What did you think of the other bands playing at the Band Explosion gig?
"We don't really respect any other bands at the moment just because we don't think they are doing anything worthwhile. There's a tendency in this country for people to demand, really try, avant-garde originality, which we don't pay much respect for. We just want to be a perfect mixture of rock 'n' roll and political music."
What did you think of the audience?
"We like concerts like that because it's more exciting for us. We've done so many this year and when everybody loves us it gets a bit boring. Scotland was probably the most violent. People were getting on the stage and punching us. People were getting syringes and filling them up with lager and squirting it at us. Someone dived into Sean's drum kit and the cymbals almost decapitated him."
Why do you feel the need to be in a band?
"When we were young there were no bands, you just felt the same thing about all the bands, it was just boring and grey, most bands these days don't demand anything, they just don't care about the way they look or what they sing about."
Why do you think they get in the charts?
”That's what most people are brought up on, apathy. They don't demand anything, they don't expect them to look good, they just expect 'em to look like themselves."
Do you think that the music press feel intimidated by you because you created yourselves and they didn't create you?
"I think most of the music press can't make up their mind about us because they don't know what to think themselves and are so used to doing interviews and going to see bands who do nothing that when a band comes along who look different or even moves onstage they're unsure about it. They say a lot of the problem with us is we remind them of bands that existed 15 years ago, but we were never around to see the Clash or The Sex Pistols, we were just in junior school. At least with us there's always something to write about, it's always different."
How badly do they blow things out of proportion?
"They just exist on lies, it sells more papers. The press phoned to see if it was true that James had 13 stitches after the can hit him in the head, he actually never had any."
What about the album?
"The album is going to he the most important thing, we always said that was the one big thing that we always wanted to do. We've started to work on the art work, getting it all laid and organized, it'll be between 16-20 songs."
If you don't sell 25 million LP's, do you think that what you set out to do, will still have been worthwhile, on a smaller scale?
"We think what happens next is the most important, whet happens when the band makes an important statement?, what follows it?. When we read about all the acid parties, 50 000 people, off their own backs go into a field and party, which is really good, but all that came next was bands like the Charlatans, which didn't really do anything. But if a political group came out or, the acid scene, that would've been worthwhile."
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