by Taylor Ruckle (@TaylorRuckle)
If interviews are anything to go by, you could have a memorable conversation with Andrew Falkous any day of any week. The frontman of mclusky, Future of the Left, and Christian Fitness has nearly thirty years of noise rock experience, including at least fifteen albums that compel music journalists to use words like “sardonic” and “skronking.” Another phrase you see here and there: “shit-stirring.” In song, on stage, and in the press, Falkous has spent his decades dispensing jaw-slackening one-liners and potshots at other bands. Nowadays, he’s added some hard-won wisdom to the mix–if he weren’t still so playfully cynical and self-deprecating, you could call him an elder statesman of post-hardcore.
With all that in mind, any day would do for a chat, but Post-Trash happened to catch him at a busy three-way intersection of notable happenings. This spring, mclusky completed a rescheduled U.S. tour celebrating the anniversary of their classic sophomore album, Mclusky Do Dallas. Shortly after, the band’s third LP, The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not On Fire, turned twenty years old. And shortly after that, the band signed with Ipecac Recordings for the first album of new material since their breakup in 2005.
The Difference was the second mclusky album recorded at Electrical Audio in Chicago by the late, great Steve Albini. It was also, as Falkous detailed in a 2018 Talkhouse piece, a total fucking nightmare to make. In the recording process, drummer Matthew Harding was fired from the band and replaced by Jack Egglestone, who remains with mclusky to the present. The year after the release, the band called it quits, and bassist Jon Chapple never returned (Damien Sayell now holds the post with aplomb).
mclusky first reformed in 2014, so for those keeping score, their second life has now lasted longer than their first. With over twenty years gone by since The Difference, Falkous has a refreshed outlook on the album, which he shared with Post-Trash over Zoom. He also had plenty to say about returning from tour, his excitement for the next mclusky album, and his deep gratitude for music as his life’s work. He uses one particular word a few times, always with an earnestness you don’t often hear in his lyrics: it’s all “magical.”
photo credit: Keira Anee
TR: At some point this year on Twitter, I saw you say, "It's ridiculous not being on tour." How are you coping with not being on tour right now?
AF: I'm coping okay, because the day-to-day of having a child and engaging with the rudiments of life means you get sucked back into a routine. We're all creatures of habit, but I'm a point of satire, really, in terms of how habitual I am. Part of it is the fact that I'm an older gentleman, and habits are very easy. I would eat probably the same things every day if I could, but it's frowned upon by members of my family. I mean, even the cats look at me a little bit askance, like, "Surely you're not going to eat the same thing again."
But yeah, having not done a tour to anything like that extent for so long–the last tour of any kind of equivalence would have been 2012, when Future of the Left toured The Plot Against Common Sense in the States. I've always been able to settle into the rhythms of touring very well, though that tour was very, very easy because I was sharing a room with my wife [Julia Ruzicka of Future of the Left]. A lot of times on tour, I can pull rank and actually get my own room sometimes, which is very nice. As a band, we tend to prioritize cheap hotel rooms, but own hotel rooms. We're happy to stay in a motel. If you've got some time off, having your own room is just great, even if you're just gonna spend most of the time staring into space.
TR: But it's your space.
AF: Exactly. And frankly, having toured for a lot of time and shared a room with a lot of...well, with a variety of people, and listened to their snores and early morning exercise routines, I'm kind of over that. But I love the rhythm of touring. I love having a purpose in life–I'm not always the best for shaping the timings of my day. Like a lot of people of an artistic inclination, really what I'm more expert in than anything is procrastination. Anybody who's ever picked up a guitar or written a word will surely be able to relate to that.
But it was ridiculous not touring. That tour in particular, even though it wasn't without its dramas–missing luggage, and then an incident at the end of the tour involving a hectic race against the clock trying to get a carnet document back across the Atlantic Ocean to Jack, who's still in Chicago, to save us $2,500. Apart from the–well, it's an admin stress. Mission Impossible 8: Admin Horror. Apart from that, the tour was magical.
TR: I remember seeing you put out some calls for specific pedals.
AF: In Los Angeles, yeah. Everything was missing, and then the day before, my stuff showed up, but Damien's stuff hadn't showed up. We did have to cobble together his rig for that show, which is never ideal. You know, if you're playing a show in front of 500 people–especially 500 people who are excited to see you–you want to feel confident in the tools you're taking on stage with you. But apart from those things, it was magical. Especially when, halfway through, I realized that I wasn't gonna lose any money.
TR: You mentioned the administrative stress, but it must be a load off your mind to know you're not touring at a loss.
AF: It was something I wanted to do so much. I had invested a lot in it. And when the guy who became my agent, Merrick [Jarmulowicz], came along, and frankly got some unbelievable fees for a band of our size–on a couple of occasions, I had to get him to check that he knew who these promoters were booking. "They do realize who we are, don't they?"
But when we had to cancel the tour in November 2022, I lost a lot of money. I don't make a lot of money. I had made a little money from the Do Dallas reissue, but [canceling the tour] crippled me, financially. I wasn't in a position where I could lose money again, really. Without being dramatic about it, like anybody, if you don't have the money and you have liabilities, then you're bankrupt. It's as simple as that. But about halfway through, I was able to relax a little bit and actually enjoy the company of people, enjoy the shows, enjoy the enthusiasm, which was there. I've stopped short of calling it love, because it doesn't always seem appropriate for a band as playfully cynical as we are, but there's this definite sense of people willing us over the finish line. I can't say I've ever truly felt it to that extent before.
TR: I wasn't able to make any of the dates, unfortunately, but we have fans of the band on staff at Post-Trash, so I was getting live updates when somebody in Carrboro, North Carolina broke their leg in the pit.
AF: Well, it turned out they didn't actually break their leg. They...I forget what happened. It's to do with the kneecap. I mean, it's agony, but they were back on their feet, literally and figuratively, in a couple days, without the attendant huge medical bill, so that was good as well. I think, in all our years, that's the first time that's happened. We tend to have quite a polite pit; we police it, to a degree. I'm not particularly comfortable with stage diving in its more violent forms. We're not a band who tend to attract it. You know, jumping off the stage into the willing arms of fellow participants is fine, but diving feet-first into the crowd–we had a bit of that in LA in September 2022, and I must say, I found that mystifying. It's just high-speed, rhythmic assault, isn't it?
TR: Why do you think mclusky doesn't attract that? Is it because people are more tuned into the lyrics? Are they more thoughtful about the music that way?
AF: I have no idea, because there's obviously a huge crossover with bands where that kind of thing would be happening. Maybe it's a combination of all the factors. Maybe nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd; people see a couple people doing it, then they join in.
But yeah, that situation was dealt with very well by the venue. The kid it happened to has guest list for life, obviously. He was pretty strong through the ordeal, 'cause nobody wants that to happen, especially not if you're seeing a band that you really like. You don't wanna bum everyone out and also be the center of attention like that, but that was a really great room. That show hadn't sold as well, maybe, as the promoter expected, so it was put into the smaller room. But the smaller room is vastly superior to the bigger room. It's actually a really great venue, [Cat’s Cradle,] one of the best smaller venues I've ever played. We restarted the show, and nobody died, which is always a bonus.
We're a weird band, because we definitely have a man energy going on. I mean, Damien's the size of seven houses. I don't shy away from a confrontation. But we're not a macho band, or at least we exist a step away from that kind of behavior, you know? It's hard to articulate that, because it's not something we articulate between ourselves. We don't have any kind of manifesto, or we don't talk about how we approach those things. We simply are ourselves.
TR: This year is the 20th anniversary of The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not On Fire. You've written about it length–it's an album that took multiple recording efforts and multiple drummers to complete. I know that you've been spending some time with it recently, so how does it feel to revisit that album twenty years after the fact?
AF: It's really positive, because it just exists as a record for me now, as opposed to a reminder of what was a pretty unhappy time. Because on a personal level, it was a time when things should've been opening up. I mean, it's a little bit reductive and unnecessary sometimes to think of music as a career, especially when you love it, but also, you can't help but think of it that way. Do Dallas hardly came out to balloon parades in the streets, but I think there was an understanding that even a year and a half after it released, it was a slow burn. It wasn't going away. It was a foundation you could build something on.
With The Difference–I mean, it's a weird one, and it's a much more exciting record than my memory tells me it is. A much less painful record. And it's a much more playful record, even though there are elements of darkness to it. I always think of it as a softer, weirder record, but it's not soft at all. It's really spiky. Whereas Do Dallas is just a ball, it's just a romp through, and without doing it deliberately, it doesn't really step outside of a particular paradigm, The Difference tries lots of different things. I think Do Dallas is probably a better record, but The Difference is a record by a better band, if that makes sense.
There are certain things I would do differently. The song "Kkkitchens," the vocal would be clearer. Like on the demo we did, it wouldn't really be very distorted. On "Slay!" again, the vocal would be clearer in the choruses. I was just going through a phase where–I'm sure my family and bandmates can relate, but I get sick of the sound of my own voice. You wish, even just temporarily, you had access to some different words, or you find it embarrassing; the things you always do make you cringe. So at that time, rather than using distortion or overdrive to accentuate what it is I'd do, I was hiding behind it. I just didn't want to hear myself sing, which is a bit of a hindrance for the singer in a rock band.
But having listened to it, it's a really colorful album. It's a gateway to Future of the Left, in a lot of ways. And yeah, it's far poppier than I remember. I think of it as quite a solemn album, but the reality of it is actually much more exciting. I'd give it a solid 8/10.
TR: "Without MSG I Am Nothing" has such an interesting guitar tone. What went into that?
AF: The sound on the record was played on a Lovetone pedal called a Big Cheese, which I actually have an emulator of now, somewhere. I can't find it. Don't tell my wife; she got it for me for one Christmas. It was played on a Big Cheese, but those pedals–they look like they're built like tanks, but they're very expensive. I couldn't have afforded one at the time. I think they probably go for £700 now or something. I can get close to the sound with an Electro-Harmonix POG with the up-octave dialed completely off. So, live, that does.
mclusky isn't generally a very–like Future of the Left, they're not very pedal-y bands. I use pedals, but I find they get your ass in the seat, more than anything. They inspire you to play the guitar. I've bought a couple of guitar pedals recently, something I don't normally do, but after playing around with them for ages, I had so many ideas. Then I went straight into rehearsal and wrote four songs without even any distortion! But it's kind of not the point; it's the inspiration something gives you. A new bit of kit, if you're any way musically inclined, should just make you go, "Oh yeah, music!" And you just start throwing ideas at the wall.
"Without MSG I Am Nothing" is very unusual because the guitar is very effected and the bass is very effected as well, whereas mclusky is a band where it pretty much is what it is. I use a line boost and a tuner, and they are the pedals that I need. I'm conservative with a small "c" in a lot of ways, and there is still a part of me that thinks pedals are cheating.
TR: "She Will Only Bring You Happiness" is a standout in the catalog. You write a lot of poppy songs. Even so, this one is uncharacteristically gentle. What do you remember about writing from that place?
AF: Like a lot of successful songs, when they happen, they just happen straight away. But you're doing the work on those songs before you've written them, you know? Those torturous songs which take you ages, neurons are firing, connections are being made, and then all of a sudden, all the hard work you've done comes out in a really easy three minutes. That's how it works. That's what experience tells me, anyway.
Jon Chapple wrote that guitar line. The vocal occurred instantly. A chorus occurred instantly. And then we found a way to sabotage it with "our old singer is a sex criminal" almost straight away as well. Again, it was one of those songs which was pretty much–I mean, not all the nuances of the lyrics, but the song was pretty much written the second it started.
The title refers to a friend of mine who was a singer in a relatively well-known band in Cardiff at the time. I started going out with somebody, and he said, "You shouldn't go out with her. She will only bring you happiness." And what he meant by that is–well, what I took it to mean is, "What will you write songs about?"
TR: "There's no art to be made there." [laughs]
AF: Yeah, which, to me, is absolute horseshit. It works for some people. I'm loathe to quote him, directly or indirectly, but Jon Chapple was somebody who artistically was much happier when he was working in a 24-hour garage and the band had to scrape by. He felt like a more vital artist, and I understand that. It's whatever works for you. For me, what works is–money doesn't come into it, but having enough money not to have to do a day job. And to really enjoy music, to luxuriate in it, and then to have a fuckin' nap. That's the balance upon which I work. But yeah, "She Will Only Bring You Happiness," it's always stuck with me, that.
TR: You've said at live shows that if people don't like it, they're in good company, because you also hate it. What is it that you hate about this song?
AF: Listen, I've done so much schtick about so many songs in the set, mostly just to disarm. I can't recall ever saying that about "She Will Only Bring You Happiness." The songs I really go for live…I really go for "That Man Will Not Hang" because, frankly, I've got so many songs going around my head, especially now with Christian Fitness, Future of the Left, and mclusky. There's been a few times I've been doing "That Man Will Not Hang," and I've had a beer and a half, and we'll get to the end of the first chorus, and I can't remember the second verse. There's been two or three times I've actually had to go over to see our guitar tech and go, "How does this one go?" Once I've got the first couple lines, it's fine. But also, "That Man Will Not Hang" is quite hard to sing when my throat is already going. There's a lot of emoting going on.
I always criticize "Whoyouknow" 'cause it's toward the end and I need to get some self-deprecating in there. I can't remember saying that about "She Will Only Bring You Happiness," because I do like the song. We call it our Pavement cover, 'cause again, it has that kind of lilt-y…it doesn't sound exactly like Pavement, but it sounds closer to Pavement than most mclusky songs. You'd have to say that. But no, I don't hate the song. Whatever I said, if I have said that live–and I can't rule it out–that was just schtick.
TR: Trumpets are a rarity in your music. How did trumpets find their way into "Forget About Him, I'm Mint"?
AF: Well, they're not exactly a rarity, because Jack was a trumpet player when he was a kid. That's how he came into music. There's trumpet on a Future of the Left song called "Hey Precious," which is one of my favorites. It basically didn't make that Future of the Left album [How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident] because there was a song called "French Lessons" which made it instead. They were quite similar in mood, so, didn't go on, but Jack plays the trumpet. I think there's trumpet on another Future of the Left song.
Anyway, Bob Weston plays trumpet on "Forget About Him, I'm Mint." Bob Weston, you know, from Shellac. It was just, I think, doubling the guitar lead line. He was there in the studio, we asked him if we wanted to play trumpet, and he said yeah, and ten minutes later, he played trumpet. Most of the things which work happen quickly. That can sometimes give you some sort of survivor bias to think everything needs to be done quickly, but plenty of things which don't work also happen quickly. [laughs] But yeah, it gives it a nice, joyful kind of edge. I really like that song.
When we started doing shows in 2019, we played it live, and it was cool, but maybe other songs deserved a shot more. And now we've got newer songs–it's very difficult to fit absolutely everything in.
TR: How much were you around other people in the studio? Who else was around the sessions?
AF: Well, for The Difference, I seem to recall…you know the band Cinerama? David Gedge from The Wedding Present? They turned up for a couple days to do drums, and we had to take two days off, and we went to Studio B in Electrical Audio with a guy called Greg Norman. Two of the songs were done in Studio B, one of which is "Your Children Are Waiting for You to Die" and the other one...I can't remember.
Apart from that, I got a feeling...oh, yeah, what happened is we did an Australian tour and we landed in Chicago on Christmas Eve. So it was recorded basically from Boxing Day onwards. I mean, it's a very festive sounding record. And then my girlfriend at the time, she came over with a couple of friends and we spent New Year together in Chicago. She came to the studio, but I don't remember there being any other people about.
I mean, it was the second time we tried to record it when we actually recorded it. The spirit in the band was tense, but it was happy. Whereas the first time, which I think was seven or eight months beforehand, as I wrote about in an article which is published on the Talkhouse, that was an horrendous experience. I mean, I haven't read that article since I wrote it, but it felt like I worked really hard to be completely alone. But you know, you learn–
TR: I was going to ask you, was it a learning experience in any way, or was it just a total wash?
AF: The first one was a wash. The learning experience is, sometimes you never can tell. At the end of the day now, for us as a band, we don't have a lot of time. I mean, nobody's had a diagnosis. [laughs] I mean we don't have time as in we've all got families. This [June] is going to be a record-breaking month for us because we'll have had three rehearsals for a total of seven hours, and we can only really write in a round, chucking it at each other. In terms of, for example, this album we're doing, one song would've come from a bass line that Damien wrote and sent to me. Everything else happens in the room.
So we have to wing it, to a degree. We're going into the studio at the end of [June] with five or six songs, and I hope they work. But we're not as prepared as, say, we would've been 10, 15 years ago. Sometimes you just wing it, and it works. You're relying, if I may speak so boldly, on your talent and your experience, as opposed to the depth of the material that you necessarily have. You're gonna put yourself in a position where you're hoping the depth's gonna come out of that material, and sometimes it just doesn't work. That's part of that process. Sometimes you fail. It just, on that occasion [with The Difference], wasn't just the material. It was the fact that a band member was completely disinterested. And if you're doing something like recording with Steve Albini, if a band lacks dynamics, that's what's gonna be captured in crystal clarity.
TR: I don't want to belabor it…it's a heavy subject. But given recent news, what do you remember about Electrical Audio, and Steve Albini? What stands out to you now when you think back on that time working with him?
AF: It was just fantastic. And you're working with somebody who–I mean, it's not as dramatic or as Olympics-medal-ceremony as top of the game, but they're taking care of that, and you're taking care of what you do, and everything works perfectly, if you've got the material to bring. And just a very nice man. Very kind. I think he once accused me of going around the world destroying his bad reputation by telling everybody he was nice.
But yeah, it was great. You know, “magical” wouldn’t overstate it. It's a facility set up to record bands, and an under-expressed way to get a band to record great music, unless you literally feed off the tension–and again, I think that's overplayed in a lot of rock bands. That narrative of the tension between the band members or the fact they were stealing shit from each other, which made it happen. For me, it's all about making people feel comfortable, or rather, perhaps finding the psychological states in which they perform the best. For me, certainly, it's being happy. It's having had a beer, having had a stupid laugh with somebody about the most inane stuff, and then the song. The song just happens, and that's it.
When you're in the company of somebody who clearly knows what they're doing as well, it raises your standard, and it makes you want to be…when I say professional, it's not necessarily synonymous with making money, but it's about having standards.
TR: Taking pride in what you do, in other words.
AF: Yeah, taking pride in what you do, and doing it for so long as well that it becomes like an almost unconscious response to everything around you. You don't have to think, "I'm gonna do this properly." You just do it properly, because that is what you do.
It's just great to hear your music sound so good, as well. I mean, there are certain songs on The Difference which, were you to think about it for a while, would've sounded better perhaps recorded with somebody else. A song like "Support Systems" or "Slay!" where, because of the dynamics, and because Steve famously doesn't use compression, those songs get so quiet at times. And for some people maybe who are used to listening to that music in a particular way, that can mean that the music is so extremely dynamic that–I mean, I know of at least two people who have crashed cars listening to "Slay!" because it suddenly comes back in, and they've swerved off the road. That wasn't why the song was written, but it is an example of the fact that music doesn't necessarily usually do dynamics to that–
TR: But in other words, you've had more vehicular incidents than incidents in mosh pits.
AF: Yeah, two to one. I like the way you're thinking, equation-wise. [laughs] But it was great. With Steve, I think everything that can be said has been said, and now it becomes about the other people affected–like, the ripples of a really nice person's death.
TR: Has revisiting old mclusky music influenced your vision for what you want the new record to be?
AF: No. I was really proud and excited listening to a record which was better than I thought, and it made me equally proud and excited about what I'm writing. Sorry, what we're writing. Because it's at least up to standard, so, great. Whenever I used to see that I'd said in an interview that I wanna be in the best band in the world...it doesn't come across very well in print, I don't think. It sounds arrogant, but nonetheless, that's what I want. I want to make the rock record which is unequivocally the best record of the year. That's it.
And I think we're well on the way to it. We'll have done four days of tracking by the end of [June], including the stuff we released last year, and we'll have 11 songs, so we're gonna do some more recording at the end of the summer, and then the record will be done. It needs one particular type of song that it's missing. I'm not gonna tell you what kind of song.
TR: I don't imagine it's an "I don't hear a single" situation.
AF: Ha! Well, the thing is, we do write singles. Or rather, we've got a song called "Cops and Coppers" and a song called "All Focus on the Prime Directive," and both of those songs are single-y in the grand scheme of things. But you know, it's not like they're gonna be played much on the radio or whatever, so why bother? There's a few songs which definitely race towards obscurity, but every album for me needs to be made up of–there's some first-listen songs, and then there's some set fifth-listen songs. The aim always is to get a song which is both of those.
I can't tell you how happy I am to still love making music. Because it hasn't been without its challenges; there was the stuff with my ears a year and a half ago. It's not that I don't want to talk about that, it's just, I don't wanna make it part of my narrative. It was a really traumatic time, but I'm through it now. Or rather, I'm coping with it now, and live, wearing in-ear monitors under ear defenders, it's actually been fine. But yeah, honestly, the record–I don't think anybody's gonna have any problems with the record. A friend of ours, Craig, used to manage the band. He said "All you need to do is come back with an okay record, and people are going to lap it up." And [I said] “You know what? I think you're right, so we need to come back with a great record. That's what we need to do.”
It’s just so much fun. Whenever I’m sat on a plane, flying across an ocean, someone’s effectively paying me to go play shows. There’s still a part of me, even though I think I’m good at this, that can’t believe how lucky I am to be in that position. Sorry, it sounds like an acceptance speech, but it’s genuine. Sometimes a life in music can feel like a curse, certainly financially, but it’s just the most wonderful thing. And apart from the ones who are serial sexual predators, musicians are really nice people. They have a childlike quality, which I genuinely like in people.
TR: Well, this brings me to another question. You had, for a long time, a tradition of–I apologize for using this phrase in my American accent–slagging off other bands in interviews. Have you ever regretted that?
AF: Yeah, nearly every time, is the answer. Again, to a degree, it's schtick. To a degree though, certainly in early mclusky days, we were just universally ignored by people, and it felt like you had all these big budget shysters just pillaging around. One thing I've come to accept as I've got older is that even when music is demonstrably very bad, it can still provide magic to its creators and to people. I mean, I can still pull it apart if required, and hopefully be funny doing it, as well.
There are some bands and their worldviews that I can't abide. I feel very relieved that The Smiths and/or Morrissey never appealed to me in any way. Just not my kind of thing, so when he turned out to be the king of penis island–although the signs were always there. It's not like he suddenly lurched to the right in the early 2000s, but then again, I was never looking that closely. Luckily, so far, the bands I've loved, nobody's committed genocide or become a turbo nonce, so that's good.
But yeah, I do regret that kind of stuff. I mean, I've literally ended up in fights because of it as well. I'm not really a fighting man. I will punch when punched.
TR: When was the last time you ended up in a fight?
AF: Any kind of fight? Or because of that?
TR: Well, because of that is what I'm most interested in, but both are good answers.
AF: I've been threatened a lot because of that. Again, I don't want to name people because I don't want to exacerbate the circle of swordplay, and also, it's pathetic. You should be allowed to say–I mean, I've seen people criticize me and/or the band before, and you just go, "Oh well. That's okay. Never mind." You can get over it quite easily.
Actual fights...I was in lots of fights in my 20s. Without ever, you know, starting a fight in my life. The first interview I did on camera was before mclusky's first ever record came out. In fact, probably that week. I'd been assaulted outside the flat in which I lived three days beforehand, so I was doing this interview with this gigantic black eye. And the interviewer, who was French–I've no idea how this came about–said, "You have a reputation for being quite an aggressive band. Is there any truth in that?" And I'm there with a black eye going, "Absolutely not. It just sounds aggressive." But obviously, everything you say sounds incredibly hollow because you're there with a fucking black eye.
I was kicked, knocked out, punched, stamped on, for most of my 20s. I wish that wasn't the case, but pretty much when I got to the age of 32, it just all stopped. I think you're no longer a threat to the kind of virile young men who want to take out the fact they haven't got laid that night on a passerby. And I suppose by virtue of having a shaved head and whatever, I probably looked quite aggressive. Haven't got into nearly so much trouble since, which is the way I intend.
TR: You speak very softly, as opposed to on stage. Have you ever had to pull out your stage voice in everyday life?
AF: When my daughter's trying to cross the road without looking, that's about as close as it gets. I'm from Newcastle, but I've never had a very broad Geordie accent, 'cause frankly my dad would've beaten it out of me. But when I was younger, I had some friends in college, one of whom was an Italian guy who was a black belt in karate. Whenever there was trouble, they just used to get me to come along and accentuate my accent for the purposes of diffusing trouble.
I remember very distinctly, just before Do Dallas came out, it was getting a lot of attention in Germany particularly. We got flown over by Beggars Banquet to Hamburg–I say this like it happens all the time, it's literally the only time it ever happened to me–to do some interviews. It was basically a day of interviews, like ten or eleven in one day, so you can understand sometimes why very successful bands get a bit fuckin' arsey, or, as in my case, don't do tons of interviews. Because they've literally answered the same questions fifteen times. I could tell how terrified some of the people who were interviewing me were, and then how astonished they were when I was just a person talking like I'm talking now.
But no, I try not to get out that voice in public. Imagine if you were ordering a pizza. I mean, you're probably getting extra parmesan, but maybe the police will be called to escort you off the premises at the end of the meal.
TR: How did the Ipecac Recordings deal come to be? I know they're also releasing The Jesus Lizard comeback record.
AF: So, we released a single last year, "Unpopular Parts of a Pig," which we released explicitly to finance our U.S. visas, and after we released it, Mark from Ipecac just contacted me and said he really liked it. Met up with him in New York when we did our shows, and that was it, really. Obviously, it's a huge vote of confidence in some senses, but also the fact they're releasing The Jesus Lizard–I mean, possibly the best live band I've ever seen–was fantastic. At the risk of dropping names like a right cunt, I only discovered they're releasing The Jesus Lizard when we were having food with David Yow before our Los Angeles show in March, so it was a lovely coincidence.
The album's got a title. [At the end of June] it's going to be two-thirds recorded. I haven't signed to a record label in thirteen years or something, so I'm not entirely sure how it works. We used a friend of ours to do press on…the last time was on a Future of the Left record eight years ago. But yeah, it's going to be announced in July, and I'm very excited by that. It's just nice, and they're obviously a storied label as well. The reason we're going with Ipecac, really, is it gives us the chance to have experiences like we did in March and tour again.