A couple of months ago, I read an interview with you all in a magazine from England called Spiral Scratch. Oh yeah, all right. Was it...hold on... No, before that I used to be in a band called the Wild Flowers, and I sort of did--well, this is about 1984. The Wild Flowers are actually still around now, and they're signed to Slash records over here. So this is 1984, it was an independent album, and it was this was, there after that, 1985 or so, we got put together, but they still carry on; they're still around.

Would you say you have any influences or are you beyond that at this stage? No, we have a few. We're completely fascinated with music, that's why we do it. Just everything, from when we were really young, bands like Slade, the Sweet, stuff like that. And then when we were 12 years of age, punk rock was starting to happen, and that' what got me and everybody else as well. We were into that for as long as it was exciting, which was about two years up until 1979. I doubt there's a lot of good bands that have come after punk, like--bands like Gang of Four, for instance, who are an influence on the band. A lot of guitar bands that came around, you know, but at the time, you don't know you're influnced by a band you like. A band like The Church, the Chameleons were a big influence, early Pink Floyd. Just anything.

You toured with the Chameleons a while back. That was our first American tour. It was a strange thing--it was OK after the first days. We actually got on well, we've since become good friends even though the band don't exist anymore.

Really? Yeah, they split up like about two and a half years ago, not long after the tour, and it's a shame because the tour was a real success for them. It was a personal thing in the band, but it was great, it was one of the best times I've ever had. It was really good.

So how do you feel about touring? We love it! We're in Indianapolis at the moment, we've just come from Tennessee. We like to go sight-seeing and see all the tacky things--we went to Graceland! Yeah! (laughs) It was quite fun, we went to Sun Studios, we like to go to water parks and Disney World and the tacky things. The usual tourist things.

How long has this tour been? We've been here for like 11 weeks, since the second week of January, and we're here until the beginning of May. We're doing alright, the last date has been set for the third of May, so we've got the light at the end of the tunnel. So it's...you know.

Do you get a different response from American audiences than from English audiences? Uh, it's alright. I think without generalizing, that British audiences are more stand-offish than American audiences. It depends what town or city you play. We've had some pretty wild gigs on the West Coast where in general you could say 'Oh, the West Coast is real laid back.' Which it is. We played in Atlanta the other night, and that was pretty crazy. Then again, you can't generalize because you play somewhere with a wild reputation and have a real quiet gig. I think that on the East Coast, you generally get a better reaction than on the West, but I'll play anywhere in America, you'll get a better reaction than in England.

Do you think your live show represents what you guys can do musically? I think it represents us more as... I don't think we've ever made a record that captured how we sound live. I think the nearest we've ever come to it was on the last album. I think, you know, I'm quite happy with that. I'd rather have it that way than the other way around than make records and have people come to see us live and get really disapointed with the live show. You're never totally happy with the record when you make it. With your live show, it's totally down to you--how well you perform and how well you put yourself across, whereas on record, it's how well the producer puts you across.

When you do a show, do you try new songs or stick with what people will know? When we tour, we like to swap it around. We like to do a few cover versions and stuff just for a laugh. We like to keep it fun for ourselves, rather than just being pre-programmed stuff and all that.

You've been going around this tour with The Ocean Blue and John Wesley Harding for this tour--any opinions on their music? Well yeah, when this tour was first put together, we weren't really familiar with either of them because neither has done that much in Britain, but first we though strange because we don't really sound like The Ocean Blue and John Wesley doesn't sound much like us either. We thought it might be a bit strange but its actually worked out great. I think sometimes if you're flicking through your local paper and you see an ad, it looks like something you'd want to go see. You've got three top ten college acts for $10 or whatever, which is really good. There hasn't been a single gig where one act has died a death. We've had gigs where The Ocean Blue have gotten as good or better a reaction than us, and the same with John Wesley Harding, so in general it's pretty fairly good. There hasn't been a gig where they've booed the Ocean Blue or anything like that.

I'm sure that makes things easier between the bands. Oh yeah--we're pretty easy going people as well. We all get on together (laughs). We have some real good fun, there's often good times.

Has there been any one concert that sticks out in your mind? I don't know (pause). We think of more what happens afterwards--that's usually more unusual. We had a really crazy gig in Atlanta, like I said, the other night, where it was a really young crowd. They were just going wild. It's hard to think back now because we've done so many.

How many shows do you think you'll have done by the end of the tour?
About 80 or 90. (laughs) So its hard to remember individual ones. We've been doing a lot of colleges, is what we've been doing. They've been wild. We're always worried when we... We love doing all-ages shows because I think when people get over the age of 21, their enthusiasm starts to wane a bit. I know when I was 17, I would go to a gig and jump around as now, I don't. When we do college shows, well we used to think that because there's no alcohol on sale there, that no one's actually had a drink. (laughs) We did not realize that meant people just get absolutely out of their faces before they attend the show! So we've had some wild shows at colleges.

How long have you been playing guitar? I don't know because I had a guitar since I was 10 or 11, but before punk came about, I gave up because I couldn't play like Jimmy Page or Brian May from Queen. But then when punk came, it was like, 'Oh shit, I can play that.' It was, it really was a major influence. It gave you the courage if you like to actually take a working guitar and go for it. And that's the thing with the band; we're not the sort of band showing off with guitar solos or drum solos or that sort of stuff. We're not sort of egotistic in any sort of area.

How long did "Laughter" take you to make, because it sounds more sparkled up? I know! We actually went in with another thing in mind. We played a lot of it live and everything, so all the drums, bass, guitars pretty much went down live. Looking back now I think we spent too much time after that putting on loads and loads of overdubs on top. There's a lot of songs that are pretty basic--"Into The Heart of Love" is not a lot of overdubs on it. We didn't realize it; it took us six months after making it to actually realize how much we had put on it. Because we were convinced that we played it all live, because we did. After doing all that, I think we bored it a bit by putting too much on top of it. The next album, we're thinking of recording a lot liver than this one. Maybe we'll record it at Sun Studios (laughs).

For the sequencing of the album, was that thought out? Yes. Actually one of the reasons why I think this album works a lot better our other ones is because we spent a lot of time on sorting the order out. If you look back at our first album, Happy Head, which was fundementally just a collection of songs that we'd written in our first year as a band, there was a lot of really fast ones and a couple of slow ones. On this album, there's a number of medium-paced songs and you can listen to it as an album, as a whole thing and it sort of works in that way. We did actually speak about it at the time that we were doing this.

Because the first side really works as a whole... We all felt like our producer, Mark Wallace, who produced it, didn't... He didn't agree with the order, but we knew we were right; we knew "At Midnight" had to be the first track, because when we play live, we open with "At Midnight" and its perfect.

It really sets the mood, sets thing moving. I think so, yeah, and...we're not arrogant, but we knew we were right on that one. (laughs)

About videos, how do you feel about making them? Hmmm...hate making them, yeah. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need them, but television is such a big medium. MTV is so big now, so you're limiting your audience if you don't make a video. We make them begrudgingly (laughs). We don't like making them but we do. Having said that, I do sort of tune into 120 Minutes every Sunday and whatever, just to see. I'm a big fan of the Church, and that new video for "Metropolis" is bad. Oh, it's terrible, it spoiled it I think.

Yeah, I talked to them a year or two ago and they said they hated every single video they ever made. Ahhh, that's fair, but I can't see why they've gone to the extreme--have you seen the new one?

No, I haven't. Well, if they hate making videos, they shouldn't have made this one! (laughs) I mean, you can make good videos. "Under The Milky Way" isn't that bad, pretty straight forward, but it's OK. But this new one for "Metropolis" is just the worst.

Can I ask you about writing songs, or is that not really your department? No, actually I wrote a lot of the last album.

How do you work that--do you sit and decide, 'Oh, we're going write something today' or does it just come to you while you're out and about? Our old bass player used to write a lot of the songs, but we fired him from the band about a year ago--don't know if you heard...

That was another thing I was going to ask you about. Which that was basically because we knew the way we wanted the band to go. We didn't have to sit down and talk about it, we just knew. With Tony, he didn't want to do what we wanted to do and his enthusiasm was waning as well. He wasn't really writing songs again either, and when he did write a song, it was just the same thing over and over again, which we'd heard before, which was not what we wanted to do or whatever. I actually ended up writing most of the last album myself--it was great though, because when he went, Marcus came into the band, and after doing nothing for like six months or a year while Tony was being idle, it all came together in a matter of weeks. I sort of went away, and in a week and a half, I wrote seven or eight songs, and it came together real quick!

Do you think he added something new to the band? Marcus? Oh yeah, definitely. He's more a musician than any of us.

How so? 'Cause I'd got this bunch of songs, and he's real good on things like arrangements as well. The band's really been a democracy but with Tony, the old bass player, he'd sulk a lot if he didn't get his way, whereas Marcus will make suggestions. He's actually done real well. He's part of the band. Its like he's been with us all along.

So you knew him beforehand? No ,we didn't! (laughs) He found us as well, it was quite weird. He heard from a friend of a friend that we were looking for a bass player, because we hadn't really advertised it. He came in and said, 'I want to join the band.' He'd been playing with Julian Cope previous to that.

How long were you without a bass player then? In terms of after firing Tony, just a few weeks, but we knew that something was going to happen for a while. For about a year and a half, we were concerned about it. The last American tour, he didn't really enjoy it. He liked the idea of being in a band and everything, but he wasn't prepared to do the work

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When you write a song, do you find the words first or the music? It varies--sometimes you get a melody or a chord structure or a guitar riff in your head or something. But something like "Where Do We Go From Heaven" originated from a phrase, which sounded so ridiculous that it sounded good. It sounded kind of funny but I put that over the acoustic guitar-type chord thing, and then worked the song from there. So it can vary, whereas "Into The Heart of Love" started with the guitar riff--the da na, na na, na na, na na, NA na--so that was what came first.

Here's a question just for myself--the beginning of that song, there's this really quiet echo of the riff just before the song starts; was that done on purpose? Oh yeah, (laughs) we spent quite a bit of time doing that. All we did was we fed the guitar through a transistor radio so that it sounded like an old crystal set radio or something.

'Cause I'm a DJ at our college radio station and we have the worst time cuing up that song because of the echo! (He laughs and laughs) That's why we did it--to confuse radio DJ's.

Do you write thinking about how it will sound live--"this is going to end cold because that's how it will be live"? Yeah, pretty much so. The thing is with the songs, once the band gets around it anyway and we play it live before we record it. Before you do it in the studio using drum machines and stuff, you come to play it live and you're stuck so we make sure we can actually physically play the song before it goes on record, so that when we come to do it live, we hopefully can do it better than on the record.

You wrote songs before this record, I take it. Yeah, I used to co-write.

Any particular place that you get your ideas from or is it just things around you? It's just being in the Mighty Lemon Drops, it's a full time thing. Touring around the world, you're exposed to quite a lot. We've visited everywhere--South America and stuff like this. We don't actually write anything on the road because we're so busy, but you see that much and you're exposed to so much more than if you were sitting at home in your bedroom. All that--life itself is an influence. When you forge a trail in life where you see a lot, as in what we are doing right now, which is hotel rooms and dressing rooms (laughs), those are what we seem mainly.

Do you ever write in the studio or is it all planned out beforehand? We have done it. There's a track on the CD which is not on the album called "Rumbletrain" which was just something that originated from a jam. We actually did it live, what happened was we were recording it, and wrote. We each got a piece of paper with like verse, chorus, verse-bit, do a guitar solo there, and we just played it live and the first take, that was the one we kept. And that was it. And then we just made lyrics up in the studio.

How do you feel about the British music press, since they're pretty notorious about slamming bands that have been around a while? The problem with the British press, is that you've got four, five, six music papers every week--Sounds, NME, Melody Maker, Smash Hits, Record Mirror--and they're just desperate for things to write about. You can actually within six months form a band, get the front cover of the NME or Sounds, and within six months, your career could be finished. As the Lemon Drops, we had the front cover of NME and the front cover of Sounds when the band had only been going a few months. We were like literally playing to 30 or 40 people. Nowadays, when we can play to 2,000--3,000 people, we can't get arrested in England. That's just the way they are--you know they're just looking for new things and it's just a bit daft.

I don't know about over there, but here, there's been a lot of comparisons of you guys to Echo and the Bunnymen. How do you feel about that? I don't feel anything. I don't particularly like them. When we very first started, the nearest thing that they could equate us to was that, and I still can't see how we sound like them. I don't think Paul sounds anything like Ian McCullouch. I think we're a lot more aggressive than anything they've ever done. They don't even bother me anymore; they're not even going, so how can we be compared to a band that doesn't even exist? (laughs)

Last question--any plans for after this tour? Yeah, I think we're going to do, is that since this last album took a lot longer than we wanted it to due to Tony and all that I said, I think what we're going to do is go back home, take two weeks holiday, and after that, we're just going to get on with the album. We want to make the next album, basically, so we can get back over here and do another tour. Generally that's the plan, so we'll probably bring the album out at the beginning of next year. And we'll come back over and tour on that.