by Martin Popoff
Was this an easy or hard album to make?
"They're always hard to make. You never have enough time or enough money and you're always on a limited budget. I think it's the same for every band. I think we work best like that though. When you're under a little bit of pressure, that's when you get to be most creative. Of the songs which we wrote and rehearsed in kind of a live rehearsal situation, they felt like they were going to be very easy to record, but when we went into the studio to actually do them, the musical side of the band realized that they had actually written a few nightmares, with all the harmony guitars and all the different parts in there. We were very conscious that we wanted to do songs that worked well live with two guitars, drums, bass, violin. But even so, when you're in the studio and you're trying to double track everything and get the kind of effect you're looking for, it turned into a bit of a bigger job than we thought. It took three weeks to record, which we did in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the Northeast of England, nearly in Scotland that is, a cold and windy place on the North Sea. It's quite a small studio, but it's the kind of place we wanted to work. It's run by a guy named Fred Purser from Tygers Of Pan Tang; he actually played a couple of licks on the album. He's a very, very nice man indeed; I'd never met him before. Good engineer and he worked well with our guitarist/producer Kevin (Ridley) in the studio and he's a very nice man and he's got a very nice little studio in his house actually. You look at from the front and it looks like a natural British house and you go in and itŐs huge. But no, it was fun, good fun recording that. And we mixed it at a place called Mole Studios in Bath, a very scenic, tourist-y place, very nice, quaint, typically British and they have a really good studio there. And we mixed for 11 or 12 days there."
That isn't anything to do with Peter Gabriel's studio outside of Bath, is it? "No it's not, as far as I know. I know lot of famous people have recorded there though, but not in the rock side of things, but people like Portishead, Marillion. It's a very good studio, top class."
Have you ever located or searched out Peter Gabriel's compound out there? "No, we haven't. I don't think it's anything we can afford. We probably couldn't even afford tea at that place (laughs). They probably wouldn't even open the door. If we knocked on his door, he'd probably give us a pound coin each, and say go way."
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