I thought Manchester was open-minded for that sort of music?

Dan: Yes, Manchester [bands] have been doing that sort of stuff for ages even back to New Order, they were a band that used keyboards. It has been done in the past and it has been very successful.

Bruce: The thing is, there’s a lot of bands that use keyboards, it’s more the dance aspect of a band, not specifically just a band using the keyboards.

Dan: It seems like a live band is making dance music.

It’s probably fair to say that there seems to be a lot of dance music acts now with just one person using a laptop to play live performances.

Dan: We were saying to each other that having a live band playing is something visually you can see on stage. We like dancing and moving around as we play, and we’d rather it was one person like that.

Fiona: It gives a more spontaneous energetic feel to it, if it was all just come out of laptop, it’d be a bit flatter, you wouldn’t get that kind of energy.

Dan: In terms of the audience feedback as well, you’d just be standing there, interacting, you could talk to them if you were actually playing where as it’s all to do if it’s just one person playing on a laptop.

You released songs on Fat Boy Slim’s label. How did it happen?

Bruce: They just got in touch with us.

Dan: When we were looking at releasing “Muzzle no.1” as a single, our manager, who came on board then, had ignored a few people and gone onto smaller labels than Fat Boy Slim’s to release the small single. Some of the people were really interested and really keen, so they released the single. But then they wanted to do an album since they had a lot of love and appreciation in what we were doing. So we decided to do an album and it turned out brilliant, we’ve got a great team to work with. It’s a really small team but they are all really enthusiastic.

In Japan, it’s a rare thing to have a manager before you actually release, is it a common thing to have managers in England?

Dan: Yes, in the UK. It’s weird, there’s a lot of things happening, you can have people in the team before you can sign a record deal. One of the first people that approached us was a lawyer to start off with straight away. He was helping us along with the legal side of things into various contacts that Dave made in the industry. We had a whole team in place before we had the record deal.

Fiona: A lot of the bands I know, they would just immediately get a mate in when they just formed to become a manager. We didn’t do that, we waited.

Nathan: We all had experiences of having bad management and not bad management, we’ve all been around enough to realise how things work.

Fiona: When they have friends in, at the end of the day, when it gets to the point of getting the record deal, and when things start moving, they don’t know what to do. They get in trouble for having gotten the wrong person. So we all knew it was important to spend some time to find the right person.

Fiona: It’s one of the most important things for a manager to negotiate the record deal and get it in place.

Nathan: A lot of the record companies actually like to deal with the business side with the band. In England, most bands like to do gigs and have drinks, but when it gets down to the actual business, they prefer to have someone that are managing rather than people who are just drunk in a bar.

Dan: It’s good to take the first manager at the time, but we did do as much as we could ourselves. But then, when it gets to a point where you spend more time e-mailing than writing songs, there was that much information to deal with and it was getting too tight.

You have been releasing records through Fat Boy Slim’s label through a management contact. The reason you released through the Kitsune label was because of MySpace, right? Did people contact you directly?

Fiona: Some people just come towards us, some people go through the labels, some people get in touch with our manager, if someone gets in touch with us, we’ll pass it on to our manager, or the label, or talk to each other. We’ve all got really good communication with each other, so it all ends up the same anyway.

Who’s in charge of MySpace?

Fiona: He’s (Bruce) obssessed with it- if you find him on a computer, he would be on Myspace.

Bruce: It’s really good to speak to the fans and it’s good to get feedback as well, like to know what songs they like and why they like the band, you know, it’s a really good way of helping the band as well. Actually, I speak to a few Japanese people, and last night we went out with some friends from Myspace. There was a girl I was writing to, and then I met her, but she couldn’t speak English, she must have been using a translation engine.

Bruce: This friend from Myspace sang “ichi, ni, san, shi” in one of our songs.

Dan: It’s on the album. She came to see us in London in the studio, and while she was there we got her to sing it down a microphone, and she sent it through the internet. She was in a band, so she came to London to play a gig.