AR: Where are you at right now?

SH: I’m actually outside the pub.

AR: Sounds good.

SH: Yeah, it’s like ten o’clock here. I actually completely forgot that I was doing an interview, cause I’m useless like that. And it’s my first Friday night out in my home town for about a month, so I was hitting it hard.

AR: So are you looking forward to hitting North America? It’s sometimes a bit of a daunting thing for bands from the UK when they come over here…

SH: Yeah, I think from when we first started the band, it was always one of our…you know, just that sort of schoolboy dream to get your band out and play around the world. And especially America, with a lot of the songs being influenced by a lot of things…coming from America. And so yeah, we’re just really excited about it. And coming up to Canada is…I mean, a lot of the music that we really love and that inspired us is from Montreal, so I have a huge soft spot for Canada.

AR: Which bands were those in particular?

SH: Well, basically everything that’s on the Constellation label…God Speed You Black Emperor and Frankie Sparo and then the sort of offshoot bands, Alien 8 and what-not.

AR: You mentioned your focus on the U.S., which is obviously pretty noticeable on the album. Have you spent a lot of time there, or is it just kind of an interest from afar?

SH: I mean, I’ve spent some time there. It was mainly just the sort of stuff that I was reading and was interested in at the time, really. There were a lot of references to America on the record, but I think there’s also a lot of stuff that isn’t meant to be specifically inspired or in relation to anything from America. Like Black Dollar Bills, for instance – the title has nothing to do with America. Black dollar bills is a business term, for lost money within a company. A British company would say “I did a million black dollar bills this year,” or a Japanese company would say “1 million black dollar bills this year” – you know, they wouldn’t say pounds or yen or whatever. So I think a lot of the things get taken to be more specifically American than they actually are.

But as I said, the stuff I was interested in when we were writing these songs that ended up being on the record was this idea of the frontier spirit of these people traveling to the new world to set up this kind of pure society, and just sort of how far that had fallen by the wayside. And I think that’s the nature of many countries around the world, really.

As I say, it was just the thing at the time. The new stuff we’re doing now is a lot more sort of London-centric – and Russian, for some reason, because I’ve been reading loads of stuff about Russia at the moment.

AR: So you’re working on new material already?

SH: Yeah, we tend to write pretty constantly, which I’m sure will dry up eventually. We just did some b-sides for the next single here in the U.K., and we had a bit of time so we demoed four new songs which might end up being on the record or not.

AR: I saw a reference in another piece to your saying that you want to go a little harder on the next album. Is that true?

SH: I think it was just one thing I’ve said, you know. People have started asking us bizarrely quickly, I think, ’cause the record hasn’t been out very long and not many people have heard it. But I think on that day, yeah, but I was still outside our rehearsal rooms when I said that. I was playing electric guitar, ’cause I used to just be a guitarist in a band and I kind of miss doing that a little bit.

The b-sides we’ve just done, we wrote and recorded them in the studio, and I’m playing electric guitar in all of those. But the next record might just be a completely acoustic record. I’ve changed my mind on what the next record’s going to sound like every two minutes. So it just depends on what’s sort of going on around us at the time, really.

AR: Your live shows sound pretty elaborate, with the projectionists and all. Are you going to be able to do all that over here, or is it going to be stripped down?

SH: No, no. There’s obviously budgetary restrictions, but that’s the situation when we’re [in the U.K.] as well – we’re not a cheap band to put on shows. But we’ve always tried to do that, whether we’ve been in the smallest venue known to man, and the projections come out about the size of a TV screen. It’s so integral to us that visuals aren’t an affectation – you know, they’re not just an afterthought. They’re pretty integral to the songs and how we want to put ourselves across. So definitely when we’re in North America and Canada and Japan we’re going to as well. I couldn’t imagine playing a show without them, really.

I think often when we play – as I say, we’ve played such small places, and we’ve always tried to do it - I think people tend to appreciate the fact that we’re doing our best to get it across as well as we can. It’s obviously easier for us – not just the projections, but the way that we sound and stuff – to play bigger venues. But playing smaller venues, I think people appreciate the fact that we’re doing our best, they appreciate the effort.

AR: Most of the songs on the album are kind of obliquely political, but they’re not really directly commenting on the world right now. Are we going to find you at an anti-Bush or an anti-Blair rally, or are you more…

SH: No, I think we’ve always been slightly nervous when we get painted as a political band – not so much because we haven’t got anything to say, because we do and it’s in the songs. But in the songs it’s more based around the sort of personal political – the idea of just being one person stuck in a pretty unpleasant world these days.

I remember somebody said… I can’t even remember where I read it, but somebody said that if you put politics into art of any form, whether it’s a painting or a piece of music or a film or anything, it automatically makes it uglier and kind of corrupts it. And I think that’s totally true if things get too specific. There’s bands who’ve managed to pull that sort of thing off – you know, Rage Against the Machine were pretty specific. But that’s not the band we are. Every song we do is kind of a combination of about a hundred ideas all thrown into one song, and one line relates to something and one line relates to something else.

AR: Among the different songs, there’s quite a contrast. It seems some are extremely optimistic, and others much less so…

SH: Yeah, yeah, I think so. To me, there’s a core underlying thing running through all the songs on the record of hope – sort of hope as a genuine feeling, not as some sort of an intellectual concept.

I think a lot of bands make absolutely amazing records, but they’re just miserable records. And I think people should just say “Yeah, I made a miserable record, and it’s great.” You know, a lot of those records are my favourite records. But with us, I don’t think we did make a miserable record, or a specifically angry record. I mean, Me Ves Y Supres seems to me like it’s the saddest song on the record, but it ends on finding some sort of positivity and hope through getting angry about feeling that sad, and not just wallowing in those feelings. So much as there’s up and down moments on the record, to me, anyway, there’s this core element of hope.

AR: Both lyrically and musically, it’s pretty demanding stuff. Do you think mainstream audiences are able to wrap their heads around it, or are you not even really shooting for those audiences?

SH: It’s not the kind of record I think you can just sit and listen to once and totally understand it. But that was the record that we were always going to make.

Back in the ’70s or early ’80s, one of the biggest bands in the world was the Clash, who were really pushing themselves musically and writing incredible lyrics that meant things to people. We find it quite troubling that these days, the biggest bands in the world are the lowest common denominator – just the blandest of the bland, really. That’s a real shame. I think people are underestimated…for the sole reason that I’ve always been inspired when stuff that’s considered to be slightly more left-wing becomes really popular. You know, I’d love to be a great band, and I’d love people to understand us. But it does take that time.

But then, you know, it happened recently. I remember when Kid A went to number one in North America – to us, that was such an inspiring moment. ’Cause this is a band who could’ve made some horrible cock-rock stadium-filling record, and they chose just to follow what exactly they wanted to do, and to me made their best record. And that was number one in the States.

I just think people are underestimated so often that this idea of being more cerebral – that you can’t be a mainstream band…I find it all a bit troubling, really.

AR: I’m curious about your songwriting process. All the songs are credited to the entire band…is there a division of labour there?

SH: This is obviously a sore subject, ’cause you know bands. I mean, I write all the lyrics, and I write sort of sketches of the majority of the songs, and then people sort of write their parts with some direction from me, or sometimes they just come up with something totally different and it’s great. They generally tend to start from the core of a song that I’ve written and then people sort of do their parts, but everybody’s completely integral – it’s not a singer-songwriter sort of situation.

AR: The one thing I should ask you about before we go, although I’m sure you’re pretty tired of this by now…Obviously there was a pretty rough time for your band earlier in the year (with the suicide of guitarist Jimmy Lawrence). The album was recorded entirely before that, to my understanding…

SH: Yeah.

AR: Has what happened changed the nature of the band? Is it going to be reflected in music in the future, or is it still the same sort of chemistry?

SH: Obviously it’s a different chemistry, ’cause he’s not here now. We’ve got a new guitarist who’s just one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met, just for the way that he’s handled this entire situation. ’Cause I think for Mike, who’s our new guitarist, it was as hard as it has been for us. But the first time we rehearsed together, it was really incredible – and basically all that we’ll ever say any more about Jimmi is that he’s our best friend, you know, and we’ll forever miss him. And if he was still here now, then I’d want to have Mike in as an extra guitarist, so they were both in the band.

You know, I’m sure it does put a different spin on things, but we were lucky to have something so positive and something to put all our energies into as opposed to just sitting in a pub and turning into alcoholics and just crying 24 hours a day. We were really lucky that we had the record to pour ourselves into and to sort of carry us through it. And playing shows now and playing these songs that we worked on the six of us, and having his part being heard by people so they realize what a great musician he was, is to me the only thing that could be done and the most fitting tribute to him that we could ever give. And I know that he’d just be unbelievably proud of us now.