Bassically Speaking

Why did you put together some songs, that are obviously different tracks, together on one track?

That’s actually more of a visual thing. We didn’t wanna have too many songs listed on the record. I think there’s 11. And so we didn’t want it to be 14. It’s kind of cheating. I do feel a bit bad because a lot of people have picked up on this and of course I’ve never really thought about what happens if somebody want to go straight to that song. They’re not gonna able to do it. But that’s just a quirkiness of the album. You just have to live with it.

So the important thing was trying to keep it short?

Yeah. I think one the first goals was to make a short record. I think we felt that the last record, X&Y, was a little bit too long. It could have been more concise so we kind of learned from that and did it this way. We have a lot of songs that didn’t go on the record. They’re very good, they’re not B-sides. We’re still deciding what we’re gonna do with those songs. I’d say there’s another album ready to go.

Do you know straight away what is a B-side and what isn’t?

No, it’s very hard to tell. In this day and age people don’t have B-sides anymore because it’s all iTunes. But traditionally for us B-sides are songs which are not necessarily not as good as album tracks but they just somehow don’t fit or they’re different or they’re strange in some sort of way.

Do you buy music on iTunes?

I still like buying CDs because I actually like to have the artwork and the booklet and stuff like that. But I’m terrible with file management. I remember once, not so long ago, I’d put my photos onto a hard disk, all of them. I did something and they all disappeared. And so I don’t wanna spend money on iTunes and then do the same thing because I know it’ll happen to me. It just seems very complicated. What I do is I buy CDs and then put them on there and then put the CD in a box somewhere.

If you set your mind back to when you all formed the band, what were your ambitions then?

When we started all we wanted to do was make an album. And then of course from there you live with your insecurities and your doubts about that record. That drives you on to get better and make another one. So I think we’ve just got this constant drive to push ourselves further and to try different things. When we started we just wanted to be in a band and we wanted to make records that people loved as much as we love listening to bands records. We also wanted to travel and to play concerts.

Looking back, do you feel you’re progressing with each album? Do you feel happy and satisfied with your progression?

Yeah, I think so. It’s an interesting time for us now because we’ve finished the record, we can’t do anything to change it now. Yet nobody has heard it. So we’re just waiting for the record to be released and to see what people’s perceptions of it are.