27 september–2 october 1999

The day to-day journal / diary seems inappropriate for us last week. After having reviewed it, it reads as if I've become a kind of unofficial spokesman for the band – which is bollocks quite frankly, as that is certainly not the purpose. That may be the knock-on effect of having select magazine print some of it up. You know you can get a bit self-conscious and in this business and forget why you initially shared something. And what were those reasons? A mixed bag really, a bit of an attempt to de-mythologise this whole process of making a new record. It might be of interest to some to hear from one of the horses' mouths (or arses) what is going on. And it's actually pretty interesting for us if only to reassure me/ourselves that there are patterns which emerge, only when documented in the way we work that ensures that you don't get too down when things aren't going to plan.

A lot of this week was spent setting up. The right environment to work is crucial if your going to attempt to do anything vaguely different, then your surroundings have to reflect that. Equally so, what has become increasingly evident is the need to change our approach to recording on a lot of the songs. The approach or setup is crucial. For instance the way we worked the on the last record was to rehearse everything to such a standard, where most of the parts have been so finely tuned, that recording was largely a matter of capturing the best performance. And that's fine, but recording in this way tends to mean that the songs have a certain way of sounding. i.e. – Pretty good in a live/band context.

Well that's not enough now, and I think there is a feeling that unless we change our approach often were just going to become (?) of ourselves and even dull. There was a wonderful moment this week when we were all crowded around the TV watching this programme documenting the story of hip hop and it was the classic years from '88 until '92 with RUN DMC, Public Enemy and NWA – etc. Some of the greatest records ever made, and they interviewed Hank Shoucler – he was the fella who produced Public Enemy in the early days – and made the great "it takes a nation of millions…" album. And he was explaining their methodology – the way they recorded. Basically they all set up with samplers, Devo, drum machines. In the same room and recorded. Now most of it we said sounded like a mess, but apparently there were great moments, that were then cut up and from that the basic track was constructed. The effect of hearing this was like "well why the fuck can't we do this" – it could be so exciting. We have the means to make a communal racket so why not harness some of this technology and use it within our own sphere. I mean we're not going to make a hip-hop record, much as we'd like to, but what was exciting was the idea that kind of approach, or something similar offered us a necessary alternative to the way that we have largely worked until now.

Once we have done this then we might really get somewhere.