Under the Radar - Lupine Howl



Words by Mark Redfern Unless you’re already a fan of the band, if you know anything at all about Lupine Howl it’s probably only that it’s members were once fired from Spiritualized in 1999 for reasons that are still up for debate. Some of you may have even heard The Carnivorous Lunar Activities of…, their epic space rock of a debut album. Although that record was certainly a fine debut and featured some choice cuts, most notably the philosophical and thought-inducing “Sometimes,” it was also somewhat marred by a slight lack of focus. Several songs pushed the eight, or even ten, minute mark and often featured so many different changes within one song that it was like listening to two of three different songs in one song. This approach was almost endearing in a way, but it was time for the band to move on and separate themselves from their Spiritualized days a little. Enter superior second album. Unfortunately, even fewer of you have probably heard the good news that late last year (2002) in the UK, and earlier this year (2003) in the States, the band dropped a lush and much more focused sophomore record, The Bar At the End of the World (Beggars Banquet). The album opens with the driving guitars of “A Grave To Go To,” before settling into a more relaxed and welcome string infused contemplative mood, with lyrics that perhaps question the various rules and routines we have made for ourselves as a modern society. The Bristol, England based band got a ton of press in their homeland when they debuted in 2000 with the “Vaporizer” single, mainly because of the controversy surrounding their sacking by Spiritualized main-man Jason Pierce. Alas, now that they have an even better record to promote, there’s no controversy for NME and the like to write an article around to help sell magazines. And as frontman Sean Cook explains below, the band’s now former record label seems to have gone out of their way not to promote the gorgeous new album. Despite mainly great reviews (including a 9 blips out of 10 in the fourth issue of Under the Radar), The Bar At the End of the World has pretty much gone unheard. So we were more than happy to interview Cook again (after also being interviewed in Issue 2 of Under the Radar) and give them some much needed press, as he told us he could count on one hand the number of American interviews he’s done for the new record. Due to some pesky bad cell-phone reception that apparently made yours truly sound like Lucifer, it took awhile for the interview to get settled. Ironically, “A Grave To Go To” (and thus the whole album) opens with a sample of Cook’s cell-phone. Just for the sake of it, we’ve presented the full interview transcript below, bad transatlantic cell-phone connections and all. Stick with us though, because Cook has a wealth of interesting things to say about record label politics, struggling to get the money to tour the States, the two sides of the Spiritualized dismissal story, the then just winding down war in Iraq and the questionable motives behind that conflict, divorce, a disbelief in true love, recording with friends Massive Attack and 3-D’s child pornography scandal, doing session work to fund their own records and whatever else we talked about in the one hour plus interview. Just for the record: Cook plays bass, among other instruments, and sings lead vocals. Lupine Howl also features ex-Spiritualized guitarist Mike Mooney, and Jon Mattock, who played drums with both Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized. Another ex-Spiritualized drummer, Damon Reece, played on the first Lupine Howl record, but left to work on the solo record of his girlfriend, who happens to be Elizabeth Fraser, singer with the late Cocteau Twins. In fact, the original plan was for Fraser to be the singer of the band, but the personalities didn’t exactly all match (nor would have Frazer’s voice matched the eventual sound of Lupine Howl) and so they thought of having lots of guest vocalists, ala Massive Attack, and even got Euros Childs from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci to sing on one song that’s still never been released. When the logistics of getting a bunch cool guest vocalists, like P.J. Harvey, proved the idea unrealistic, it was then decided that Cook should just take over vocal duties, even though he’d never sung before. Somewhere in there the band also worked on sessions for the last Massive Attack album, although their stuff didn’t end up on the final album. Ian Maclaren, formerly of the band Sunna, now also plays guitar with Lupine Howl. Anyway, onto the Sean Cook interview. March 21, 2003 First try. Phone rings…. Mark Redfern (Under the Radar): Hello. Hello. Faint Voice: Hello. Mark: Is this Sean Cook from Lupine Howl? Silence. Second try. Phone rings…. Mark: Hello. Voice: Hello. Mark: Is this Sean Cook? Sean Cook (Lupine Howl): Yeah, that’s right. Mark: This is Mark from Under the Radar magazine is Los Angeles, I’m supposed to be doing a little quick interview with you? Sean: Yeah, yeah, cool. How’s it going? Mark: Good, good. I actually interviewed you, you probably don’t remember, about a year ago. Sean: Okay! Oh right. My memory’s not as good as it once was (laughs). Mark: No I understand, you do a lot of press. For us journalists you always remember who you interview, but you can’t expect the same of the musicians. Sean: Yeah. (laughs) Mark: So it’s kind of a strange dynamic that way. Anyway, so you ready to get into the questions then? Sean: Yeah definitely, yeah. Mark: Alright, first question is: how would you say The Bar At the End of the World is an evolution from your first album? Sean: I think one of the main differences was the way we wrote it. With the first record most of the music was kind of done before any vocals or anything like that was put on. So we were basically just experimenting with riffs, cutting things up on the computer and various things like that. And we kind of dumped the vocals on top of all that. But this time a lot of the songs have been written more from a vocal melody and the music track being built up around that. And that’s made it a bit more, I suppose songy, for want of a better word. Mark: Was that a conscious decision when you went in to write the album? Sean: It wasn’t really a conscious decision, it was just the way we begun to do things. Quite a few of the songs that are on this latest album were written before the last one even came out. That’s just the way we’ve begun writing songs after the first one. You’ve got to understand that I wasn’t a singer before the first album. Someone had to do the singing so I have it a go and Mike was like ‘oh yeah, it’s alright, it’s not that bad, we don’t need to get anyone else in.’ As I sort of got into that role more I was writing things on the guitar and coming up with vocal melodies and finding the basic chords behind them and going to Mike and saying ‘look what do you reckon of this vocal melody?’ And he’d be like, ‘yeah, wicked.’ And then he’d start making the chords more complex and interesting. And that’s just how it naturally developed. Mark: When you set out to record the new album what were you setting out to accomplish, did you have a particular goal in mind in terms of what you wanted to do with the new record? Sean: We wanted it to be different from the previous one. You gotta understand the things we were going through when we made the first one; our lives were slightly in turmoil. We were both kind of going a bit mad in a way, and the sort of schizophrenic nature of the record reflected what was going on in our personal lives really. By the time we came to do this one things had calmed down a lot, we’d got a lot of things out of our system and all the rest of it. It was kind of inevitable that we were going to make an album that was a bit more reflective. It was inevitable that sound wise we’d be looking to do something that wasn’t quite as frenzied. We had an idea to make something that was a bit ore reflective, a bit more mature, a bit more epic like in a way. Lyrically we just had this idea of accomplishing getting through some of the stuff that we’d been through before and trying to describe where that had brought us, the place that had brought us to in terms of the way we look at the world, hence the name The Bar At the End of the World. Mark: A lot of people I’ve played the new record to, and I think some of the critics have said this too, have compared the record to The Verve. Sean: Oh right, yeah, yeah, we get that quite a bit. Mark: I’m a Verve fan as well, but personally I don’t really hear it, but everyone that I play it to seems to hear it. Do you think that’s a fare comparison? Sean: Um, well it’s not like we set out to be The Verve. Don’t get me wrong, I like The Verve. There’s certainly no conscious attempt to do that. I mean a lot have people have said that my singing’s a bit like Richard (Ashcroft)’s, which I suppose in a way is a compliment because he’s a fuckin’ good singer. I don’t know, it’s difficult for me to say. It doesn’t seem like it is to me, but you always listen to your own voice in a bit of an odd way, do you know what I mean? You don’t kind of hear it like other people hear it. I think there’s some sort of element of self-consciousness about the way you hear your own voice. I don’t know. To me, it doesn’t sound that much like The Verve to me, but I definitely have heard it said. I suppose in a way there’s plus sides and minus sides to the comparison in the sense that The Verve were a great band, so in a way that’s quite good, but they’re also a band from a few years ago really now, if you try and sort of suggest that we’re living in the past then obviously the comparison’s not that good. But it’s very difficult to comment on what other people think about your record. I mean, we certainly never had any conscious desire to sound like The Verve and I don’t think it sounds that much like The Verve to me. Loads of the normal sort tricks The Verve would use, we don’t use any of them really. I think it’s mainly down to the voice that they think that. Mark: Like I said, I don’t necessarily see it either, but a lot of my friends seem to. Sean: Yeah, I can see, it’s been said over here too, so I can see why people would say that. Mark: The album was well received by critics in the UK, but it wasn’t a huge commercial hit, were you happy with the way the album did in the UK or were you kind of disappointed? Sean: I wasn’t very happy with the way it did at all. I don’t think the record company did a very good job of promoting it. More or less, unless you know one of us you’d be hard pushed to know that it was even out. (laughs) I think they did a pretty poor job of promoting it and obviously these things aren’t going to jump off the shelves, soundscan themselves and jump into someone’s CD player. You gotta tell people that something’s out there if you want them to buy it. Most people are unaware of the group. That has been an ongoing problem for us. Were we happy with what we did? Given the kind of limited resources we had to make the record, we were happy with the way it turned out. When we make the records, we don’t sell them. It’s the record company’s job to sell them and I don’t think they did a very good job. ‘Cause I think it’s a good album. I mean the times are weird now, I suppose the times have always been weird, but there’s quite a lowest common denominator thing taking control, at least in the UK, there’s not a lot of room for the more maverick sort of groups. People don’t buy CD’s like they used to buy them. They don’t seem to be as interested in music that they once were ten years ago or so. Mark: Did you try and talk to the record company about your concerns and were they responsive? Sean: Yeah we did, we talked to them a lot, and no they weren’t very responsive. (laughs) So I’m not sure what their gig was really, I’m not sure what the sketch was. I think that they just felt, I mean they obviously thought we were a good group and valued having us, otherwise why did they sign us in the first place, but I think they were looking at the climate that there is for music these days and thinking that it sounded a little bit too much like hard work to try and sell our band, so they decided not to bother. (laughs) Mark: That’s not good. Sean: Not good at all. Mark: I mean here in the States I got the same sense that it just kind of came out and I haven’t really read many articles on you guys or really seen many ads or much about it Sean: No, that’s entirely in line with my expectations. (Sean’s cell phone starts to break up.) Mark: Are you still there, you’re breaking up right now. Hello. Silence. Third try. Ringing… Mark: It looks like we got cut off, I guess because of your mobile phone. Sean: Yeah. Mark: I’m still having trouble hearing you unfortunately. Sean: Are you. I can hear you fine. Mark: There isn’t a landline I can call at over there, there isn’t a number I could call you at? Sean: I haven’t got a landline, no. Landlines seem to have gone out of fashion here a bit (laughs). Mark: (laughs) Right. Well I can still hear you a little bit, we’ll see how we go. Sean: Okay cool. Mark: We were talking about the album over here, and how it hadn’t exactly been well promoted over here too. Sean: Yeah, like I say, that’s not entirely surprising to me. I don’t know what the reasons behind that are. From my point of view it makes everything a lot harder, but I mean we’ll still carry on. Mark: When I spoke to you last year you said a big goal was to come out and tour the States, any indication that that might happen or has the record company not really been forthcoming on that? Hello…..hello…. Right, I still can’t hear you again, so I’m going to try you one last time. Just hang-up or hold on I guess. Fourth try. Ringing…. Sean: Hello. Did you just keep trying? Mark: Yeah, it took me awhile to get back to you. Hopefully I can hear you, if not I don’t know what we’ll do. Sean: You’ll breaking up quite a lot there? Mark: I’m breaking up myself? Sean: Yeah, you sound like the devil! Mark: (laughs) That’s ‘cause I am the devil. Sean: (laughs) I can barely hear what you’re saying. Mark: Oh, that’s not good. Do you want to try and reschedule to call you on a landline. Sean: Yeah, yeah. What might be a good idea is I can go to my manager’s house, it’s only around the corner. I don’t know what time suits you best. Hello? Mark: You tell me when you want to do it. Sean: Do it tomorrow? Mark: Yeah, why don’t we do it tomorrow. Sean: Do it tomorrow, should we say five-o-clock? Mark: Five-o-clock your time, yeah that’s good. Sean: Yeah, tomorrow afternoon. Mark: Yeah, do you want to give me that number, do you have it handy? Sean: Is that cool yeah? Mark: Yeah, do you want to give me the number to call you at then? Sean: Hold on, let me just pull it out of the phone. It’s the +44 thing and *--*. Mark: Cool, I’ll talk to you tomorrow at five then and hopefully we’ll have more luck. Sean: Alright, wicked mate. Take care yeah, bye. Mark: Bye. March 22, 2003 (5 PM ,UK time, the next day.) Fifth and final try. Ringing…. Sean’s manager: Hello. Mark: Yeah, is Sean Cook there? Sean’s manager: Yeah sure, hang on a sec. (To Sean in the background: Yeah, that’s him). Slight pause while Sean comes to the phone. Mark: Hello. Sean: Hey. Mark: Hey, how’s it going. Sean: Not so bad, yeah not too bad. Yeah, I can hear you a lot better now. Mark: Yeah, me too. Sean: Yeah cool. (laughs) Alright then. Mark: Alright, yeah, should we pick up where we left off yesterday (laughs) Sean: Yeah, yeah, wherever that was. Mark: Well I have notes. Oh, we were talking about the album’s reception in the States and whether you felt like it had been promoted here well as well, and whether or not you were going to get to tour over here. Sean: Right, yeah. Well I suspect it hasn’t been very well promoted over there. I think you were saying something to that effect. I’ve been going on about playing over in the States since day one really. In fact one of the reasons that we signed with the record label was that they said that, we felt being in America to be quite important, that our music would probably go down better there than it would do in the UK. But just won’t pay for us to go there. Mark: So you guys are ready to go, it’s just that the label won’t fork out the money. Sean: Yeah, exactly. To me that would be our best bet, to be over there. Naturally that would be the best market for us. And obviously I like being in the States, I like touring over in America so I’ve been screaming at them since day one to sort that out, but they just won’t pay for it. I don’t know what the problem is. They obviously don’t want to make any money or something, I don’t know what it is. (laughs) But yeah, they won’t pay for us. We’ve recently been looking trying to find someway of just sort of getting over there ourselves, sort of bypassing them. But obviously it’s a fairly big undertaking to take on if it’s self-financed. But yeah, we’d love to. Mark: Theoretically you could do New York and LA or something, but to do a whole big tour would be pretty pricey. Sean: Oh yeah, a whole big tour, we definitely ourselves couldn’t do that. I mean, I know there’s people that want to put us on, especially in New York, there’s definitely a few gigs we could do in New York. And I’m sure once you’ve cobbled a couple together in New York you could do one in Philly, one in Boston, maybe go up to Toronto, Detroit or something. It wouldn’t be too strenuous. We’ll just have to see how it goes, but obviously once the record company decides it’s not going to finance a band, it makes it very difficult for a band to do that kind of thing. The only other thing we could think of maybe is if we could get on a support tour with somebody over there. That might happen, I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that we supported The Charlatans over here. And that makes life in terms of expense a little easier. Mark: That would be good, a support tour would be good. Sean: Yeah, it would yeah. With Spiritualized that’s what we used to do at first. If they’re well chosen support slots then they work well for the band. Mark: As long as you’re not opening up for Sum 41 or Blink 182 or something. Sean: Well, yeah some shite like that. Yeah, we have done in the past, we’ve made some horrendous mistakes supporting. We (Spiritualized) supported Depeche Mode once and I’m sure we didn’t sell one single extra record or gain one extra fan from doing that. But when we (Spiritualized again) supported the Jesus & Mary Chain there were people coming to our gigs right at end that we were, ‘the first time I saw you was on that Mary Chain tour.’ Mark: How long do you have a contract with Beggars, are you thinking about finding another label? Sean: Oh yeah yeah, definitely. We have to all intents and purposes parted company with Beggars Banquet. One of the good things about them is that they don’t really try and hold you if you don’t think it’s working out. So if you don’t want to be with them, then they don’t want to be with you, which is a good attitude to have. So I’m thinking more along the lines of something a bit cooler, more underground, a label based in America that’s a lot cooler and a lot more underground. I think there’s a whole range of people in the world generally now, they don’t find out about music through the regular mainstream music magazines or through Tower Records, that kind of thing, or from major label promotion. I think there’s a bit of an underground scene which is probably more up our street and more of a direct link to the people that might want to buy our records. Mark: Yeah, exactly. The people who read our magazine are probably people like that. Sean: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s the more the kind of thing we’re looking at. We do something with the internet. We’ve still got our record company Vinyl Hiss, so we might start reenacting that over the internet and then see if we could make some links to cooler record companies over in the States and in parts of Europe and stuff like that and go about it that way. Mark: It’s a shame because this record’s really good and I play it for people and they’re like, yeah yeah, it’s great, I didn’t even know they had a new record. Sean: Yeah it does my head in mate, I tell ya. I get a similar sort of thing. Everyone that gets to hear it, well not everybody, but most people that get to hear it like it. Mark: Yeah, people who didn’t even like the first record are like, ‘wow this is miles ahead.’ Sean: Yeah, in a lot of ways it is miles ahead. It’s more thought about. The first record was a bit of a kind of frenzied sort of pent up aggression in us that had to come out. This one is more of a proper album. Even though there’s bits of the first one that I still really like. Mark: Yeah, totally. My favorite song on the first one was ‘Sometimes.’ Sean: Yeah, a lot of people say that. I like that one as well. Mark: That was a really good some, definitely. Well where was your head at when you went to write the lyrics for this record? What inspired the lyrics, ‘cause like you were saying, they’re definitely more thought out than the ones on the first one? Sean: A lot of the frustrations, a lot of the weird stuff we went through in the time before we made the first album and during the first album, and the whole general period of time when we were starting the group, both of us had personal problems, with long-term relationships and that kind of thing. It seemed like our lives changed a lot. By the time we made the first album or were making the first album, everything that we had a couple of years previous to that were completely gone. And everything that we were left with was nothing that we had had back then. It was almost like our lives had completely changed and there was this period of readjustment. And that came out in the frustration of the first album. By the time we got to the second album we sort of thought that through and sort of discovered a better identity for ourselves as a band and as people in the new phase of life we were in. And so lyrically this record was a kind of retrospective, looking at that, looking at those life changes, seeing things that were bad that happened in your life and how you got over them, and basically what that does in terms of your perspective on life. To a large extent much of the lyrical content on the second album is concerned with that, the things in life that are really important. The realization that the less you require things to be certain the more free you are to enjoy life. The more certainties you start to associate with the greater the risk of disappointment when all of these certainties turn out to be not so certain after all. And that was the whole sort of concept of being in the bar at the end of the world, that once you’ve got there a realized there’s no guarantees you can chill out and relax and none of it’s really that bad. That’s the basic gist of where most of the lyrics were coming from. Mark: That’s an interesting viewpoint on things. Sean: Yeah. A lot of the stuff we do with the second album and the stuff we’ve done subsequently, I mean we’ve done quite a lot of new material now, those kinds of issues crop up again and again. Just in terms of perspectives on life and the absence of moral codes and the absence of absolutes in life. Obviously there’s all sorts of weird tie-ins. Republicans for example would say that without any absolutes children turn to crime and drugs. So there’s a lot of social pressure for people to have certainties, for them to build up certainties, because they’re easier to sue when they believe something. But when you don’t believe in something life is much easier to get through. Mark: Right. I guess you’re also talking about religious beliefs? Sean: That kind of thing, yeah, exactly. Mark: My favorite line on the record goes something like: “we all do things we hate to get things we don’t need.” That’s a great line. Sean: Yeah, that’s funny isn’t it. I’ve never really done a job, apart from when I was a student. I’m not saying everybody’s job is boring either, some jobs are quite interesting, but there’s a whole mass of people out there doing jobs that they hate. Basically a job takes you over. You look back and the main substantive thing that you’ve done is your job and you hated it, but felt that you needed to do it because you needed, I don’t know, a washing machine or something. (laughs) And it’s like: do you really need these things? Mark: Yeah. I’ve worked plenty of shitty jobs before doing this. Sean: Yeah. When I was student I worked in factories and stuff like that in my summer holidays. Which was bad enough for me, but the worst part of it was looking at the other people there. They were permanent there. There were stories of the people just doing these mind numbing jobs and they were like, ‘yeah, I’ve been here for twenty years.’ I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, I would’ve topped myself.’ Mark: I don’t understand how people can do that, but I think a lot of those people don’t actually have ambitions. Sean: (laughs) Yeah, that must be the explanation, it must be, because clearly you’re better off on welfare, at least your time’s your own then. Mark: I don’t know, it depends. I know my grandfather was a jazz musician in the twenties or thirties. Sean: Oh yeah? Mark: In big bands touring the college circuit. But when he met my grandmother (and they had my mother) he settled down he got involved insurance, and I think he was a lawyer as well. He settled for all that to provide for his family. But he always still played piano in his spare time, and I wonder if he really just wanted to do the music stuff. Sean: When you start to get kids involved and that kind of stuff then obviously it changes. I mean, I’ve not got a kid, but it must change your perspectives in a certain way. You have to live at least partly for the benefit of someone else. I guess in a certain way I am a bit selfish like that, I’ve never really been able to do that. Mark: When we spoke last year, you basically said that you didn’t believe in true love, I don’t know how we got on that subject. I think we talking about Spiritualized and all his (Jason Pierce’s) love songs. Sean: Oh right. Mark: Is that still a viewpoint you hold or were you just bitter at the time? Sean: My mind is always open to things. If there is such a thing I certainly haven’t discovered it yet and it seems to run against the inherent nature of human beings, as my experience of them shows. People aren’t these static things that just stay the same. As time passes you become a different thing, who you are evolves. And true love would seem to suggest that there’s something static about a person that remains the same under all conditions and circumstances and time. That hasn’t been my experience of people, and my own experience with my own life. In the sense that true love is a certainty, I haven’t really found much evidence for the existence of certainties, it would seem to be a difficult thing for me to believe in. Mark: People obviously do change over time. Trying to find someone to truly spend the rest of your life with is obviously complicated. Sean: Yeah and it’s never happened to me. There’s times when I thought it was gonna happen and then I found that it all turned to shit about five years down the line. (laughs) And they start to want different things, or you they bored, you get bored. Mark: But I mean, some people do do it and are actually happy doing it. Sean: Oh they do. I don’t know, happiness is a weird thing isn’t it, I mean you can sort of almost make yourself be happy by limiting your horizons and cutting off certain things almost subconsciously, like a policeman inside your head, ruling out various options because you know that they conflict with your idea of happiness. That by thinking or wanting certain things you’re gonna loose certain other things, so you convince yourself that you don’t want those things. Mark: That’s interesting. I don’t know. Some people do it. My parents didn’t do it; (laughs) most of my friend’s parents didn’t last the course. Sean: Yeah, that seems to becoming more and more of a factor. My parents did! Mark: Oh really. Sean: Oh yeah. They’ve been together, they’ve never gotten divorced or anything. They’re getting on into their 50’s now. They seem sort of happy, but do you ever know what your parents are thinking really? I don’t know. I don’t really have massively in-depth conversations with them about their relationship with each other. Mark: Well that could be a little strange. (laughs) Sean: (laughs) Yeah exactly. You kinda don’t want to know do ya. Mark: But they seem to be alright then? Sean: Yeah. Mark: Well my folks broke up when I was three. Sean: Oh right, so you can barely remember it. Mark: Yeah, my early memories are pretty much of them fighting. I mean, they’re still on good terms and we all spend Christmas together and everything, which is always kind of strange because there’s two ex-wives, my mom and a wife before, and so I have a half brother and a half sister from the first marriage. So my poor dad’s there with his two ex-wives, and an ex-mother-in-law, ex-brother-in-law. Sean: Oh Jesus. Yeah it’s getting complicated. Mark: Then my brother always brings some crazy weird friend for Christmas too. Sean: Oh right. (laughs) Mark: It’s a bit of a mix. Anyway, so I was curious if now that you’ve got the second record out if when you do interviews if people are still asking a bunch of questions about Spiritualized and the break-up and all that, or if they’re focusing more on the new record now. Sean: Yeah, they’re much more on the new record. A lot of the time they don’t bring it up at all. Sometimes I sense that if I don’t bring it up, sometimes I wonder if they even know that I was in Spiritualized. I’m sure they must do. Mark: They must do if they’ve done any research. Sean: Well yeah they must do, exactly. Whether they feel they’re not interested in that, or whether that story’s been covered to death, or whether I won’t want to talk about it or whatever they feel, it doesn’t come up very much anymore. Mark: I think it’s probably very much a case of they’re worried that you don’t want to talk about it. Sean: Yeah. I mean I’ve talked about that as much as there is to talk about it really. And the various people’s perspectives on the whole thing are all out there to be read. There’s nothing new particularly that I can say. I think interest in Spiritualized has generally died off a little bit so maybe as a story it hasn’t got so much mileage in it. Mark: It’s interesting, because I interviewed you, I think it was about a few ago and we talked about it all obviously. And then I don’t know when it was, maybe late last summer, I actually ended up interviewing Jason Pierce for a Spiritualized article and talked to him about it. Sean: Oh yeah? Mark: Which is interesting to have both perspectives. Sean: I bet, yeah. Mark: Which were obviously completely conflicting. Sean: I can imagine they were (laughs). Mark: So you have to wonder who to believe. Sean: Yeah, well you have to sort of make your own mind up don’t you really. Mark: I figured there was probably a bit of truth to both sides really. Sean: Maybe. Although you do have to wonder if the situation was as he suggests as it was, like ie. that we weren’t being badly treated, you know you have to look at it from the other side, if these guys are in a band that’s becoming quite successful and they’re not being badly treated, according to the singer, why would they leave and sign to Beggars Banquet? You know what I mean? (laughs) It doesn’t really make much sense. There must’ve been a reason. Mark: Well anyway, we don’t need to dwell on that. Sean: No. Mark: But I did notice that they’re putting out that two CD’s of rarities of Spiritualized, are you on that at all. Sean: Yeah. I mean I’ve seen that it’s coming out. I understand that a lot of it’s from the period when I was in the band, so I would imagine so. They obviously don’t tell me anything about that and I have no rights over anything that they release that’s got me on it. Mark: Obviously. Sean: But yeah, I understand that there’s some stuff from when I was in the band that’s coming out. Sort of odd mixes and odd little rarities. Mark: Yeah, I think it’s the first two albums. I think they’re gonna do a second one with Ladies and Gentleman stuff and I suppose stuff from the last record, I don’t know. Sean: Yeah, that’s the kind of rumors that I’ve heard. I mean there’s not really much that is real rarity, nothing substantial anyway. Because Spiritualized were not a very prolific band in that way, it’s not like there’s lost songs as such. There’s the odd instrumental version of another song or remixed by someone else that didn’t get released, there’s that kind of thing, but it’s not like you’re gonna find a catalogue of new songs there. Mark: Yeah I was looking at the tracklisting and it was mainly stuff like that, live versions, or covers, or remixes, or instrumentals. Sean: That kind of thing, yeah. Mark: There’s a maybe few b-sides that were on 7-inches or 12-inches or something. Sean: Yeah, there’s the odd sort of thing. There’s things that were put out in the UK that probably didn’t get put out in America, stuff like specific tours that we did where we’d do like a limited edition single of a slightly different mix of one of our album tracks. That kind of thing will be on it. Mark: Well anyway, moving away from Spiritualized, you guys as Lupine Howl recorded some stuff with Massive Attack, which we also talked about last time, and when we talked the record hadn’t really come out yet and you didn’t have any indication what was on there. Now that the new record’s come out, is any of that stuff you did with them on there? Sean: Well not that I’m aware of, not that I can tell. What happened with Massive was in the course of them making that album they went through quite a bit of turmoil and they started referring to the stuff we’d done with them as album four and this one that’s just come out now is album five, album four having not been released. We’d done so much stuff and in a way they were trying, I mean 3D’s always trying to look to change direction and confound people’s expectations and I think that was part of the idea of getting us in and having a more organic, crazy, sort of more rock based sound. Mark: And then the new album they went the complete opposite direction of that. Sean: Yeah yeah. I know that he went through a lot of he didn’t really know what to do for awhile. My understanding is, well they just went off on tour now, but before they went off on tour and after they’d finished this record that they started going back to a lot of those sessions that we’d worked on with the idea of resurrecting a lot of it for the next album. Because I think they want to put out another album, quite soon after this one. Mark: Yeah, that’s what they’ve been saying. Sean: And that may have more of the stuff that we did. With Massive you never know what’s gonna happen. There isn’t really like a plan that gets stuck to, they kind of evolve their way through the whole thing. The way that they mess with sounds, as a player it makes it fuckin’ difficult to identify which bits you’ve done, or you haven’t done. They’ve twisted it up so much it’s hard to know. Mark: You know a lot of band’s have talked about, you know, we’re gonna do a new album really fast. It’s always interesting to see if they actually follow through with that. Sean: Well again, I wasn’t gonna say it, but now you’ve brought it up I wonder how fast they’ll be able to do it. It’s not in their nature to do things fast. It’s not in their nature to sort of say we’re gonna do something that’s rough round the edges and just like go, ‘BANG, there you go.’ It’s much more in their nature to fiddle with things for a long time. Mark: Well this last record wasn’t exactly well received by the press. Sean: Wasn’t it? Not in the States no? Mark: Not in England either, from what I read. I only read like Q and Mojo and stuff like that. Sean: Yeah, you’re probably right. There were some good reviews. I think people have found it a bit like Massive’s version of Kid A or something like that. I think people have had difficulty understanding it. I think it is a sort of record that grows on you a bit more. I think it’s got some really good stuff on it. Mark: No, I agree. Sean: But I’m a bit biased. (laughs) Mark: You don’t have to talk about it, you might not know anything about it, but I was wondering if you had any insight into what’s going on with 3D and being arrested and all that. Sean: Oh right. That was a load of old bollocks that was. I don’t know what that was, it was like a fit up. No charges were ever brought against him and actually, funny you should say it, cause yesterday, it was on the news here in the UK just last night, that the police are not going to bring any charges against him. It was all a big, I don’t know the exact ins and outs of it, but I know for a fact that he’s not into kiddie porn (laughs). The only reason he was arrested was for drugs and the rest of it, I’m not sure what was going on there, all kinds of conspiracy theories floating around because obviously he’s been quite vocal in his anti-war stuff and that kind of stuff and people are going on that people are trying to silence him and stuff, which sounds maybe a bit paranoid. Mark: That’s what we were hearing over here to, that it was all a big frame up to smear him. Sean: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a little bit of that to it, because he’s in a kind of perfect situation for it because they’re never gonna have a go at someone really big, household name big, like Damon from Blur, or anyone like that. He’s big enough, but he’s still not that big that it doesn’t stop him being a bit of a soft target. Right from the start over here it was a bit weird, the way the papers dealt with it they almost didn’t believe it themselves. If it was a frame-up in order to smear him, they didn’t get much smearing mileage out of it, I don’t think. A lot of the papers didn’t really report it. And the ones that did, did it in quite guarded terms, like qualifying everything they said with ‘if he is released without charge we’ll be happy to retract anything we’ve said,’ and all that kind of stuff. You kind knew straight from the beginning that there was nothing to the whole story and I think even the press sensed that. Mark: Yeah, I got that sense too. It wasn’t that well covered over here. You’d go to nme.com or that kind of thing and they kind of vaguely touched on it, but there wasn’t a big deal there either. Sean: No, I don’t think anyone believed it. I think the people who believed it most, if you went into band forums (on the internet), you’d see quite a bit of discussion about it and you’d see people boiling in their living rooms about it. ‘Another kiddie fiddler!’ and all this sort of stuff and it was like these people were just sort of not paying attention to the news stories, not really reading what was going on. Especially in the light of over here in the UK, there’s been quite a few people, not just in music, you know TV celebrities, that kind of stuff, quite a few of them have been pulled in on suspicion of child pornography and as far as I’m aware none of them have actually been charged with anything. (laughs) Yet, they’ve all seem to have been known universally as child fiddlers. In a way it’s quite a convenient thing, because you don’t have to actually prove that anyone’s actually done anything, you just sort of haul them in and question them and that seems to be enough to get the reputation. Mark: That’s not good. Sean: That’s not good at all. It’s a gift for people in the police. It’s like, we don’t have to even prove anything and we can smear this guy. Mark: Right. Well it doesn’t look like it’s gonna work with Massive Attack. Sean: No it doesn’t. I think there’s all kinds of things being mooted, like official police apology. It’s bad enough for anyone of us to be arrested for anything, let alone that. And after an initial bit of ‘oh my God’ sort of reaction, it’s all been forgotten about now. Mark: I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the war in Iraq, if you wanted to comment. Sean: Oh yeah. Well I’m not really down with people blowing people up under any circumstances really. You know, it’s a bit of a difficult scenario. I mean clearly Saddam Hussein is not the sort of guy you would want running any country, anywhere. But you have to sort of question, I don’t know, it’s slightly the thin end of the wedge when you start undermining a country’s right to self-determination. I mean he hasn’t, at least this time, he hasn’t invaded anyone and he hasn’t done anything that directly threatens any of the countries that area acting against him. So from that point of view it’s slightly worrisome. I mean, state sponsored assassination of other people’s leaders is dodgy territory. But at the same time he is obviously not one of the good guys, old Saddam, and I’m sure no one will be really crying over the fact that he’s either been killed or deposed or whatever it is. It’s more a case of what precedent it sets. And I don’t think over here that a lot of people question that he’s an evil dictator or whatever, and in a lot of ways I don’t think that they’re that upset with him being deposed, I think they’re suspicious as to the motives of both your government and ours for attacking him, you know what I mean? Obviously some of them are talking about oil and all that kind of stuff, but I think there’s kind of a gendarmy of British and American power over the rest of the world, is a suspision, and us acting as the world’s policemen is something that unnerves people a bit. I certainly don’t think many people over here think we’re going into Iraq for humanitarian reasons. And I tend to think that governments, I mean I can’t think of many cases in history where any government’s done anything for humanitarian reasons (laughs), there’s always a vested interest somewhere there. Mark: Yeah, it’s a tough one. There obviously are motives and vested interests, but then I was listening to the radio, I think it was BBC World Service or something, and they were interviewing people in America and England that were Iraqis that had fled the country that had family back there and they were saying that they had talked to their family on the phone and the family just couldn’t wait until the Americans showed up to liberate them. Sean: Yeah, well I’m not surprised, I’m not surprised about that. And that’s the good side of it. Like I say it’s not a case of the correctness of the action, it’s the more the motivation behind the action and the various precedents that it sets in terms of world politics and what we’re allowed to do as nations and the extent to which we’re allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of other self-determining countries. It’s easy to pick a country that’s like totally out there and executing hundreds, millions of its own people and say we can move in on them. But there may be other issues further down the line where the case isn’t that clear cut. Where you begin interfering in other people’s affairs because you just don’t happen to agree with the regime that they’ve got or the particular political philosophy that they’re following. Where do you draw the line between when it’s justified to interfere? I mean, I’m totally with the people in Iraq who are like, ‘yeah we can’t wait until the Americans and the British get in there and we get our country back.’ And if I lived there I’d be thinking the same thing. Mark: Yeah, totally. And of course the irony of it all is that if it wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be a Saddam Hussein regime. Sean: Well yeah, that’s where it comes down to the motives again and the interference of other people in other countries is not as clear-cut and you have to question where these actions are leading. We arm him and then we go in there to disarm him, wreck his country and get al the contracts to rebuild his country. It’s kind of like quite a good deal for us, do you know what I mean? (laughs) Mark: Yeah, in many ways. But it’s obviously very damning to foreign policy and the United Nations and all that kind of stuff. Sean: It is, but I think that both your government and ours are fairly confident that once they got into Iraq, once they’ve got him out of the way and start to unearth what he’s been getting up to all these years, you know that there’s gonna be mass graves, weapons stashes of chemical and biological weapons. I think they went in feeling fairly comfortable that once they’d gone in there and cleared him out of the way they’d be able to come up with all kinds of evidence that would quickly make people forget that the UN weren’t really behind the action. You can’t forget that the first vote on 14-41 was a unanimous vote against Saddam and with the British and the Americans. It’s like, they decided they wanted a second vote, which is more a case of legitimacy rather than legality. To the extent that they have voted on his breach of 14-41 then it is legal in the sense that the UN are a body capable of casting that judgment over whether it’s legal or not. I mean when things gets to the world level, legality, which I suppose is on any level, but especially the world level, legality becomes framed by the people with the power to enforce it. Mark: The thing that I wonder about is if they don’t find a bunch of stuff are they gonna plant it to make it seem like they did? Sean: Well probably (laughs). Mark: The other thing is, they’ve done all this bombing, what if they end blowing to bits any kind of evidence they would have? Sean: I’m sure they won’t have any problem finding or constructing evidence (laughs), I’m sure they won’t, you know what I mean? In a way rightfully so, in a way, just in the sense that the guy clearly was a bad man and he clearly did fuck his people right over. Whatever you think of the British or the Americans, I don’t think anyone can argue with that fact. Whether there’s copious amounts of evidence there or whether lots of the evidence got destroyed or what ever, it’s like I at least am fairly convinced that evidence was there at some point and he did do a lot of the things that people accuse him of and I certainly won’t be sad to see him go. I’m more worried about the various precedents that are set through, I’m always a bit uneasy about countries like yours and mine interfering. I know sometimes we can do some good, but I think good is a kind of byproduct of the actual motives for us going in there. Both of our countries like to control the world to some degree and get things going their way. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying be realistic about your governments and about people on the planet. People mainly act out of their own self-interest. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I find it better to admit that. People know where they are when you admit it, but obviously it has various implications to their electability if they start admitting that kind of thing. (laughs) Mark: (laughs) Yeah, well we’ll see what happens anyway. I was hearing that the Iraqi military were ordered not to wear anything white so it would make it harder for them to surrender, like they couldn’t wear white underwear for example. Sean: (laughs) Well I was watching it quite late last night. The figures seemed to be doubling every hour about the amount of Iraqi soldiers that had surrendered. I mean it was up to fifteen or twenty thousand of them by the time I went to bed. But last night, I don’t know if you saw the pictures of it last night, but they did seem to fuckin’ level the place. Mark: Yeah I saw some of it, yeah. Sean: People were saying, you know journalists who had been covering stuff since Vietnam were saying that they had not seen a military onslaught like that since Vietnam. I gotta say that it did look like a fairly brutal bombing of Baghdad last night and various other towns and cities in Iraq. Mark: You have to admire those journalists that are still in Baghdad covering that. Sean: I know. Mark: That’s pretty fuckin’ ballsy. Sean: (laughs) I can imagine it being quite exciting. I’ve always fancied a bit of journalism, because do sort of get into that sort of thing, and all my family are journalists. Mark: Oh really? Sean: Yeah, they’ve all been journalists Mark: It could be exciting, but fuckin’ scary too. Sean: Scary as well, yeah exactly. But there’s got to be a bit of scariness to make things exciting hasn’t there. Mark: Right, yeah. It actually leads to another question I sometimes ask people, I often get weird responses, I ask people if they’ve ever had any kind of near-death experiences or have ever been in a life-threatening situation. Has anything like that ever happened to you? Sean: Um, no I can’t say that I’ve really been in anything that’s clearly been life-threatening. I’ve been in a few car crashes kind of thing, but I’ve never really felt, well I mean I suppose you always think when you’ve been in a car crash, looking back on it, if things had been slightly different you could’ve been killed. But, no, not really. In a way, maybe that’s part of my problem, I don’t know. (laughs) But it maybe explains some things. I’m reasonably sort of reckless in some ways in terms of my lifestyle, like concerns for my health and that kind of stuff. I’ve got just about every kind of vice going and people that have maybe had more of a scare take more care of themselves. They have this sudden realization of how important life is. Mark: That might be the case. I interviewed Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and he was telling me about how he almost drowned in a swimming pool when he was fifteen because he couldn’t swim until he was eighteen and now he’s a compulsive seatbelt wearer and all that kind of stuff, he’s really careful. Sean: Yeah. I wouldn’t want to be like that to be honest with you. I think fear for your own safety can inhibit your life a bit. I would feel that it can for me. I would like to be in a position that I don’t want to be scared with things. The last time when we went over to the States it was a couple of weeks after September the 11th, and Mike, my musical partner, guitarist, he wouldn’t go, he wouldn’t fly out of fear that the plane was going to be blown up or something was going to happen. I would find that inhibiting if I was worried to that extent. I was worried at all. Mark: Were you guys supposed to perform? Sean: No we came over to do press. It might’ve been when you interviewed me, I don’t know where you were when you interviewed me, whether I was here or in the States, but I came over and did a load of interviews in the States. I think one of those things where they sit you in the office of the record company just all day long and you just do one call after another. Mark: I actually interviewed you twice. When I interviewed the first time I think it was when you were in New York. But somebody had borrowed my tape recorder before that and a roadie had dropped a box on it or something so I realized after the fact that half the interview was garbled because the tape recorder was fucked. And so I think that was in New York and then I scheduled a follow up thing when you were back in the UK. So I think the first time I interviewed you was when you were in New York. Sean: Right, okay. Well that was the time right after September the 11th. I went to see it, I was curious to see what was going on in New York after something like that. I went down and had a look at all the rubble and all that, and pretty horrendous it was too. Streets from, I don’t know, about ten blocks from the site you had put your t-shirt over your face sort of thing, it was just a horrendous smell and an acrid dust in the air. You couldn’t actually stay down there for that long, you had to get out and get a bottle of water. But it was quite good to go out there. People in New York showed a lot of good character. We were going down and we were eating in restaurants that were around about the area of the Twin Towers and stuff like that because these people had been massively effected, their trade, their livelihood, had been massively effected by it so people in New York were going out of their way to help them out. I wanted to go over there and not be one of those people that gets scared and stays at home and then makes the situation worse. Mark: Well I just have a couple more questions. You kind of touched on it when we were talking about labels, but I was curious what the future for the band was. Do you still see yourselves doing it as a band even if you never really achieve larger mainstream success? What kind of level does Lupine Howl have to do it for you guys to keep doing it? Sean: It doesn’t have to get out of the four walls of our practice room to be honest with you and it never has had to do that. The only reason I’ve ever taken anything beyond that is basically, I mean to some people see it as a little bit crass and some people think you’ve got to teach the world to sing and all the rest of it, that’s never been my gig really, and I’ve basically taken it further than that, obviously because I get the means to work in the studios and do things to a higher standard, creatively you get a chance to express yourself more, which again is for your own benefit, rather than the benefit of anyone else. After that I’ve really only done it on a professional level so that I don’t have to do a job (laughs), and that was been my overriding factor through a lot of what I’ve done is that I’ve just not wanted to do a job because I’ve not wanted to do something I don’t enjoy doing. I’m fortunate enough now to be the position that even if the band isn’t selling records, I’m well known enough and good enough as a player to go and play bass for people and do sessions and that kind of thing. Mark: Have you done that kind of thing already? Sean: I’m doing some of that stuff at the moment, yeah. Neil Davidge, Massive (Attack)’s producer is working on a new project with this girl who goes under the name Pocket Angel. Mark: Pocket Angel? Sean: Pocket Angel, yeah. I’ve just been doing all the bass for that. Mark: Is just kind of a throw away pop kind of thing? Sean: I wouldn’t say it was throw away pop, it’s more than that. I mean, she’s a songwriter and she can play piano and stuff. Neil’s been brought in to give it it’s edginess and we’ve been brought in to that as well. I mean, it’s not Lupine Howl, it’s not Massive Attack, but it’s not shit. It’s slightly Portisheady, but it’s obviously got the female singer sort of vibe going on with it and she’s a reasonably good-looking girl. I can see them putting her on the cover of a few magazines in slightly skimpy clothing maybe (laughs). Yeah, no it’s a good. It’s like, I’m working with Neil and Lee (Shephard), who mixes and co-produces our records, he’s also the engineer at Massive’s studio, so I’m getting to work with the people that I work with anyway so it’s a nice situation for me. Mark: Do you feel like you have a pretty devoted fanbase that you’ve built up for Lupine Howl, what kind of fanbase do you think you have, like on the internet and stuff like that? Sean: I’m not too sure, to be honest with you. I mean there definitely is a reasonable fanbase and despite the lack of promotion and the seeming lack of awareness of the band we actually sold something like fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, copies of the first album. I don’t know how much this one sold, but they do tend to trickle out, mainly on a word of mouth basis I think. So I think there is some sort of fanbase there. Certainly when we play gigs in London or Bristol, in the major towns, we always get quite a lot people turning up despite the fact that the gigs aren’t particularly well promoted either. Because promoters tend to respond to what the record company’s doing. If the record company needs to lead any promoter’s campaign, if they don’t feel that the record company’s really advertising the band much, then they don’t want to stick their neck out and perhaps spend a lot of money on promotion and still have no one turn up because obviously nationwide promotion is more effective than local. So there’s people out there. I’ve got to say to some extent I’m more and more surprised that there are and how many of them there are. And when our manager goes over to the States he’s like, ‘yeah these guys want to put you on, they reckon they’re gonna be able to sell out the gig,’ and all this sort of stuff. So there are those people there. So yeah that’s one we’re thinking of doing, I was thinking of doing it more in conjunction with people in the local territories. Like I was saying before, cooler underground labels in the States, seeing if we could hook up with them in some way and coordinate what we would do on the internet with what they could do in their local territory. Mark: Interesting. Last question I really have is that you said you’ve been writing stuff since Bar At the End of the World and I was wondering what progression you’ve made on the next record, any indication of what it’s gonna sound like, when it’s gonna come out, all that kind of stuff? Sean: Well, we’ve recorded to a reasonable standard about six or seven tracks and then we’ve got a whole load of them written, because both Mike and myself, we’re all Apple Mac’d up at home, so we record a lot at home. So there’s a lot of material there. I would say that the way things have been going at the moment, and it’s not to say that they’re not susceptible to change, but we’ve been almost recording live, sort of old Beatles style, which is has given it a more immediate sound. The songwriting’s developed as well so I think the songs are more concise and I definitely think we get better every time we do something. I don’t really think there’d be a massive change in direction. I think anything we’d do would be more like The Bar At the End of the World than it would be like the first album. But where as the Bar At the End of the World is quite dreamy and psychedelic, this next one would maybe be a bit more, not raw, but a bit more live sounding, a bit less buried in odd noises and huge delays and stuff like that, a bit more in your face. I think some of the best we’ve done is some of the stuff we’ve been working on recently. Mark: So are basically gonna work out what you’re doing with labels, finish it and puty it out next year? Sean: Exactly, yeah. Like I say, the advantage of being able to do session work and stuff like that is that it can give you the money to (record). I mean by the end Beggars were hardly giving us any fuckin’ money anyway. It’s like you can do session jobs and fund your band better than they were funding it. And because of the network of people we’ve got around us and access to studio that we’ve got for very little money, the need for the record company wasn’t really so much in terms of funding the recording, because they never really did that anyway, we did it by virtue of the fact that we knew people who would work for nothing or work for massively below their market value or give us studio time for free, that kind of thing. We only really needed them to market the record and fund our live stuff, which they never really did (laughs), so you’ve got to wonder what their purpose was really. The only thing getting in the way at the moment is that because we’re having to do various bits of session work that’s imposing a time restriction in the sense that we’re not free all day, every day to work on our stuff in the way that we were. But like I say, the way we’re working now is much quicker and much more direct and practically live, a lot of the stuff that we’re putting down. We play together as a band really well now and we can bang down the meat of the track in one take and then just concentrate on overdubs. So that actually means that we spend less time and less money getting the results we need. And in a way we’ve found the results we get are kind of better for being that much more on the case with it, fiddling less with it and recording it in a more straight ahead way. Mark: You were saying in terms of promotions the record company wasn’t doing much, what about publicity, have you done a bunch of interviews for this record, even for small publications? Sean: Not really, no, nowhere near as much as I did last time around. You’re the, well I can count on one hand the amount of American ones I’ve done, whereas last time around I totally lost count of how many I did. And the same for European ones. Although this time around I did do quite a few for Germany and Italy and stuff like that. There seem to be a reasonable amount of support for us in both of those countries and the interviews are often like, ‘why don’t you come out here? I could get you a gig out here.’ And I’m like, ‘yeah tell me about it.’ And it’s like mad. (laughs) Mark: Well I think for the first record definitely there was still the whole thing about you’d just left Spiritualized and stuff, so there was definitely an exciting angle for writers to write about. Sean: Sure, sure. Mark: Now it’s just about your new record, which is a great record, which is an exciting angle in itself, but it’s not quite the same. Sean: It hasn’t got the same gossip sort of credentials. And it also doesn’t tie in with a band that has sold a reasonable amount of records. And obviously people fill column space, the bottom line when you’re talking about more mainstream publications, to sell copies of their magazine. And obviously if the band is not as well known it’s not going to sell as many copies of their magazine, by definition. Mark: Well if you find the right readers you can sell copies of your magazine writing about good stuff. Sean: Yeah exactly. But that’s more your sort of area of things isn’t it. (laughs) Mark: (laughs) Yeah, totally. Sean: As opposed to Spin magazine or stuff like that. Mark: All those magazines, they do cover good bands sometimes, but they give them so little space. Sean: Exactly, yeah. That’s why you have an underground. And I think one of our problems have been, through our previous record company we weren’t really getting to those people and we’ve got to find a way of getting into the underground side of things more and trying to build up something that’s a bit more real, rather than sort of being neither in one place nor the other, because we weren’t a mainstream bands, we were never gonna be really on Top of the Pops and on billboards and the sides of buses, but we were being promoted by a record label that is for all intents and purposes a worldwide major record label and so we were neither one thing nor another. Whereas you can look at underground labels that will promote bands I would say who’s commercial potential is significantly less than ours, but because of their enthusiasm and because they know where to place their band, they end up selling more records. Mark: It’s just a case of finding that label. Sean: It is, yeah. Mark: Well good luck with that. Sean: Yeah, cheers. We’ll definitely keep tryin’. Mark: Hopefully someway you guys would come out here and play. Sean: Yeah, I’d love to, I’d fuckin’ love to. Mark: I know a bunch of people that would definitely go and see you guys. Sean: Yeah, I’m sure we could get some stuff together there, it’s just a case of finding someone that would bring us out there. I would say over the course of the next few months that’s the sort of thing we’re gonna be working on. Since the inception of this band I was always like, ‘America’s where it’s gonna be at for us.’ England’s such a fucked up country music-wise and America’s just a much more dependable option. And plus the fact that I’ve had so much experience in America, I feel sort of slightly part American almost, at least I feel that I know what’s going on with them musically. Mark: Yeah, there’s a big scene out here in LA of people that are into bands like that, that are into your type of stuff. Sean: Yeah, that’s my feeling on the thing. So yeah, we’re just going to have to see what we can come up with. Mark: Well it was good talking to you again. Sean**: Yeah, and you. Since this interview was conducted, the war in Iraq has ended, but of course no weapons of mass destruction have been found as yet. Massive Attack has yet to announce anything about recording their fifth album. It seems highly unlikely that Lupine Howl will be touring the States for The Bar At the End of the World, although they will be opening for Massive Attack at a Bristol homecoming show on August 25th, along with Goldfrapp, The Streets, The Bees (aka A Band of Bees) and Martina Topley Bird (ex-Tricky), the first three of that fantastic line-up are also interviewed along with Lupine Howl in Issue 4 of Under the Radar. Lupine Howl has yet to announce what label(s) their as yet to be finished third record will be coming out on. Check back with us for any future Lupine Howl news. www.lupinehowl.com www.vinylhiss.com