I even asked Joey [Santiago] to play guitar on it and he was kind of, ‘I’m busy right now, maybe I can, send me the stuff.’ I don’t know if it was because he was busy or he’d think he was rocking the boat with the band too much or something. He’s played on other records of mine, but I think in the context of... I think Joey wants to make a Pixies record, to give you a little more background, but he doesn’t want to rock the boat too much, and what happened was, the producer said, ‘The tones on your guitar sound right, we don’t need a lead guitar - it’s too much.’ So actually it was cool for me to go, ‘This is my first Black Francis record, whatever that means, and there’s no other guitar player - it’s just me. It’s all about me - me and a rhythm section. It felt like that: I can’t give you the Pixies, but hey, here’s Black Francis.’

SP: Were you nonetheless thinking of them when you were writing the songs? It’s not hard to imagine Bluefinger as a Pixies record.
BF: Well sure, but just in a friendly vengeful kind of way, sort of like, ‘Ha ha ha, this could have been you but you said no, so fuck you, you blew it.’ You know, maybe the record will just be another obscure one in my collection of many obscure records...

SP: Do you think it will be?
BF: I have no idea.

SP: It is different, this one.
BF: Yes. You know, I just have more energy now than I’ve had in a long time. I’m still a fat guy, but I was a fatter guy about a year ago: I started fasting on a regular basis and I dropped a bunch of weight. When you go from being one size to another, you feel like, ‘Aaaah yaaaah!!!’ Your energy level totally changes. Now, I don’t want to take a nap in the middle of the day - it’s just different. And one thing I’ve learned in therapy is that you make these symbolic gestures. [Hits the table] What does that mean? Really, in the cosmos? Nothing, it’s just a fucking symbolic gesture, who gives a shit? But sometimes when you do that, suddenly doors open and things happen and you respond to the symbolic gesture, the ritual: ‘I am now Black Francis again.’ It’s theatrical application and, on some levels, I don’t even deserve to take on a stage name because the history of stage names, at least in America, comes from a black blues tradition and those guys were trying to get rid of their fucking bullshit slave owner’s name. It’s so much more meaningful than me saying, ‘Iggy Pop has a stage name, I wanna have a stage name.’ But still, I was once Black Francis and, as a symbolic gesture, I became Frank Black, whatever that meant at the time, and then Frank Black is over now and I’m Black Francis again, whatever that means. I don’t know what it means.

SP: Have you asked your therapist what it might mean?
BF: No, because there’s so much other stuff going on. I think she’s just amused that her student has tapped into certain things and is kind of doing it on his own. She doesn’t really need to participate in it: I told her and her response was, ‘Great!’ and, you know, ‘Next!’ So, I don’t really know who this Black Francis guy is yet, but I’m working on it and that’s why I got rid of the guitar on this tour for the first time. That’s a psychological barrier. I always felt like I’m not that connected... You see, this is the problem: you get up on stage and you already feel kind of naked and awkward up there... The Pixies, especially, we came out of this more anti-pop kind of scene and it was never about kissing the audience’s ass. You want to impress them - you wanna be loud, or you wanna be exciting or dynamic, or you wanna put on a show - but it’s not about, ‘Hey, how’s it going everybody?’

SP: You weren’t dancing bears...
BF: Right. And now all the festivals... I’m not playing festivals anymore - that’s it. I played my last one, I don’t give a shit about them anymore. I mean, we’re all paid very well at these festivals, even if you’re low on the bill. I’m Frank Black and I’m not that high on the bill, but still - loads of money and you wonder where it’s coming from... I’m standing in a field in Switzerland the other day and I’m watching these parachutists come out of the sky, very dramatically over the audience, and there’s smoke coming out of their boots, and I’m like, ‘Wow, what’s going on? Air show or something.’ Parachutes open up and... ‘Nokia!!!’ [cracks up] Fuckin’ A, man! All these festivals, they’re all Nokia, Heineken, Marlboro... all this corporate bullshit. And I’ve never been offended by the whole corporate thing - it’s like, ‘Fuck it, if you can’t beat them, join them. I can’t get played on the radio but you want to put me in a TV ad? At least I’ll get some money, which will give me more financial freedom...’ But I’m playing these festivals and I always forget this. When I first started playing them years ago, they just seemed cooler; it seemed the audience wasn’t quite so dumb: one moment you had Texas doing their pop thing and then it was Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and people weren’t confused. Now, I feel like they look at me like I’ve got two heads. It’s like, ‘Come on, you fucking people!’ I stopped a show the other night at a festival: they were kicking around this fucking blow-up dolphin - a symbol of the festival, a balloon thing. ‘Stop! Kill that fucking dolphin. This is bullshit. This is not why I do this - so you people can hit around a beach ball. Fuck that.’ It’s like the whole thing with the encore, which, since the beginning of my career, has been overdone. It barely has any trace of what a real encore was 100 years ago. Everything is like, dumb audience, dumb festival, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. I’ve got nothing against pop music and I’ve got nothing against people who want to be showmen, but it really bothers me that there’s an expectation from the audience now: they don’t have any tolerance for something that isn’t that. Even some of my own fans have the same attitude: ‘I went to a show last night and I have to say I was very disappointed because he didn’t even talk to the audience.’ Jesus fucking Christ! I didn’t even talk to the audience? Where the fuck have you been!? Have you ever listened to a fuckin’ Lou Reed album? Have you ever been to real rock show? Have you ever seen Mark E. Smith? Come on! You want me to talk? Is that all you care about? Having this interpersonal, ‘Heeeey!’ Fuck you!

SP: You often read reviews in newspapers where the writer complains there was no artist-audience banter...
BF: Yeah, the aesthetic has gotten all wrong. The culture has changed - it’s all Nokia and Starbucks, it’s dreadful. So now I’m like, ‘You know what? Fuck all this corporate shit.’ No one will give a shit if Frank Black doesn’t want to play festivals - they’ll still go on - but I’ve had it. And I was never one of those guys who got up on soap box and was like, ‘We’ve got to stop Clear Channel, they’re ruining everything!’ I was always, ‘Showbusiness is showbusiness, baby. If Clear Channel want to pay me $2,000 more than local yokel punk rock promoter guy, fuck it - I need the money, I’ll play for the 2,000 more bucks.’ But I’ve been doing that for a few years and it’s so lame. I play House of Blues [swanky chain of gig venues in the States] and they’ve got nice production and you get treated well, but you can just feel it: the staff don’t know who the fuck you are and they don’t give a shit who you are - they’re just part of this big thing and you’re just a cog in their wheel. I’ve had it.

SP: It seems you’ve always done things on your own terms and often at the irritation of your fans. Many of your solo albums have come in for quite a kicking over the years. Has that upset you?
BF: I don’t expect everyone to love all my records - I don’t even love all my records - you just make them, and they just come out the way they come out. I figured out a few years ago that I’m a snake in the Chinese zodiac and a snake feels his way - he just reacts to what’s right in front of him. You don’t have a lot of artistic vision, it’ more, ‘Right here, right now, let’s do it.’ In terms of making music, that’s exactly how I am and exactly as I’ve always been since the beginning. People are always suggesting things that are too hypothetical and I’m always like, ‘No, can we just book a studio tomorrow and see what happens?’ I guess I’ve been offended sometimes when people act like you have no business putting out a record. It’s like, ‘Fuck you! I can do whatever the fuck I want. I make records - if you don’t want to buy them, don’t fucking buy them.’ And there are plenty of people who don’t - trust me. But some people buy them - they’re all in print, and that’s all I give a shit about. It’s like, ‘Lou Reed’s got a zillion records all in print and I want to have a zillion records all in print.’ I’m not leaving - I will continue to make records, because that’s what I do and that’s what I know. People are always saying, ‘On this record...’ or, ‘On this tour...’ But there is no tour or record - it’s all one big giant tour, and it’s all one big giant record. I don’t differentiate - it’s all just being a musician or a songwriter.

SP: Have there nonetheless been changes, pre-Pixies reunion and after? You were loading your own gear beforehand, right? And last night you sold out Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
BF: No, no, no. Last night went well and so did a couple of other places, but last year I went on tour in the States and, although I got paid a lot of money compared to what I was getting before the Pixies reunion, the shows didn’t go. The promoters gambled and didn’t win: the places were too big and they were paying me too much money. Before that I did acoustic shows in much smaller markets and all those shows went great. The reunion has put some money in my pocket but it’s not like it’s made Frank Black a commercial success. People don’t know Frank Black, they know me as the guy from the Pixies. But, yeah, I had three roadies for this tour, but I’m still very close to carrying my own amp. It would have been a more lucrative tour if I had but sometimes you go, ‘Fuck it, I’m 42-years-old, I don’t give a shit, I’m flying business class.’

SP: So no grand expectations for Bluefinger?
BF: There are always the high hopes, but my high hopes are always tainted with the experience of reality. And now, of course, there’s this whole thing of, ‘The record business is down! Live gigs are up, but records are down!’ Great, so now I can sell even fewer records and still struggle in the clubs. For me the business is there, but it’s very selective - it’s my London show, my Paris show, my New York show. I’m not complaining, but it’s not like I can just go out and have thousands of people turn up every night. I don’t know what I’m gonna do next, but I know I can’t just keep going out on the road the whole time. I mean, I’ll still go out on the road, but I’ve got to do something different too - write a theatre production of something.