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to do something because that’s as much
a part of art as a piano player or a
guitarist. So Tim [Burgess, vocalist]
is friends with them on Twitter,
and we’re big fans of theirs, so
we asked them to contribute their
ideas through words. It just made
more sense to get people to come
and guest rather than for us to do
an album on our own again.
I’m interested in digging deeper into
that.With the musical collaborations
you have on Different Days, how did
you identify who you wanted to work
with on each track? Did you listen to
a track and think ‘We want Johnny
Marr for this one, Paul Weller for that
one’?
Yeah, basically. We had a song and
we thought ‘Who could we have play
on this?’ It became obvious to us when
we listened to it who we wanted for
it. We’ve only got a few f-cking mates
[laughs].
What level of input did they have? Did
they help write the song or just come
in and put their style on it?
The songs were 98.99 percent
complete; the vocals and everything
were done. We pulled down what
we didn’t want them to hear. It
was so obvious that Johnny was
going to play in songs like
Plastic
Machinery
; that was perfect for
him. He played harmoniously
with the piano, you know what
I mean? I’m sitting there playing
the piano and he’s f-cking playing
away on the guitar. It’s like we’ve
been in the band for 28 f-cking years.
It’s incredible how things like that work
out. But that’s how it is: you kind of
instinctively know that he’d be good on
a certain track. It’s not written towards
that person, it’s just that you know for a
fact that it lends itself to Johnny Marr, or
this lends itself to Stephen Morris and
Gillian [Gilbert]. They worked more on
the rhythm thing with synths.
I know you were out here last year,
but any plans to come out again to
4 3 2 1
We can’t just do
something that
sounds the same
and feels the
same - we need to
add something