That was obviously part of the reason why you decided to re-record "Ships" and "We're Not In Kansas*
Yeah. I mean, I'll let you know how bad things had got. When I took the original demo versions of "Ships" and "Kansas" into the record company, they didn't even want them on the "N.P.L.H." album, they couldn't even hear them as songs. But "Ships" has been a huge success throughout Europe at the moment. Even as we speak, it's gone really big all over the radio. I just couldnae believe that kinna attitude. It was like there was some bizarre sort of conspiracy plot to undermine everything that we were about. I mean, you donnae like to be paranoid about things like that but sometimes you wonder. It shouldn't be a grief-filled business, making records. It's about expressing yourself and communicating things and it doesn't have to be involved with all that kinna grief.
Is that perhaps similar to the sort of crisis of confidence you went through before "Steeltown"?
Yeah, well, "Steeltown" was not really so much of a problem. Its just that I really wanted to make an album which expressed a whole load of the kinna darker things that I feel rock music had always been scared to touch. I mean, I think that one of the things that is frustrating about rock music is that a lot of times, especially at that period, it was kinna, it didn't want to go outside of the sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll type of imagery. And I've just felt that its always had so many more possibilities; that it could be something that was interwoven with the social and environmental fabric, much more than it has been that you could write contemporary folk songs with loud guitars. And I really wanted to do something like that, it may not have been the smartest career move of all time but for me it was a very pivotal point, not only in my musical career but in my life as well; it's something that I'd been building towards since I was fifteen or fourteen years old, I think. What tends to motivate your writing these days?
All different things. I really appreciate the fact that I live in Scotland and have a distance between myself and the major rock media outlets. I think if I did live in London, I'd tend to hang out with musicians and journalists anyway. But living where I do in Scotland, I get to hang out with the people that I grew up amongst and I get to meet people who come from all different walks of life rather than just one small section of it. It gives me a
whole load of different conversations and ideas and to me, if you don't live amongst
people, you can't write about them and it's important for me to have that distance. You've always tried to maintain that distance though, haven't you?
Yeah. For me, it's crucial as a writer. I have to have an environment that I feel is one that is relevant to the lives of people who you're writing songs for when it gets to the end of it, y'know? You write songs initially to express something you feel moved by yourself or I do anyway - but you also hope that you can write about them in a worldly enough manner that people in other places will be able to identify and connect with what's actually in the songs themselves. It really is important to be able to have that distance to do that.
That seems to be one of the very noticeable things about your very loyal fans that they do identify so strongly with your songs.
Yeah. But I think that's something that happens when you're making music that is very kinna personal and just stands on its own feet. You know, I think we haven't been a kind of band who would ever be called hip or fashionable and that's cool by me, I really like it like that. To me, anything to do with fashion involves following someone else and I'd rather kinna plough my own little furrow and make music that I cared about which is why the past couple of albums have been so frustrating, because it's difficult to feel a hundred per cent satisfied with music that you feel someone else has diluted for you.
I notice that Chris Briggs was the guy who signed you to Compulsion and he initially signed you to Phonogram. He's obviuosly still got faith in the bend.
Yeah, I mean Chris knows what we're about and the great thing about him is he is able to let us express that. He doesn't have this kinna compulsive need to feel that he has to stamp his authority all over what we do. The great thing about Chris Briggs and, I think this has been a measure of him all through his work as an A & R man, is that he lets the artist be the artist. He signs people that he likes and lets them make records. That's what it should be about.
