ML: I have very old equipment. It’s simpler and easier to work on. A lot of things today sort of go off lead after a while and people will say, "Oh, we’ll just throw that out and get a new one." The amplifier that I have is a beauty, an old Silvertone that packs a massive punch. And it’s very simple, all hand-wired, so if something goes wrong it’s fairly easy to pinpoint the problem. I like things that are stripped-down and make sense. You look at these computerized things today and say, "I could never work on that." There are some very good synthesizers out there today, but they all look so loaded with different options. I just like the simple old things that when they break down aren’t impossible to fix.

I moved to the States when I was sixteen. My father, my mother, two sisters and I moved to Colorado in 1984. My father was an electronic engineer working in Germany at the time for Digital Equipment and requested a transfer to Colorado Springs. I’d been kicked out of the boarding school I was going to in Germany because I wasn’t doing very well and wound up back in England going to a comprehensive school, the Montgomery El Alamein Boys School in Winchester. It was amazing. You walked into the foyer of the school and there were portraits of both Montgomery and Rommel (laughs).

My favourite bands growing up were anywhere from Madness to E.L.O.

Oh, yeah! I actually saw E.L.O. in 1982 at the Munich Olympia Stadium for the Time album - it had the single "Hold On Tight." I was a fanatic. I had all their records. I still have all their records and still listen to them. Production-wise, they’re phenomenal recordings. You can hear everything from Doo Wop to the Beatles. Jeff Lynne has a great ear for arrangement. I love all that stuff. I think he was an absolute mastermind of pop music.

Oh, I love Grandaddy. Yeah, I can hear that on one of those Grandaddy songs, (sings) "Gotta get outta here." That’s so E.L.O. The only thing that was sort of dismaying about E.L.O. to me when I got older and I started to appreciate lyrical content was that it was definitely lacking in that band. But Grandaddy, no way! They’re awesome. They have an awful lot of substance.

I’d moved to Denver and was going to school at the Institute Of Art, where I first met Robert. He’d just recently moved there, too. I met him through a high school pal of mine who was also an XTC fan. Robert had boasted in this local article that not only was his band, the Apples - this was before they added the "In Stereo" bit - the greatest pop band in the world, but all the bands on the Elephant 6 label were the greatest pop bands in the world. My friend Joe bumped into (Apples drummer) Hilarie Sidney working in a record shop and she told him to come on down and check them out. So I went down and met Robert. He was immediately very amiable.

I was in a band at the time called the Henrys. I’ve been in a ton of bands - a death-rock band. I was even a drummer for a heavy-metal band called Jokers Wild (laughs). But I didn’t have long hair. I had a crew-cut and a four-piece Gretsch drum set. I was the odd man out. The Henrys was my band, a three-piece and very much XTC-inspired. "Golden Street" was one song that we played. We did two recordings, but nothing I would share with anybody. We were together for at least a couple of years. Then I got into this louder band called Ink, a noisy, grungey kind of band. Our bass player was into Les Claypool (laughs). Two different worlds! I was still writing pop songs and these guys didn’t want to do that.

All that time Robert was saying, "Hey, we should record those songs you wrote with the Henrys." So when Ink broke up and I didn’t have anything, he said, "Let’s do a single." We actually started the band together. I came up with the name. Robert played the bass and lead guitar and Hilarie played the drums. That’s how we got it started, more of a project than a band at first. I knew I wanted to write some fairly solid pop songs, do a single and get ’em out. Then Rebecca (Cole) became the drummer. We’ve been together seven years now and married for five years.

Oh, we got that all the time. I mean, we did. We’re being compared less and less lately. We got so tired of it. For a very long time we couldn’t have a review without it. It seemed like there were only three bands that counted and the rest were forgotten. People would say stupid shit like we were the "second generation." I mean, we were an album behind, but I resented that "second-generation" stuff. All of us have been involved in this kind of music for a long time. It’s not old enough to have a second generation. But it’s been the story of this band from the get-go. We’ve either been compared to those bands or our influences. But everybody comes from somewhere. Buddy Holly came from a various number of influences. Nothing just pops out of nowhere.

Somebody told me recently he thought of us as a throwback. And I can see it’s very easy to say that. But a lot of bands today are borrowing from other sources. The newest new craze these days is New Wave (laughs). But I’m 33 and I remember it pretty damn well, and I have to say I love a lot of that synthy pop stuff. Are there any original New Wave bands out there? Well, Stereolab draws from such obscure influences maybe you could say they’re original.

I’m not just trying to wriggle out, but I don’t see it, man. I only know a certain way of singing and writing. I could try and affect something, I guess. But this seems a little more natural. I enjoyed and had a very difficult time making that record. I got a lot out of it. I learned an awful lot. I wanted to learn essentially how to write songs other than two-minute pop songs. And we’re still learning. I’m working on ideas now for a new album and I feel really refreshed--and a little scared, too. Can we keep it fresh with new ideas? But it keeps continuing to grow. We will try anything. We’re getting a lot out of making music right now, which is beautiful. For the first time we’re starting to feel comfortable with our live set. When you start out you’re really self-conscious, and that’s a healthy thing. But I feel a little more confident about the things we’re doing.

I’m fairly critical of my work. If there’s a weakling (song) we try to weed it out. I am a perfectionist, but there’s also an alarm that goes off in me a lot of the time. To a certain extent, I’d tend to ignore it with this last record. There are a few reasons for it. For one, I was incredibly nervous about having full production duties. Robert wasn’t there at all. The first album he was very much in control and I liked that when he said, "Hey, look, you’ve gotta trust me. Let’s make this record." I more or less just stood back and it was a very good way of working together. Obviously, it was very open. It was a wonderful experience making that album, at the same time doing a record with someone I highly respected but doing it the way I wanted to do it. With my other bands the engineer wouldn’t even let you go near the board. But Robert takes great pleasure in finding sounds. He’ll spend all day getting the sound he’s looking for and he’ll fucking get it.

Yep. I’ve listened to that record quite a bit lately and it really struck me. I’d never really listened to it before that closely. To me, it was the kind of concept record that was perfectly not a concept record. It was loosely affiliated bunch of songs strung together to make some sort of a concept. The songs stood out on their own. I don’t think of it as anything. Like Tommy. "Some Mother’s Son," Yes Sir, No Sir" go deeper than any song on Tommy. Two years ago I went back to England and stayed with my grandmother who’s in her early 90s. She’s had the same neighbours for 40 years. It was that time of the year and all of that clicked. All of those stories on that record are true. "Arthur, the world’s gonna pass you by." I have a member of my family who fits that description exactly. I suppose you could listen to Arthur in the middle of the Grand Canyon and not get the same thing, but I had it all in front of me.

Well, I’d been a pop fan for years. I would sing along in the car, sang along to stuff on headphones. It was just wanting to sing along to stuff all the time. Wanted to do it since day one. I can tell you the first time I was absolutely blown away by pop music. It was 1977 and it was (E.L.O. album) Out Of The Blue. I think I saw "Mr. Blue Sky" on Top Of The Pops and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I was nine at the time. I can’t think of anything else that really gets me going. I paint - I went to school for that - but I haven’t done that in a while.

No, because I enjoyed that too. E.L.O. was on the radio the same time as Elvis Costello: "Oliver’s Army." No, we listened to anything. On Radio One, as a kid, there was a mishmash of everything on there. For four years, that was the greatest pop in the world. You had not only   great punk but great pop. And I can listen to, and get pleasure out of, both. I’d been in louder, dissonant kind of bands, but I didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted to do what I truly, truly love.

That is our longest song ever, by seven minutes (laughs). That was a lot of fun. It was a crazy, "the world’s a polluted mess" kind of psychedelic pop song. And we’d never gone into that territory before, with a crazy, rock-out jam at the end.

No, he won’t let me hear it. I keep asking him, "Am I going to hear that record at some point?" and he’ll say, "No, no, I don’t think that’s possible." I know it’s gotta be good.

Well, I wouldn’t want to do it behind his back, because he really doesn’t want me to hear it. I really enjoy working with Jeff. Actually, I just did something with him recently. He mastered  a track for this split-single we’re doing with Tobin Sprout of Guided By Voices. Jeff did a great job on the Stephen Malkmus record. He’s quite the engineer.

Well, there’s definitely a scene. And I suppose we’re affiliated with a couple of little corners of the local scene. We hang out with the guys from Magic Marker. Then there’s a band I recorded called the Kissing Book. We play with shows with them. We’re playing a show tonight with Luther Russell. There’s a lot of different cliques in Portland, a great musical town. We’ve been here three years now.

We felt a little stifled there, maybe a little bit in the shadow of the Apples. And we wanted to experience something other than our own scene. There wasn’t really much more going on in Denver other than our own little thing. And I felt that was dangerous. And I also wanted to go to a place that was colder, temperature-wise. Denver in the summer was brutal. We’d played a show out in Portland the year before and had a better response than we got in Denver. And I thought, "Wow, this is a great place." We’d play in Denver once a month and no on would ever come.

No, and you shouldn’t be. We’re making records, godammit. This is the only time I’m going to be able make records. Maybe I won’t ever be able to do it again. Fuck, once you’ve got this chance to make records you’ve got to grab it. I don’t have any hirable skills outside of this. This is the only thing I know how to do. And I’m going to keep doing it as long as what we’re doing isn’t something that’s just cooked-up. It comes straight from the heart. We do it because we absolutely love it.

We do get brushed off by the press mostly. (U.S. magazine) AP recently described us as being just Meet The Beatles, which I don’t agree with at all. But that just hardens our resolve a little more and go wherever we want. I have noticed that music critics are pretty much a buddy club. Whatever’s determined as the cool record of the month is gonna be boosted.

It’s funny, you know I was terrified of the East Coast the first time we went out there. New York and Philadelphia seemed so daunting at the time. A band like us, people would turn their noses up. But now, the East and West Coasts are the two places we look forward to playing most. Every time we play San Francisco we have a great time. There’s a level of enthusiasm that you just don’t see in other towns. We played a great show there recently with the Pernice Brothers.

Without this I wouldn’t say my life would be over. I’m fairly critical of my work. If there’s a weakling (song) we try to weed it out. But if it got to the point where I felt we weren’t doing anything good, I would definitely move on. But, then again, I’d like to get to that point where I’ll never stop doing it completely. At some point I can see where we won’t be putting out records every year. There’s a limit to what you can write about, I suppose. Or maybe there isn’t.