Now that you’ve read our article on the end of Add N to (X) on page 36 of Issue 4 of Under the Radar, scroll below to read more quotes from the last ever North American interview the band did before breaking up. When we spoke with Barry 7 and Steven Claydon at Silverlake’s Spaceland Club in LA they had already thrown Ann Shenton out of the band, but still felt the need to tour in support of their last, and possibly best, album Loud Like Nature (Mute). Unfortunately, we were informed by the band’s publicist a couple of months after our interview that the band completely broken up and that ours was the last Stateside interview and photo shoot they’d granted. Read on for random quotes from the duo, compiled under different subject headings.

“ It’s not like making three solo projects, it’s very much about making stuff under the Add N to (X) umbrella and then see how it would work when we brought it all back together. We were surprised by how cohesive it was. I think our other albums are more schizophrenic.” – Steven Claydon'

“ It was pretty much like we’d sit around a table and then we’d play everybody the stuff we’d done and then we used the stuff that would work with everybody else’s. It was pretty much a considered choice of how it would all fit together. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s left on the cutting room floor, but there’s loads of stuff that would work and loads of stuff that we’re most proud of because you wanted it to be a surprise and be surprised by everyone in the band. Instead of having that kind of stupid argy-bargy that goes on in the studio between what’s good and what’s bad, and what’s accepted, and what this sounds like and what that sounds like. We’ve been doing it for six years and we kind of come to a point like every band does where they either go on and they do the same shit for the rest of their career and they make fuck loads of money, or they break up and decide to go and experiment either within their own band, do something different. Or you’re constantly fighting against these kind of rigid impositions that journalists force upon you or you force upon yourselves. There are plenty of bands I could name that go off in directions that don’t necessarily attack the origins of where that band started. And for us it’s always been a multi-dimensional mind kind of band. It’s not something we’ve ever given a shit about. We’re not rich through it. It’s just something we’ve been allowed to do by our record company. I don’t think any other record company in the world would let us go on this long doing what we do. And I think that, ‘why not, why shouldn’t we challenge all the rules’ because this is where we kind of end up. This is a shit -hole, you know what I mean. And it’s just like endless shit-holes across America, endless shit-holes across England, endless shit-holes across Europe. So for me the whole kind of touring thing is really fuckin’ hard work. When it comes to making records it’s a fantastic experience. Why not do what the fuck you like, because when you come here you can’t, you’re under so much pressure and constraints, and you’re playing for a bar. And that what pisses me off about this kind of level of thing, you’ve got no control. The only control you’ve got is over your own shopping activities, which is severely curtailed because you do like twelve shows in a row. So it’s that kind of constant nonsense. Doing an album is better so you should be able to do it anyway you like because everything else is very much structured and formulated.” – Barry 7

“ We’re really good friends and it’s just like not a cool thing to do. But I mean clearly she has problems going on. I don’t think she’d been able to do it had we forced her.” – Steven Claydon.

“ We don’t know how it’s gonna work. We just felt that we ought to do these shows just because we’ve got an album and we think it’s a good album, and fuck her if she doesn’t want to do any of the work, any of the real work. I always kind of thought she’s maybe done a Brian Jones or Syd Barrett, and that kind of makes her a lot more fucking interesting than she actually is. So we felt that we ought to do the hard work and go
out and play the songs, because they’re good. We think it’s a good record and so rather than canceling again because of her whims. So there’s a lot of anger there. So we don’t know how it’s going to turn out but we just wanted to do these gigs.” – Barry 7

“ The whole desk is fucked. Our house engineer is fixing all their equipment just so we can play tonight, which is a bit of a drag. And they won’t give us a drink.” – Steven Claydon

“ I don’t know what I’d fuckin’ do with it. I haven’t got a clue. I was thinking about it today: what would I want?
I don’t want much more than this.” Claydon says.

“ Apart from a Rolls Royce Phantom V5.” Barry 7 jokes.

“ Oh that yeah,” Claydon plays along.

“You just got to do stuff, that’s what we’ve always been about: moving forward and challenging what you do, opening the envelope, bringing more things in, trying to force more and more stuff down you, force feed yourself with different things and see how it comes out. There’s never been a particular format or formula or agenda, only in as much that we just want to keep testing what music is to us, what sound is. And it’s as visual as it is audio. It’s all about those things. So the moment we find ourselves in a tract or being complacent we’ll jump ship. I mean there’s enough reasons for us to pack it in but we’re not gonna.” – Steven Claydon

“ I don’t think we understand what pop music is, that’s the main thing. We don’t understand what that is and we don’t understand what experimentation is because as far as we’re considered the job just gets done, there it is, it’s there, it’s a flash, it’s a moment of what you do. And to your own ears you find it exciting. And some of the things, how we’ve been described and how our songs have been described like, fuck, I don’t understand it, I don’t see where those people are coming from and I think that most of those people have kind of a short sonic attention span or their limited CD collections don’t necessarily go any deeper so they wouldn’t necessarily know where we’re coming from anyway because it’s six years worth of really investigating what the instruments will do, records, you know all these different things that influence you and inspire you. In England nobody fucking knows who Kim Fowley is. It amazed me that every single review of our album read ‘with guest star Richard Hawley.’ Now Richard’s a fuckin’ great bloke, but he hasn’t done as fucking much for music as Kim Fowley has. It’s very strange.” - Barry 7On being labeled Electro-Clash

“ Electro-clash has a lot more to do with dance music and we’re much more about rock ‘n’ roll, we always feel like we have been.” - Steven Claydon

“ It’s like putting a country and western band with Slipknot, they both have guitars.” – Steven Claydon

“ It’s more about bands that don’t sound like us that have an approach to their music which is daring, original and interesting rather than appropriating other people’s music from twenty years ago, which I just don’t understand. People have the audacity to call what we do retro, I defy anyone to tell me what it sounds like or who we’ve ripped off.” – Steven Claydon

Bad music is just bad music

“ It’s just infuriating to see bad music being championed as good music. That’s all that bothers us. We don’t have an ego where that’s concerned. We’ve always know that what we’ve done is not going to be easily digestible or translatable.” – Steven Claydon “ We always tried to branch off and do a million different things, it all fits together like this crazy city or some weird Frankenstein’s monster,”- Barry 7