With the way you went about Loser Friendly and the way it was marketed, were you surprised by the attention it received?

Simon: Yeah, we were, considering it cost $2000 to make! [Laughs]

Russell: We did have a lot of belief in it, as well, and when you look back at it it's amazing just how much belief we actually had! But I think you need that sometimes.

What did you take away from that experience?

Russell: That you don't have to spend a quarter of a million dollars on making a good album.

Simon: [Laughing] And a quarter of a million's cheap, anyway!

Do you think the Internet is still a viable alternative to the major label route?

Simon: I think it's great for a band who was at our level a year or two years ago. It's fantastic... amazing! But we worked up to a point where we wanted to go beyond that.

Is Freeloader Records still active?

Simon: No. We never even trademarked it or anything. It was just something we made up! [Laughs]

Russell: We were broke, so we just told people, "We're in this big record company called Freeloader Records!"

Speaking of registered trademarks, you have the registered trademark -- ® -- predominantly displayed after the band's name. It's an off question, but I'm just curious as to why?

Simon: Oh, yeah! Where did see that?

[Laughing] On your website!

Simon: It shouldn't be! [Laughing] We were supposed to take it off!

Russell: What was that?

Simon: The registered trademark after our name. Unless you're a company you're not supposed to have it after your name.

Russell: Oh, really?

[Everyone laughs]

Simon: Yeah.

Russell: See how green we are?

Simon: We did it and then someone told us we couldn't do it, but I guess we still haven't taken it off... because we're rebels! [Laughing]

Just reverse the image and make it backwards.

Simon: It stands for "rebels" anyway!

How did you all get involved in music? What was the spark that made you throw it all away for a career as a musician?

Russell: Simon's got a wonderful little story he wants to tell you.

Simon: Well, not actually very exciting.

Russell: We were all living in a seaside town called Hastings, in England. It's a great music scene. Lots of really good musicians, lots of older musicians who've done well in the industry and have bought themselves a house there. We just gravitated towards each other, really. We've had a couple of line up changes, but we ended up as this fantastic, tight unit.

The thing is, in London everyone's trying to hop on to the next thing, and so there's no commitment there. So working together in this town on the coast was great and allowed us to spend a lot of time together. We rehearsed three times a week, five hours at a time.

Simon: I thought you were going to tell him your sweet Queen Anne story?

Russell: Oh, yeah! When I joined the band Queen Anne was coming to open up a rehabilitation project in town. Wait... Princess Anne! Sorry!

Simon: [Giggling] We're so loyal to our monarchy that we can't even remember their titles!

Russell: I just happened to be in the street and this bloke who runs a rehearsal studio came up and said, "Oi! You wanna come and join Simon's band?" And I thought for a moment, "Yeah, alright!"

Simon: And now I can't get rid of him!

Russell: And that was it, really.

I still don't get the Princess Anne part, or Simon's "wonderful little story."

[Simon and Russell laugh]

Coming back around to the band's songwriting, we already talked about the process you go through to write a song, but what are your influences? Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Simon: I've got a lot of stuff from the past that I really love. I love Bill Withers, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix...

[Coughs] Paul McCartney.

Simon: Paul McCartney, obviously! The Beatles go without saying, obviously. Presently, songs come along that inspire me. It's quite old now, but when "Wonderwall" came along I was really inspired by that. I really love Radiohead's OK Computer and The Bends. I think Travis have got some really nice songs. Coldplay have some great songs, and Starsailor have one amazing song.

Just one?

Simon: Just one. I can't think of anything else at the moment. What I usually take away from a song I like is the mood and the atmosphere of it.

The Paul McCartney bit aside, there's been a lot of positive buzz about the band. I remember hearing about (and hearing) Loser Friendly when it first came out.

Simon: I remember that you were one of the people we contacted and sent a CD to.

Yeah, I liked it very much. In fact, I was listening to it last night as I was preparing for this interview.

Simon: Very nice!

That buzz has stayed with you. Given where you've gone from being on a major label to doing your own thing and being successful at it -- in terms of how it was received, if not how much that success lined your pockets -- to being back on a major again, how would you define success for Steadman?

Simon: Oh... we were successful the minute we got a band together and we did our first show. Success is relative. We're successful because we're doing what we want to do, we don't have pissy jobs, we're making a living out of it, and we're having fun. And that's "success" as far as I'm concerned.

Russell: That's pretty much for all the band, really. Being able to keep doing it is success. Obviously, we'd like to be at the stage where we're playing huge stadiums. That would be great as well...

Simon: But that's a different kind of success. It's not necessarily the success we require.

How has it been doing the residencies when you've been at one venue for several nights in a row?

Russell: The way we do the residencies is usually one day a week for a month, and it's worked really well.

Simon: It's paid off so much.

Russell: It's amazing how many times we've played places like San Francisco or San Diego, and then had people ended driving out to see us at the Viper Room. So it's worked well in that respect.

Simon: We did the Viper Room shows and the way it built and the buzz that was coming after each show was just amazing. Because it's LA and the music industry is here, people had no excuse for not coming to see us play, so eventually everyone got to see us. It generated this buzz which has paid off ten-fold.

Russell: We're headed to the East Coast shortly to do the same thing.

Simon: We're playing Philadelphia, the Knitting Factory in New York, the Paradise in Boston.

Do you have any plans to do a proper tour behind the new album?

Simon: Yeah, but we're waiting for the album to come out first. The great thing is that Elektra aren't like, "We're going to put this album out, and if it doesn't sell five million copies in the first week, you're gone." Instead, they're like, "This is a slow build. This is a band we're going to build and build and build." Which is fantastic for us.

In answer to your question: yeah, we'll be touring a hell of a lot more. But it's such a big country that right now we have to focus on a few points, particularly that we come from England and don't have a home base in America. We've got no hometown fans that we can call upon, so we've first got to build up a following.

Russell: Obviously, a decent support tour is what we're looking for.

Who would you like to get on tour with over here?

Russell: Unfortunately, we missed out on Supergrass awhile back, but we did do some stuff with Ian McCulloch over on the East Coast, which was good fun.

Simon: And Feeder were really cool, and Ash we played with as well. So, a lot of English bands, but there's a ton of American bands we'd like to play with. We don't care. Put us in front of anyone and we'll play! Apart from, maybe, Metallica.