Tim spoke to Kerstin (all-singing, all-flute-playing woman) before Senser's gig at Warwick University.

The first time I saw you was at Glastonbury '93, just after the release of 'Eject' and since then it's been more or less the same material, the stuff off the album. Can we expect any new songs tonight?
Yeah, there's about six new songs in the set tonight.

So will there be some new releases soon?
Hopefully, yeah, we're still writing at the moment. By the end of the year there ought to be some new stuff released.

It's a very big band. How does writing work in a band that size?
It's quite a sort of messy process sometimes. It's alright, it's just sort of...get together, jam about, come across things that you like develop them, argue about whether certain things should be there or shouldn't be there, until eventually we have a song.

The band is very active on the live circuit, and obviously tonight is a postponed date, so what happened?
Heitham's been losing his voice for most of, well, during last year and all this year, really, his voice has been really weak and coming and going, so we've had to cancel a lot of gigs and postpone things and work around that mainly, but hopefully it's on the mend, I don't know...He's still even having problems now.

Is that partly the reason for the short tour? It's only about five dates long.
Yeah, partly. It's also that we want to start just doing key places, rather than across the board. There was a time when we were just doing as many gigs as we could, which I think, eventually you've got to move on from that and start concentrating on writing. The times when you're doing a lot of gigs, it's like a promotion period, it's like getting yourself about and known. You can't sell records if people don't know about you, so now we want to concentrate on writing music.

If you're concentrating on key venues, why Warwick University?
I don't know actually. It's a good point. I've absolutely no idea. That was the thing stated by our management, but it isn't exactly what I'd call a central place, but maybe they thought that if we'd cancelled gigs in the past, we'd better keep up with those.

The fact that it's a campus university sometimes means that the crowd is more different than it would be at a neutral venue...
Yeah, I know, but people still have a choice to come or not come at a university, as much as they do in a town. Most of our gigs on this tour are at universities and they have sold out. I've also played universities when they haven't sold out. It's a captive audience, sure, but people still have the choice. And at the end of the day, we're just doing our gig and if people like it, all the better.

So what about the rest of the year?
Mainly writing, we're going to be touring America for the first time, apart from that I don't know. I think those are the main items on the agenda.

What about the 25th Glastonbury?
In a way, I hope not. I think if I was going to Glastonbury and I saw the same band three years in a row, I'd get really bored, but there has been talk of it. The only reason I'd particularly like to do it would be because I want to go to Glastonbury. Free ticket, innit?

You were lumped in as part of the big rap/rock crossover explosion thing a couple of years ago, along with bands like Rage Against The Machine. Since then it's all been a bit quiet.
Yeah, I suppose we were wrapped up in a scene. But, I don't know, our music sort of fluctuates and changes and we're sort of writing things according to what we like listening to, I mean, our tastes change and people grow up and develop and various things like that. If people like the development, then maybe we will continue to sell records to a varied market. Scenes are things that have a short lifetime, but I don't think the bands necessarily have to, it's only if they get stuck in their ways and want to concentrate on one mode. Which we don't, 'cos we're kind of like, we're drawn by a lot of different ideas. Our energies are fairly scattered about in lots of different forms, so it's alright. It'll be alright.

Kerstin from Senser was talking to Tim, in January 1995.