What with Soul Coughing having a song on the soundtrack for the new Batman movie, we thought it wise to give you the lowdown on just who / what they are and what they’re doing right now.....

The first thing anyone will tell you about Soul Coughing is that you probably are not going to be able to hang a tag on the music that they make. Which, I am sure you will agree, is no bad thing since you can never straddle too many genres, so long as what you end up with sounds good.

Ask Mark (samples/keyboards) and he will probably tell you that the band is “from a rock tradition.” Which really understates the diversity of the sound we are talking about, surely? “I know there’s all sorts of influences that our music can be traced back to but if there’s one thing in common between the four of us, then it’s our rock background, even though rhythms are taken from other places”.

So, you see, Soul Coughing are kind of cagey about getting into long discussions about whether they’re influenced by jazz or whatever. Sebastian (bull fiddle) actually goes so far as to suggest that there is some humour in the concept of various critics trying to compare the band to Beck and the like. “This band is really about four different people who lived in New York for four very different reasons, all of them revolving around music, and those four people getting slammed into a room together”. Soul Coughing was the result. “We just found we liked playing together and it got exciting when we recognised there was a sound there... we’re influenced more by what we eat than what we each listen to, you know?”

Anyway, two years have passed since they were last writing and recording a collection of new songs in the form of ‘Irresistible Bliss’ (the ‘Batman and Robin’ thing was a one off between tours), so the band is starting to think about making moves back to the studio once more, “We’ve got a lot of new material and we’re on the verge of writing a bunch of stuff, but it’s kind of cool because we don’t quite know where it’s going. The way this band operates we never know quite how it will sound because no one person writes most of a song and lets the other guys do their parts - we write together and it can be kinda exciting and scary”.

As for the making of the record, the plan is to get back towards the feel of the first album (‘Ruby Vroom’) by recording it “low-key guerilla style - on the spot. We’re gonna record at the end of each period we have set aside for writing.” So, expect some seriously dirty grooves and expect Soul Coughing to start making moves towards fame and fortune in Britain as they have already done elsewhere. A prospect which Sebastian is happy to take on. “The fact is I’ve moved furniture for a living, I’ve worked on a phone sex line, I’ve done all kinds of stuff and this is amazing. I’m not about to get bummed out and start complaining about the colour of the drapes in my hotel room. This is so cool ‘cos we are getting to play what we wanna play - we’re not curbing our impulses in any way”.

Soul Coughing were talking to Drew and Dave, in May 1997.