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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1308 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on January 14, 2003 and belongs in the interviews category. The previous post was , and the next post is .

The Delgados

Alun Wood­ward and Stew­art Hen­der­son of The Del­ga­dos talk about their new album, Hate, that Mer­cury Prize nom­i­na­tion and being Scottish.

So your new album, ‘Hate,’ is it a reac­tion against hip­pies and the whole all you need is love ethic?

Alun Wood­ward: The song, or the album in general?

Both, I sup­pose. Either way, it’s quite a bleak album.

Alun: I think it is. I think you can per­cieve the record as being quite bleak, because I think it does focus on, things like hate, fear and anx­i­ety, cer­tainly lyri­cally. But it’s kind of like…you know that sit­u­a­tion where, if you look at the people around you, and you think, ‘fuck, this is bril­liant, this is a great place, everything’s great’ and you shout it so much, until your fuck­ing eyes bleed, even though it’s a bril­liant place? And then the slight­est little thing comes along and it totally fucks you and knocks you off bal­ance? To be honest, I find the record pos­i­tive in that respect. It does focus on a lot of neg­a­tiv­ity, but I think once you actu­ally listen, there are songs which say, ‘I’m an alright guy, but I’m a bit of a dick­head, right, and I can see that in myself, there­fore when I go out on the town with you, and I know that you’re a bit of a dick­head, I can accept it’. I think there’s a lot of humil­ity in the record.

So it’s about accept­ing that every­one comes with their own flaws?

Alun: Yeah, and I think there’s a real lack of that, in gen­eral. There’s a lack of under­stand­ing that every­body has flaws, and a lack of accep­tance of your own flaws, and I think you have to accept that.

Do you think, then, that people too read­ily assume that everything’s fine?

Alun: Yes. absolutely. I think if they didn’t they would fuck­ing die.

People tend to have a Pan­gloss­ian notion that every­thing will be all right; that this is the best of all pos­si­ble worlds.

Alun: Yeah. And there are so many sit­u­a­tions where, if you actu­ally sat down and thought about what it was you were involved in, and the place that you lived, it would be actu­ally unbear­able for most people to deal with.

You said that the small­est thing can knock you off track. Was there some­thing that knocked The Del­ga­dos off track?

Alun: I think we’ve always been fairly fatal­is­tic about things. I think it’s just that per­haps we’re more obvi­ous with it now. I’m not saying that we’re always grim or any­thing, I just think there’s some­thing very Old Kirk about us.

That Scot­tish cyn­i­cism? Or is it maybe pessimism?

Alun: Per­haps, yes, but I don’t know. I still see it as being an opti­mistic record.

Stew­art, what’s your take? Is it an opti­mistic record?

Stew­art Hen­der­son: I agree entirely with what Alun says. You could argue that the thing about our records - all of them, to be honest - is that there seems to be a per­verse enjoy­ment to be gained in explor­ing the neg­a­tive aspects, or the darker areas, of life.

One of those happy when you’re sad situations?

Stew­art: A bit. But also, the whole ‘joy of life’ path has been well trod­den, musi­cally, and I think, from my point of view, the thing that I get most out of the stuff that we do is the com­bi­na­tion of the music and the lyrics. I think we’ve got our­selves a good sit­u­a­tion where we can explore both of them, with­out ever becom­ing too sick­en­ing or maudlin. It’s a great luxury, as far as I’m con­cerned, for Alun, or Emma for that matter, to explore some of the things they do in the lyrics and not have it too over­whelm­ingly depress­ing to people, in the sense that you can jux­ta­pose the dark lyrics, which are a purely con­scious thing, with the just unadul­ter­ated beauty of the music, in places. I think, for me, the con­trast between the music and the lyrics on this album sums up the tone of the record, and I think, yes, admit­tedly, the album’s called ‘Hate’, and there are songs like All You Need Is Hate, and there are obvi­ous ref­er­ences to point you in one par­tic­u­lar direc­tion, but I think that once you listen to the record and you hear the lyrics and you get to live with the album a bit, you realise that the whole album is an explo­ration of…y’know, the force and the dark side. [Hen­der­son laughs] Whether the lighter side of things is expressed through the lyrics or the music is irrel­e­vant; the two of them are explored togther.

That’s some­thing that plenty of bands have: an air of melan­choly that some­how man­ages to be joyous too…

Stew­art: I just find it makes for a far more sat­is­fy­ing record, in the sense that I can listen to our record and I can appre­ci­ate it on a number of dif­fer­ent levels. Ide­ally, when you get a Del­ga­dos album, you should be able to put the head­phones on and just lose your­self in the record for how­ever long it lasts. 45 min­utes or what­ever. It’s great. I just think that this album in par­tic­u­lar is the most realised, in my opin­ion, of all the records we’ve done, in that I think the music is a real, it’s a sound­track to the sto­ries in the lyrics. I just find it an accom­plished piece of work. [laughs] If I’m allowed to say that.

Alun, The Delgados’ lyrics have always seemed quite personal.

Alun: Yeah…[pause]…They’ve always been per­sonal, although I think per­haps in the past they were more dis­guised; there were very very vague ref­er­ences. I don’t know, it’s not really been a con­scious thing, but as time’s gone on, I increas­ingly can’t be arsed with hiding what I’m trying to say. If I think something’s a cer­tain way then it’s best just to talk about it like that, and make it as straight­for­ward as pos­si­ble. It’s good for us, and I think it’s better for whoever’s lis­ten­ing to us. The thing is, you’re trying to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing by writ­ing songs, and I don’t want other people lis­ten­ing to the records to come away won­der­ing what the fuck it’s all about. I’d like them to be able to listen to it and say ‘Oh, right. What a grim bastard’ That’s fine.

You don’t worry about exops­ing too much of yourself?

Alun: No, I don’t. There are things that I would always keep away from, because obvi­ously you’ve got to pro­tect cer­tain parts of you and the people around you. But pretty much, if you’re my friend or you live with me, you’ve got to accept the fact that I’m in a band, and I’m a fairly honest person. And I can’t, y’know…I just write songs about what I want to write about, and I can’t really offer expla­na­tions to people about that; they’ve kinda got to accept it.

So is it a case of all art tends towards autobiography?

Alun: For us?

In gen­eral, I sup­pose, but with you as well.

Alun: Well yeah, in that it’s hard to write with any con­fi­dence about things you’ve not expe­ri­enced, or at least I find that. Take a book like ‘Down And Out In Paris And London’. Yeah, that’s a great book, but c’mon, [Orwell] could fuck off home any time he wanted and someone’s gonna give him a job teach­ing at a school. There’s a degree of insin­cer­ity to it, and it’s a good book, but if you read some­thing by, I don’t know, Jean Genet, you realise that he was actu­ally living on the docks, as a pros­ti­tute, and the way out for him was prison, that’s the only place he was going. And I think it’s the same with our music; the stuff that we’re writ­ing about is the stuff that we’ve expe­ri­enced, there­fore if someone’s telling you how low you can go, you know that it’s because they’ve been there.

When it came to record­ing Hate, was it a con­scious thing that it, son­i­cally at least, had a lot in common with The Great Eastern?

Stew­art: I think that it’s strange, because there’s almost a sup­po­si­tion in some cases that every record, for cer­tain bands, has to incor­po­rate some kind of tan­gen­tial shift every time they make a record. It’s like ‘Okay, you’ve done The Great East­ern, and so that’s enough of the strings’n’orchestra schtick,’ so we’ll move on to some­thing else. And I believe that there were things with The Great East­ern that I look back on, and though I felt at the time it was the best, and it was the best record we could have made at that time, I did feel that there were things we hadn’t explored or things that we could have done better, or in a more inter­est­ing way. I think that The Great East­ern was an enjoy­able record to have realised at the end of the day, but I think with this record, we learned a lot from that album, and we took that into this record, and this was a much more con­fi­dent record to make. I mean, cer­tainly from my point of view, I had no inten­tion when we were making this record to strip it back, to have an acoustic feel, I really do think that the band should be very big sound­ing, and we would take what we learnt on The Great East­ern and apply it to this record and see how we could take it fur­ther. With that in mind, it was a con­scious thing; I don’t accept the crit­i­cism - and I’m not saying for a second that you’re lev­el­ling it at us - that people say, ‘Oh, you had big orches­tras in on the last album, why have you got it in this one?’ Well, why the fuck shouldn’t we? we hit our cre­ative stride with The Great East­ern, and we’ve taken it for­ward with this record, and I think that the song­writ­ing has devel­oped and improved, the use of the instru­ments and the orches­tra­tion and so on are far more accom­plished than what was on The Great East­ern, so I would say that this album is a con­sid­er­able step for­ward; the fact that we still have strings and brass or what­ever doesn’t make it any less of a pro­gres­sion in my opinion.

And was it a fairly easy album to record?

Alun: It was easier than The Great East­ern, but prob­a­bly a lot of that was to do with con­fi­dence; if you’re feel­ing fairly con­fi­dent as indi­vid­u­als, as a group, then things do come along easier to you. And I think that The Great East­ern really bol­stered our self belief, con­vinced us what we could achieve, so in that respect it was easier - hap­pier - to record. I think The Great East­ern was one of these things that we prob­a­bly pushed too hard at, for a cer­tain period of time, and by the end of it, you know, you end up going off in direc­tions and you’re not even sure why you’re doing it, and that’s why, in that respect, some­one like Dave coming along to mix this record was a good idea.

Is that why you got Dave Fried­mann to mix it? To get some­one in who has a bit of dis­tance from the record­ings, in the same way you did with The Great Eastern?

Alun: Dave was really impor­tant to The Great East­ern, because we had just burned out in a way. I think Dave made an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to Hate, but it was nowhere near the one he made to The Great East­ern. With The Great East­ern the songs came back and a lot of them were so dif­fer­ent to how we had tried to envis­age them when the songs went away. With Hate, we gave Dave so much more, it was a much easier job and it was a lot clearer for him.

Stew­art: I think a lot of that was down to Tony Doogan [the band’s engineer].

You’ve worked with him for quite a while, haven’t you?

Stew­art: Yes, since ‘Peloton’. And with this album there was a real sense of pur­pose, and a really refresh­ing sense of excite­ment going into this record. As Alun said, we had much more con­fi­dence and belief, after all The Great East­ern stuff and all the stuff that hap­pened with that record. I think the 4 or us, and Tony, the 5 of us as a unit, kind of set about making this record in a much more focused way. Tony was unbe­lie­ve­able. Because this might have been an easier record to record, but tech­ni­cally, it’s still a dif­fi­cult record to put together; there’s a lot of stuff on it, but Tony just… You don’t really mind how rough the sea is if you’ve got a good cap­tain, if you see what I mean. You can go to the bar and get drunk whilst he steers the ship through the rocks, and that’s what he did with this record; he was unbe­liev­ably com­posed and skilled. I mean record­ing choirs for God’s sake, I’d have hid in the toilet rather than do that myself.

Do you think anything’s changed with respect to the fact that this time round, the record’s coming out on Mantra rather than Chemikal Under­ground ? Also, has run­ning Chemikal Unde­ground changed the way you worked as a band?

Alun: Well, the Chemikal Under­ground influ­ence on a record like ‘Peloton’ was huge, because when we should have been in the studio a lot of the time, we would be in the office. But the past three years or so, it’s not to say everybody’s hands off with the label, because that’s not the case, but the reason we pay people to work at Chemikal Under­ground is not so we can go out on a Sat­ur­day night, it’s cause they’re good at their job, that’s the impor­tant thing. The impor­tant thing with Chemikal Under­ground with this record was that it wasn’t going to fina­cially screw the label. And if Chemikal Under­ground was going to release this we would have had to drop Arab Strap and Aere­ogramme because we wouldn’t have the money to record this, because it was expen­sive. Also, The Del­ga­dos have always been licensed to Mantra out­side the UK anyway, so what hap­pens is, a lot of people will look at it and say we’ve signed to some­one else, but the fact is we’ve always been with that label, so we’ve lost one ter­ri­tory. To be frank, it’s fuck­ing great; there’s some­one else phon­ing people up telling them how great my record is because frankly it’s embar­rass­ing, when you’re trying to pro­mote your own record. You’re doing your mar­ket­ing plan and you’re think­ing ‘Am I spend­ing too much on this record ‘cause it’s mine or am I spend­ing not enough on this because it’s mine?” Bugger it, get some­one else to do it.

Is it, again, a case of being a bit too close to what you’re doing to be ratio­nal about it?

Alun: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s got its pos­i­tives as well, because when you’re doing your own record you know that everything’s being cov­ered; you’re sit­ting on top of it all the time. That’s one of the prob­lems I find being on a dif­fer­ent label; there’s still that ten­dency in us to want to know every single detail of what’s hap­pen­ing. There’s a degree of trust, and people will get our trust when the record’s done absolutely per­fectly and nothing’s missed, but we’re obsessed by our record, as every band should be.

Stew­art: It’s human nature, you know what I mean? It’s like, moving the album to Mantra in the UK, for that read abdi­cat­ing a lot of the respon­si­bil­i­ties that you would nor­mally have your­self. It solves a lot of prob­lems and eases some of your con­cerns, but it cre­ates a whole dif­fer­ent raft of anx­i­eties that you wouldn’t have had nor­mally. There’s a bal­ance, an action and reac­tion; you give them the record and you need to feel that there is some­one on the case and work­ing it, and you’re anx­ious that everything’s get­ting done the way that you would like it to be done.

Was there ever a point in the past that The Del­ga­dos as a band were suf­fer­ing because you were spend­ing too much time run­ning the label?

Stew­art: I don’t think that we suf­fered, aside from maybe having slightly more pro­tracted peri­ods of time before we could actu­ally go and record. In that respect, yes, we prob­a­bly did. We would have been a little bit more pro­lific if we didn’t have the label to run. But I think, on the whole - we could maybe look at The Great East­ern actu­ally as exam­ple - you could say that that was - pos­si­bly, you can never tell for sure - but pos­si­bly that record might have suf­fered some­what because it was on Chemikal Under­ground. Because there weren’t the finan­cial reserves in place to drive that album harder once we got the Mer­cury nom­i­na­tion. But you’re all wrapped up in what ifs and maybes and it’s dif­fi­cult to pre­dict for sure. You could look back and say - it’s a ter­ri­ble word to use - we could have exploited that album a bit better if we had a little bit more money to drive it through.

What was your reac­tion when you heard that you’d been nom­i­nated for the Mercury?

Stew­art: We just went to the pub, to be honest. It was a strange morn­ing. You hear good news in much the same way that you hear bad news, it drips through. It’s like, if some­thing really ter­ri­ble hap­pens in the news, say when the twin towers were hit, I don’t know if you can remem­ber exactly about the very first hint that you’d heard some­thing had hap­pened, a plane’s crashed in New York or there’s been an acci­dent, you don’t quite know what it is, but it drip feeds to you through a period of ten min­utes, that’s what it’s like. One morn­ing I came in, got a phone call from this guy we know who works down in London, and he said “I’ve heard a rumour that you guys might be on the short­list for the Mercury” and just as he said that every single one of the 4 or 5 phones in the office started ring­ing simul­ta­ne­oulsy, which never hap­pens. And that was it for the whole morn­ing, just phones ring­ing, people saying “Naw, I don’t think you are” and others saying “no, you are”. It was mental, we just closed up the office and went to the pub and got pissed.

Was it frus­trat­ing, not having the cash to exploit the Mer­cury nomination?

Stew­art: The Mer­cury thing’s a strange one; you have to be care­ful how you talk about some­thing like that. It was a great thing which achieved a lot for us, and in some cir­cles it put us in a con­text that we hadn’t been in before. It kind of ele­vated the status of the band in some people’s minds, which was a good thing, but y’know, there were def­i­nite things that I found frus­trat­ing about the Mer­cury. Not that we didn’t win it, which was ulti­mately extremely frus­trat­ing, but get­ting nom­i­nated for a Mer­cury puts things into sharp focus, in that you find out who your sup­port­ers are and who they aren’t. I felt that - and this is why I’m ner­vous about talk­ing about it, because it sounds bitter, and I really don’t want to convey that in this inter­view, because we’ve moved on since then, and we’ve got better things to talk about - I was frus­trated in some respects about the lack of supp­port we got in cer­tain areas, par­tic­u­larly up here. I would say, present com­pany excepted, in the sense that all the broad­sheets up here unan­i­mously sup­ported us for years, I just found that, as soon as we got nom­i­nated, we were imme­di­ately ghet­tosied as some rank indie out­siders. In the sense that we got a pat on the head, and we should just be pleased that we got nom­i­nated, and should never have the audac­ity to expect that we would maybe be in the run­ning to win it. It was almost like “oh, that’s nice” and I found that deeply irritating.

A kind of, “Well done, now toddle back off to the 13th note”?

Stew­art: Yeah. I found that deeply, deeply irri­tat­ing. Erm, but you did ask.

I sup­pose I did. But I was just think­ing, is it a Scot­tish thing, that some­body gets suc­cess­ful and other people imme­di­ately bris­tle against it, either because they’re pes­simistic or they’re not keen on Scot­tish people actu­ally suc­ceed­ing? It’s like all those people who com­plain about their little favourite indie band sud­denly becom­ing suc­cess­ful. And then they say either “I liked them first” or “I never really liked them anyway”

Stew­art: There’s a really good exam­ple of this, and it’ll prob­a­bly go down well with the Sunday Herald, because they despise the Daily Record, and why shouldn’t they, but it was shock­ing to me that after the Mer­cury nom­i­na­tions, the Daily Record ran a fea­ture on Heli­copter Girl, who was some lassie who was appar­ently born in Dundee. They did a huge fea­ture on Cold­play because the bass player’s granny was Scot­tish, and they never did a single thing about us. It was like, “Scottish nom­i­nee, Heli­copter Girl” to be honest, it was like they didn’t even fuck­ing know who we are.

Alun: It’s strange, for a paper that sees itself as being pecu­liarly Scottish…

Stew­art: “Real Scots do read the record,” after all.

Alun: …and they absolutely suckle at the teat of the London media, they’re com­plete whores.

Stew­art: I tell you though, if I found it irri­tat­ing, that’s noth­ing com­pared to the fury my mother felt. A huge double page spread about the bass player from Cold­play - and I have no beef with Cold­play, inci­den­tally - that was more depress­ing for me than any­thing. That’s prob­a­bly why, if we have any regrets about why we never sold more copies of The Great East­ern, or never made the most out of the Mer­cury nom­i­na­tion, it was because of fea­tures like that, and because people chose, for other rea­sons, to ignore who we were or what were doing.

Last ques­tion about this before we move on. Was that period, after the Mer­cury nom­i­na­tion, your big shot at the main­stream, your chance for far bigger com­mer­i­cal suc­cess which didn’t really happen?

Alun: I don’t know, because I don’t know if there’s that much com­mer­cial music on the record. It’s dif­fi­cult; com­mer­cial suc­cess that we may or may not have is kind of beyond our con­trol. If you listen to com­mer­cial radio, or Radio One, that’s where you’re going to sell the records. You’re not really going to sell records by good reviews in mag­a­zines. To a cer­tain degree you can, you can get to a cer­tain level, but ulti­mately you really need radio, and unless there’s a sea change in the kind of records people like and they’re going to start pro­mot­ing the Del­ga­dos instead of…

S Club 7?

Alun: Exactly

I sup­pose that’s the thing. Even if you did put S Club 7’s pro­mo­tional budget behind a band, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to succeed.

Alun: You absolutely have to gen­er­ate sup­port from all dif­fer­ent sides of the media. And I think what The Great East­ern did, that period just after the Mer­cury nom­i­na­tion, I don’t think it’s the case that it was our shot at com­mer­cial suc­cess; I think it was just another stage in the grad­ual accep­tance of us by other people. We’d always done really well in inde­pen­dent cir­cles, that was always alright, but it’s been a grad­ual thing for us; as time’s gone on, we’ve been accepted by people in radio, and .

The Del­ga­dos have been going since 93/94. How much has the rela­tion­ship between the 4 band mem­bers changed since then?

Alun: There’s prob­a­bly dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ships that have changed in dif­fer­ent ways, from the start until now. But that’s inevitable with any four people who live in each others’ pock­ets for large peri­ods of time. There are going to be ten­sions, there are going to be flaws. The other side of that is when you’re stand­ing on stage in front of 20,000 French people, all going fuck­ing mental, because you’re play­ing songs. That’s some­thing else we share, a totally dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship. So yes, the rela­tion­ships aren’t static; they con­stantly change, they change for the better in some respects and yes, def­i­nitely change for the worse in others, of course they have: that’s inevitable.

Do you think that run­ning Chemikal Under­ground is part of that? I mean, anyone run­ning a busi­ness with friends is going to find it quite stressful.

Alun: Yeah, I think so. I mean it’s always going to be the case that any­thing that you believe in, you believe in a pas­sion­ate way, and issues are going to arise, there are going to be ten­sions. And yes, Chemikal Under­ground has con­tributed, but if we had been run­ning a restau­rant or some­thing it would be the same. There are loads of exam­ples, you read about broth­ers who set up family run restau­rants and they end up trying to stab each other in the kitchen late at night. It’s just human nature.

Stew­art, you’re nod­ding as if you know exactly what he’s talk­ing about.

Stew­art: I empathise com­pletely. Alun and I have been friends since pri­mary school, since we were 9. I think there are, with­out get­ting too maudlin about it, there are sad­den­ing ele­ments of what has hap­pened, when you go through the Chemikal Under­ground thing or The Del­ga­dos thing, it’s not…you lose the kind of reck­less cam­er­aderie of just having a mate. I can’t remem­ber, apart from when we were on tour, the last time that say, Alun and I, or Paul and I, or Emma and I, or all of us for that matter, just said to each other “What’re you doing tomor­row night? You fancy going to the pub?” We just don’t do that any­more. We all have other friends that we would rather do that with, and that’s sad in some respects, but it’s bal­anced by a couple of things. One, that whole thing is reju­ve­nated when we go on the road, and I think there’s an ele­ment with us - and this is where Chemikal Under­ground comes in - because we’ve got the toil of run­ning a busi­ness together, I don’t think that there are many bands who have been going as long as we have that hit the road with such aban­don and hilar­ity as we do. When we go on tour, it is your wee happy bus kind of thing. And the other thing about it is, we have a dif­fer­ent type of friend­ship now. I mean, when we argue we argue more as brother and sister than as friends do. We were doing this inter­view in New York a couple of years ago and Alun came up with this anal­ogy, and I think it’s per­fect: if you’re brother and sister, the vast major­ity of time might be spent argu­ing and being at each others’ throats, but every now and then, you know, there’s always a christ­mas morn­ing where it’s dif­fer­ent. And that’s exactly what it’s like for us. Because much as we don’t go out and socialise, we’re prob­a­bly four of the firmest friends that we could be. And it changes your friend­ship, but it forges it in a dif­fer­ent way. It’s a good thing.

I sup­pose part of it is get­ting older as well. Some of you are mar­ried, or have kids; regard­less of whether you’re in a band or not, your rela­tion­ships would change anyway.

Stew­art: Yeah. I mean in that respect we’ve been lucky, because there really aren’t that many people I was at school with who I would care to know now.

Alun: I’ve actu­ally for­got­ten. I was having a con­ver­sa­tion about people I went to high school with, and it wasn’t that long ago, but I actu­ally can’t remem­ber, there’s only a few.

Stew­art: There are a couple of excep­tions, in case any of them are read­ing this fea­ture, but gen­er­ally, my two clos­est and firmest friends at school were Paul and Alun. And in that respect, it’s really for­tu­nate. We’re 30 now and we’re still close, and we’re work­ing together. There are maybe other things that will bring an end to The Del­ga­dos, but the one thing I don’t believe will end the band is one person turn­ing into a prima donna, and flounc­ing out of the band or what­ever. The four of us are fairly tight as far as that’s con­cerned. There may be other things that’ll tear us apart, but I don’t think it’ll be that.

So where do you see the Del­ga­dos being in a few years time?

Alun: I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t want to know, and I don’t want to think about it. I think it’s best not to be too con­trived about what you’re trying to do; to plan ahead and say that the next record’s going to be this kind of a record, because to be honest with you we’ve got really no idea where we’ll be and I think it’s best just to keep it that way. I’m ner­vous about think­ing about things like that too much, because you end up tying your­self, and you talk your­self into a hole, really. You should just leave it as free as possible.

When you set Chemikal Under­ground up, your first release was your own first single, but did you def­i­nitely want to sign other bands?

Alun: It was estab­lished in order to be a label. There were a lot of labels around at the time which were set up [by bands] just to release their own records, maybe get signed by some­one else, and that’s a fair enough thing for a band to do. We never wanted that, and that’s why, delib­er­ately, our second single was on some­one else’s label; because we had money from our first single to work with another band in Glas­gow, and it was always intended to be that way.

Posted at 3pm on 14/01/03 by Leon McDermott to the interviews category.
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