Tell me about the last year in the life of Young knives.
Henry:  Fucking hell, that’s a big question! Well, writing an album, recording an album, doing a load of shows. Yeah last year pretty much writing, recording and playing shows in-between.

Your last single ‘Terra Firma’ was a real breakaway from your old sound, it sounded like a more commercial Young Knives. What inspired that song?
Henry: Do you think it sounds more commercial? I think maybe its production was. It's one of those songs that for a long while was a bit meaningless, until we finally put the finishing touches to the lyrics. It was kind of a critique of our “Consumer Society” (laughs), and the being in bands and around people stuffing stuff up their noses, and all that stuff going on. People trying to reach that ultimate party night and then having to come back down to earth afterwards. The fake rabbits are the soft cuddly things and they are not real, but the snakes they bite your ass, they are well real.
 
How did you approach making the new album. How did the writing process and song topics differ from the last record?
Henry: This one was more immediate. We went in with the idea of doing things a bit more melody based. Writing the melodies before we even touched instruments. 
Was it a harder record to write?
Henry: No. I think it was actually easier. Because we did it over a short period of time, and the pressure was there. We wanted to get it done and for it to be as varied as possible. We had an idea of the sort of things we wanted to do, from the stuff we’d been listening to, and the bands we’d been playing with on tour.
We’d been playing our old stuff and then hearing stuff other bands were doing and thinking, it would be good to write a song like that, play something like that on stage. Basically we would work on the basis of the things that we didn’t do with the first record, things that we’d quite like to be doing. Taking those ideas and making them into songs. So we were pretty desperate to write this album, when we were on tour I kept saying I can’t wait to get in the studio, get back home and start messin’ about.

“We spent the night in a travel lodge and played ‘who can drink a pint of dark ale with a teaspoon the quickest” Henry

Do you prefer being on tour or working in the studio?
HOL: I prefer being on tour to recording but I like the writing process. I prefer that to the actual recording in a funny sort of way. Recording’s not as immediate. Writing is you can stand there and at the end of the day you have this form, this song, you have this product.
Henry: A product?!! (much laughter). Recording is fun. It’s fun when you can mess about with all these sounds and you think ‘oh, we could do that in the studio or use that on a song'.  All these ideas are fun but it’s also bloody hard, really difficult to keep your concentration going on it, and be that excited every day for ten hours a day.

What inspires you lyrically would you say?
Henry: The sound of words is the main thing. What sounds funny or good or different.  It’s the way we write lyrics for songs.
HOL: Like ‘Terra Firma’, we had that chorus for ages. The way those words fit together, they don’t make sense on their own. It sounded like something nobody else had thought of.
Henry: What it’s just reminded me of is that Robyn Hitchcock song ‘Black Snake Diamond Role’. Like, he’s a songwriter that inspires us because of way he fits lyrics over tunes. Same as Mark E Smith, you sort of get the impression that sometimes he’s only singing words because they sound good.

Like bold statements?
Henry: Yeah, but I think it’s more about what words sound great together. Some might not have a direct meaning, but I don’t think that’s a problem. You’re creating pictures with your words for other people to interpret. The more you leave to people’s imagination, the more creative and more inspiring it will be.

How you feel when you heard you had been nominated for the Mercury music award?
Henry: They tried to keep it a big secret from us, but we kind of worked out what it was. We were told we had to be in London for this day, we had to cancel the studio for the day and fly down from Glasgow and we thought this has to be important. Someone actually phoned me just before because it was announced on Radio Two. I felt a little bit annoyed that everyone was trying to keep it a secret from us, but it was nice. I didn’t really get chance to react to it really. I was pleased in one way but in another I thought ‘what does it mean? What does this mean for the Young Knives? It meant a lot more people will hear us, and that was the long and short of it. I thought it might have put a load of people off us as well, it probably has. Yeah, we didn’t even know we were up for it.

The sound of the band is quite eclectic; do you all have very different music tastes?
Henry: We have quite similar tastes, but we all have quite far-reaching music tastes too. None of us go ‘I really hate your choice of band. We all listen to each others music and be happy with it. Oliver likes some right rubbish.
Oliver: I used to like things like Doves. They are alright but I’ve stopped listening to them.

The last album’s title was inspired by an early Adam & The Ants lyric (Animals & Men, 1979), and you also recently covered ‘Stand & Deliver’. What did that band mean to you and how did they affect you musically?
Henry: Specifically that first album ‘Dirk Wears White Sox’, the way that it’s so different. I mean some of it’s got so much in it. It’s got so much percussion and just messin’ about. Some of it is ridiculous, but some of it's about having a lot of fun. It’s like their purple period, having a real good go at trying stuff out. There are so many songs on that album that you come back to it and think ‘I don’t even remember this song. I could listen to those tracks again and again

Are there any bands like that today that inspire you at all? 
HOL: That are that inventive? Yeah.
Henry: Well yeah, but I think music becomes more classic the further you go back in time, but band’s like Super Furries are quite like that.
HOL: The Mystery Jets. They are quite like that. I was impressed with that album when it came out. The way they put that together and what was going on in their songs. They did things with melody nobody else was doing. Some sort of jazzy thing, a Robert Wyatt-type of thing.
Henry: Some of the problem is you don’t get to hear these sort of bands because they are not commercial. It’s really hard to strike a balance. I never want that to affect our music, but I’m sure it does, it must do to an extent. It’s the worst period for that, you can’t be on the dole and be a musician anymore, and it’s not that easy. I suppose if you live in London you could get some arty squat, but we are from a countryside middle class background. I’m never going to be a bohemian. I’m a working boy really. I’m used to having a job, so we work at this like a job.

You are about to embark on a nationwide tour, do you have any outrageous tour stories to tell?
Oliver: We’re quite boring on tour really.
Henry: We get really drunk a lot! We have this lighting guy that works for us and he has the best stories. He did Blur and stuff like that and he’d go ‘ there was this one night when we were blind drunk and we set off fireworks in a Hong Kong hotel and the Hong Kong police came to the room thinking we were shooting each other’ and we’d be like ‘er, we spent the night in a Travelodge and played who can drink a pint of dark ale with a teaspoon the quickest!
Yeah, we have a lot of fun. We don’t jack up or have sex with more than one girl, or any girls, in the back of the bus (more laughter). We had a bus driver once who told us about the metal bands he’d drive around, things they had done with girls and wine bottles. I just turn a blind eye to it; I’d be like I didn’t want to see that on my fucking bus! That’s what I’d say.

Finally, what can your fan base expect from this new record that they haven’t heard before?
I don’t think the fans will be disappointed. What we haven’t done is go middle of the road. We haven’t done that ‘now we’re a credible band we should do something deep’ thing. We’ve tried to keep it spicy. It’s gone a bit louder on the whole. It’s a bit more of a rock album really. We do aspire to be a rock band and not an indie band, for whatever those differences are...

New album ‘Superabundance’ is out on March 10th and Young Knives are on tour throughout February and March.