03 - 1987 / Smalltalk, fanzine

Are you pleased with the LP ?

I'm pleased with parts of it. I think in some ways it's the best record we've done and I like a lot of the songs on it, but, I don't really agree with some of the treatments on some of the songs, like the producers input, but I do like the way some of them have come out like Automatically Yours is like a real fun song, I like that, but If I Could Tell You is one of the strongest songs we've ever done and well, I like some of the strings on it but I don't like the bit at the end, it's kind of really slushy and I don't like that.

Why did you redo Baby Honey and I'm Alright With You ?

Well we redid I'm Alright With You because I sort of heard it differently. I heard it kind of country and western and I just thought we could do a better version. With Baby Honey I didn't really want to do it, but I was talked into it by the others. I'm not really sure if it's any great improvement on the original version.

What do you think of Creation ?

I'm glad we didn't stay with Creation because I found it almost impossible to work with Alan McGee, and Glass gave us a lot more money for recording than Creation ever did. I just don't see how we could fit in with Creation now, anyway. Creation didn't think our commitment was right. I think we've made a lot more interesting records than Creation which is a lot more committed. I don't think commitment is everything. It's just we're not committed so often. But when we do things we are committed to them. We'd never want to make half baked records.

I mean, I don't know, they'll get sick of it. It's like a bandwagon just now. Quite a lot of people look at the press and say this is the type of group for me. I don't know maybe it's not quite as cynical as that, but there is a certain element of that in it, they'll probably change to something else that comes into fashion.

Have any new groups really inspired you to keep going ?

Yeh well, well the Shop Assistants aren't really a new group but when they started playing together I thought they were really exciting live, I got a real thrill from the Vaselines tape, just fleeting things. I don't think Pop Will Eat Itself's records are very good but live they're just dead funny, they've got a real energy and are real fun. I like them cos they are idiots, I mean they act like idiots and they know they're idiots. But on the minus there are groups like Bubblegum Splash, we played with them in Bristol, and they just summed up everything that was wrong in music just now. I mean they had one song that went la-la-la like Primal Scream and another with the bum-de-bum drumbeats a la Shop Assistants. It was just a joke. I mean I don't really ___ things like The Primitives, I mean, they're just doing what the Shop Assistants did two years ago. The Primitives just strike me as being totally calculated.

Will the video for "Truck, Train, Tractor" be shown anywhere ?

I don't think anyone would show it really. We've done a video for the new single with the people that did the Pop Will Eat Itself video, so I think there's a chance that might get on TV. We're gonna do a film with the guy that did that one because it's more interesting in a way for us, it's kind of more uninhibited. I think we might release it actually as a video, record some new stuff and clean it up and release it.

What do you think of Glasgow in general just now ?

What about playing with toy instruments ?

We were talking about it. It's more a sort of being sick of getting copied, we thought it would be quite awkward to copy toy instruments because they were made in such short runs that you can't get many toys that sound the same. So we thought, if we had toys they wouldn't sound like anyone else's toys even if they copied the idea.

The night you played at Third Eye Centre you used a Divine video much to the distress of the feminist members of the crowd!

I don't see how Divine could be sexist. I mean Divine is a ___. I just thought it was quite funny. Apparently The Third Eye Centre got into a lot of trouble and almost lost grants because they were showing pornography. We just thought it was fun. Divine is the sort of style of the group anyway.

How big a part do you play in 53rd & 3rd now ?

It's probably diminished quite a lot now. When it started I was a lot more enthusiastic, but now Sandy basically runs it. I mean if a group came along and I thought they were a great group and ready to record I could recommend them to him and we would do it, but I just found it increasingly impossible for the three of us to agree on anything.

This is the bad thing about it. To a certain extent it is quite cliquey, although when we signed the Bmx Bandits we didn't really know them that well we just saw them and thought what they were doing was quite unusual. I suppose it has become that way, it's like the Bellshill Mafia. With Talulah Gosh I knew Amelia, and to be truthful we signed them before we had really heard them. I mean they were going to sign for Subway and we needed another group and Sandy was really keen to do them. I had come up with this electronic duo that were quite funny, quite sort of marketable. They had songs like Bonked Senseless and Shopping For Schoolboys all going on like a Depeche Mode song then this really obnoxious guitar came along. They were really cool. So we were to get another group and they said you can't do this group Stephen. So they got Talulah Gosh.

Have you a fetish about fruit and veg ?

It was just the idea of "vegetable heads" from the Ramones song, "Everytime I eat vegetables, it makes me think of you". They're just sort of dumb items, but I think we'll move on to something different now.

What about David Belcher's interview in Cut referring to his socks ?

I do know David Belcher, but they were a truly appalling pair of socks. He's a nice guy, one of the only journalists up here, he genuinely does love music. He doesn't view it as a career move.