actual recording process was very, very quick. Took us a year to write, and very well worthwhile.” “We spent a lot of time writing these songs and perfecting them before we went anywhere near a studio to record them. I think that's the main effort of our work, isn't it?” “I had doubts from the start, but nevertheless I flew to New York with a tape of our songs. Suddenly [Bill Laswell] said he hates our songs, the band is crap and I better fire them and work with the songs he wrote for me. His idea for me was to make some kind of U2 album. So we packed our bags and fucked off.” “Originally we were going to do this with Bill Laswell, but he said the band couldn't play and he hated all our songs, so I told him where to go. We moved to Jason Corsaro, and then that all fell through, so I took it all back to England. It was financially impossible after the Laswell fuck-up. Laswell's ego has become ridiculous, I couldn't deal with it. He said he'd written songs and I should sack the band and use his people and come out with a U2-type product! To me that reeks of cliché and cop-out. It's very disappointing [...] I won't be dictated to by producers. That's not their job, as far as I'm concerned, their job is clarity, and if you're doing something wrong, to point an easier way around it. Y'know, useful tools. Steve is a musician, and it's very useful to work with people in that way. Eric Thorngren is more like a mad Hells Angel [...] [Lu Edmonds] helped in the writing [...] It's the actual writing of the thing that counts. I'm not going to take anything away from Lu at the moment, life's very hard on him. It's a terrible thing to take a year off of your chosen profession.” “I realise that our new album sounds almost too good and that there's going to be a lot of criticism that we've sold out, but we wanted to make a really professional pop album, so to hell with the critics. Why did we work with guys who produce mainstream acts like Pet Shop Boys and Talking Heads? We didn't have much of a choice, to be honest. We were originally booked to record the album in Los