During the recording of Suicide Pact you found some time to record a short video called The Speedo Menace.

Andy: We made a thirty-minute horror film about a guy wearing swimming shorts terrorizing the inhabitants of the studio.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Andy: It's like a really, really bad "B" movie. I don't know really what we're going to do with it. We might try to release at some point with the album.

[The phone line starts to crackle and Andy apologizes for the background noise. He's been on a phone sidestage at the venue they're playing that night, and the opening band's soundcheck has been making the interview nothing less than like trying to be heard next to the roar of a jet engine. We decide to pick up again the next day and I catch up with Andy in a hotel room about an hour before Therapy? is scheduled to play.]

Andy: Hello, Craig. Sorry about last night. Clutch was soundchecking and it was just impossible. I couldn't hear a thing.

Andy: It was absolutely fantastic! It was great.

What songs have you been playing?

Andy: Well, we've been concentrating mostly on tracks off the new album, then we do some stuff off our first two EPs [Baby Teeth and Pleasure Death], songs like "Potato Junkie." Then we play things like "Screamager," "Die Laughing" and "Nowhere" that were all quite popular. It was a pretty full-on rock 'n' roll show. Very energetic.

Before Clutch doomed our first attempt at an interview yesterday, we were talking about your soon-to-be Oscar-nominated horror film, The Speedo Menace. Did you write a soundtrack to go along with it?

Andy: Yeah, we did a soundtrack. Martin had an old cello, a Moog synthesizer, and some old Korg organ, and I had a battered acoustic and a drum machine. We just kind of shot the stuff live and lit things with little lamps and torches and then made up the soundtrack accordingly. It's really funny and we're going to try to get it out some way for the fans 'cause it was good fun.

We also talked briefly about how you considered resurrecting the Multifuckingnational label to put out Suicide Pact.

Andy: We didn't actually sign with Ark 21 until we'd finished recording it. So we'd paid for all the recording time ourselves. When it was done, Ark 21 came along and offered us a worldwide deal and tour support, which worked out well because Michael and I had already spent a lot of the band's funds to take us out on the road to promote Semi-Detached. After that and paying for studio time for the new album it kind of got to the point where it was good for someone to come in at the last minute and cover the cost of the album.

With all the work that went into Semi-Detached and having it not sell as well as you'd expected, do you still feel it's a strong album? I've read in some interviews where you seemed like you weren't pleased with its sound.

Andy: Yeah...I think it's a good album. Half of it was kind of caught in that post-Troublegum melodic three-and-a-half minute songs. Other songs like "Tightrope Walker" and "Tramline" were veering more towards what we'd wanted to do. But I think it was good. I think the only thing was the fact that it was the first studio album we'd made as a quartet, and because of that Graham and Martin didn't really let themselves go in regards to the creative process. I think they felt it was like the days of Troublegum and Infernal Love, where I wrote all the songs. That's kind of changed now; it's more of a band thing and we share all that now. With Troublegum and Infernal Love I'd write everything on a four-track and then bring it in. Now it's mostly the four of us sitting down and working out ideas as we're jamming. It's a group process and it's good fun.

Andy: I've always known that I'd do stuff with music, but I think at that point... You suddenly realize that the money you're making out of the band you're paying out so you can continue to work...which was ludicrous. Any money I'd saved for the future had been spent. Me and Michael had talked about saving up to open a little studio...all that was spent just going on tour. Also, at the same time my grandmother--my favorite grandmother--had died. And on top of that I had a minor operation on my right eye, which had an infection.

I just remember one day I'd come around from the anesthetic with a patch over my eye and my grandma dead, and I just hit this point where I was asking myself if it was really worth it. But then we went back into the studio and started recording. The very first track we did was the first one on the album, "He's Not That Kind of Girl." Within the second take we all looked at each other and smiled 'cause we knew everything was on the way up again.

That energy shows up well in the album. The songs are really punchy and brilliant, and that dark sense of humor and fuck-all attitude comes across in spades. It's obvious that not only are you cohesive and together as a band, but you're clearly doing it for no one but yourselves.

Andy: That's what we wanted. To be honest with you, if we'd gone in and tried seven or eight takes of a song and then looked at each other, we'd have been, "Right, let's pack up our bags and leave." It really was like year zero--back to the start. And it was brilliant. We love the album, the fans love it...we go on tour every night and the shows are rammed full of people and the songs are going down like a storm.

The easy thing to do would have been to give in. But I didn't think the time was right and neither did Michael. He and I have been together for the duration of the band. We have made a lot of mistakes, but when we finished the album we sat down and looked at each other and said that we were really proud of this album and it's a good starting point for where we want to be.

We've taken more control back into the band and the whole creative process. It's made things much more exciting. I think we got a bit lazy in the mid-'90s. You're touring nine months a year, you're doing loads of TV shows and all that crap. And at the end of the day you get lost. You get caught up in the lifestyle.

Did you feel like you were losing your sense of identity?

Andy: Yeah, you end up losing touch with what it's all about, really.

Do you think Suicide Pact would be what it is if the past year hadn't been so hard?

Andy: Oh God, no. I think if A&M had still existed and we would have gone in and made the album it wouldn't have been anything near what it became. We had demo'd some stuff before Graham broke his arm, and we looked back on the tracks we'd done then and there's a version of "Hate Kill Destroy" and "Other People's Misery," and they're nowhere near as powerful as they actually ended up. I think it took all that to give us our fighting spirit back.

There is something true to be said about the fact that when the odds are against you...I don't know whether it's adrenaline or nerve or whatever...but it actually comes out a lot more. When you have to try you do give that extra effort.

There seems to be a distaste with the band regarding Infernal Love and the time surrounding its recording. You've said before that you "stretched the band too far and overstated the obvious." What was wrong with the process and do you feel the album could have been better had if been done differently?

The band wasn't getting on at all and we went into the studio with absolutely no ideas. We literally turned up at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios with no songs. We turned on the guitars and fired up the amps and the producer went, "Okay guys, what have you got?" And we said, "Absolutely nothing." So we wasted thousands of pounds in the first few weeks just jamming. At this point the band was hardly speaking to each other. I had a couple of ideas, so I'd go into a room and come back with a couple of songs and everyone else was so fucking exhausted that they didn't question them. The thing was that the day we finished the album it was twelve o'clock in the afternoon, we got on a train to London, stayed the night and the next day flew off to Japan to tour Troublegum there. So we'd just finished a new album and we weren't even sure of what we thought of it, but we were off on another five month tour.

It was just very unfocused. I mean, sometimes I look at it now and one thing I do think is good is that it spat in the face of Britpop. Troublegum was a pop album before Britpop come out, and it would've been so easy for us to write a really, really melodic album like Troublegum: Part II and ride that whole wave. But I think there's something quite...I dunno...funny about the fact that we were in frilly shirts with fake moustaches playing this kind of slightly gothic, melancholy rock. Heh.

You recorded Hüsker Dü's "Diane" on Infernal Love. Why did you choose that cover?

Andy: A&M got Anton Corbijn in to do the photograph. He wanted to do it in Portugal, so we...heh...we got flown over to Portugal. The cover shot for "Diane" was just a candid shot at the end of the day. We were fucking exhausted and we'd been traipsing around and at the end of the day we asked if we could just go get some food. We were down at the beach and I took my shoes off 'cause I was exhausted and Anton just kind of snapped that candidly.

So...umm...how did Grant Hart feel about you covering "Diane?"

Andy: Oh! Covering Diane... Shit, I thought you meant the photographs for the cover!

No! No! That was a good story too!

Andy: Ha ha! Fuck me...sorry man. No, we always used to jam it because we were massive Hüsker Dü fans. You know, like them we were a three piece where both the drummer and the guitar player sang. We started out playing Hüsker Dü covers when we were first out playing around Ireland. We went in to do it as a B-side and Martin was around recording his parts for "Bad Mother." I'd been listening to a lot of This Mortal Coil that Martin had around, and I asked if we could take out all the guitar parts and just put a cello quartet in it.

When he first heard it, Grant Hart was being interviewed by Kerrang! magazine and he asked them why we'd changed one of the lines in the song and why there were cellos. And I think the reason for that was that I'd sung it very late at night and I'd forgotten one of the lines. I was very, very brokenhearted because I didn't want to offend him so I got his phone number, rang him and said, "Look, if we've offended you we will never, ever play that song again. I'm really, truly sorry." And we talked for a bit and he said, "No, I just wondered why you changed the line without asking me." And it's cool now. We did a show in Brixton--a solo show--and he gave me a lovely photograph from a show he sang in Ireland. It was really cool. If he'd said that he hated the version we would never have played it again.

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