Do you have a name for the album yet?

No we haven’t got a name yet. What was it I’ve been seeing floating round the net, which I think again was Darren doing a pissed interview with something like Tokyo tour ’98? but no we haven’t heard a title that has struck us as even remotely amusing, we haven’t been to the dogs recently either. It’s due in September but there will probably be a track in June, we’re doing Glastonbury, possibly a couple of festival dates in Europe, pop over to the states for a couple of dates in the summer and come back here and do V98, but my girlfriend is having a baby at the end of July so things must cool down for a little while. Hopefully there’ll be a new book out, around the same time as the tour, it’ll be a sequel to the skyscraper book, and again that’s why I’m walking round looking so spacey, oh, oh the work, oh crikey. It’s all exciting.

Has there been a shift or mood change in the activities and attitudes surrounding the next album?

Probably, yeh. I mean we’re still interested in groove and dance music. There’s a lot more text on this record so far than any of the other records, it’s a lot more verbal.

The drummer that you’re using, is he a live session musician?

Yeh it’s a guy called Trevor Morace who was Bjork’s drummer on the last tour, but who’s a really old friend of ours. The first time we were together was as members of The Experimental Soundfield at Glastonbury in ’92. We’ve just been mates ever since.

In the stuff that I’ve heard before you combine elements that are very controllable like heavily quantised beats and samples with your voice and guitare etc which are obviously not beat or tone perfect.

Well the notion of first take is very important to us; that’s why quite often, I’m singing out of tune or out of time and stuff like that, and it’s not only because I’m not a particularly good singer, but it’s because in that first take where the melody is being improvised and the rhythms are going down very spontaneously, there’s just going to be a feel about it and we might do it three, four times after that and get the notes right and get the rhythm right, but the feel won’t be right. For us then those kinds of elements are really important mixed in with the ability to make something really precise; hence the sequencing and hard disc recording enabling us to mix up those textures.

After the success of the last album and the somewhat meteoric impact of Born Slippy there are a lot of new people in to contact with your music. Has this effected the way you think about the band?

That’s partially the reason for us taking nearly a year away; so that we could de-tox. There’s something that happens when you start to sell records in the quantities that we did after Born Slippy and Trainspotting. No matter how hard you try, it has an effect on your judgement and so your sense of aesthetics alters and it can alter quite radically without you really realising; and it’s important to take a step back from the momentum that’s being created by the sales figures and the exposure, because that exposure is quite artificial. We’ve always been very particular about the way we work and working at the speed we’re happy with; this thing comes along and starts bowling you along at it’s own pace and you’ve just got to stop. It wasn’t difficult, I mean our thing is not to sell records more than anyone else or be the biggest most famous, hugest thing; it’s to make things that turns us on, so therefore other people might [be turned on] as well.

So what does turn you on, what excites you?

What goes on in this building, you know, Tomato, antirom (hooray), not because you’re here (because I’m from antirom and he’s not just being nice) I mean I’ ve said it in many interviews. It probably excites me more than anything, because when I walk in the building, it’s always changing and it raises the game all the time and I keep wanting to rise to that level. Musically what happens in this building both sonically and visually is very responsible for the direction that we go in as a band. I mean what we’d like is for like the building to go on tour. There’s that thing in Monty Python (The Meaning Of Life) where the building goes off sailing, you know stick a giant sail on top and just leave Soho. We’ve been discussing this quite a lot, that the things that people do , instead of just being visual attachments to the band, somehow start to become more integrated. We have a group of people who are all very skilled in their own right, all of which can operate happily and autonomously, coming together to make something special. That’s something that we intend to pursue this year and make happen. There’s talk of setting up an installation space and broadcasting to get to the territories that we otherwise couldn’t get to this year.

Thanks Karl

We at antirom are all looking forward to hear the album as I’m sure are countless others dotted around the globe. The rest of the Tomatoes haven’t heard a thing yet; and they won’t until the whole thing is mixed down and I guess in some notion, a complete thing. This sense of ceremony is indicative of their fundamental pride and sensitivity about what they make. I hope we’ll all be invited to be a part of the album’s first audience.