Now, before reading this interview just have a look at the picture of the band. Take a close look. Now think about what you’ve just looked at. It’s the hat that’s bothering you isn’t it? Yes, it is a stetson and, yes, he does wear it onstage. Actually, he wears a different one onstage. It’s white. And bigger. Now try and think of the kind of music a man who would wear a hat like that would make. Let’s just say it’s music that wouldn’t be afraid to be unfashionable.

"We’re a lot more old fashioned than a lot of the bands we’re compared to,", head honcho, if you’ll excuse the term, Scott says, "I mean sometimes cripplingly old fashioned in our approach to things."

"That’s been our aim from the outset really; to write good songs and also to try and create something interesting musically as well. We wanted to do both," adds the guitarist.

"I’m always at my happiest when I feel we’re just about to embark on something that I don’t know if we can pull off or not", says Scott, "There have been a few times when we’ve gone into the studio or done something live when I’ve felt that was the case and that’s when the adrenaline is pumping at its most virulent. When, and if it does, come off that’s when you feel the most sense of achievement."

"That happened with the Brats show when we arranged the biggest ensemble we’ve ever done and we were playing to our biggest audience by far and we had two evenings’ rehearsal."

Obviously when they say old fashioned they aren’t alluding to the hat and the peculiar habit they all have of rolling their dark blue jeans up at the bottom. Their music isn’t afraid to take these fashion risks as well mixing folk and country with early electro and whatever else they can get their hands on.

"I think that’s the enjoyable thing about it is that no one quite knows what we are going to do next.", says the guitarist, "If you look back at Scott 4’s history so far you’ll have things like; Autumn ’97: ’The Funk Weeks’. Or electro is God for early ’96."

"It’s always been like that and a certain amount of it sticks and a certain amount doesn’t. I mean we did have our period of just doing West Coast AOR. Imitating bands like Fleetwood Mac and so on."

"Bands that just had no concept that punk had happened."

Fortunately they shrugged off the Fleetwood Mac thing and kind of settled on a Beck like melange of samples and rootsy guitar music. Starting out as a minimalist folk trio, once they got over the difficult ethical issues of introducing a cymbal to their snare drum, acoustic guitar and voice line up they went from strength to strength.

"To be honest you feel very trapped in a lot of bands." Says Scott, "If you go in with a very loose idea of what you are going to do then being in a band makes you keep to a more rigid sense of that, then you will get frustrated. The way that we work now has worked out quite well because the core of the band stays this small thing. It’s quite easy to get in other people and work with them but we don’t have to work with them all the time. We’re small enough to be able to move quite quickly in whatever direction we want without, you know, your first trombone player saying; ’ahh, are we not punk rock anymore?’".

So to sum up Scott 4’s amazing ability to get something that sounds fresh and new from some really quite old fashioned source material and their ability to look like a band from hicksville and not get laughed at, we’ll leave it to the guitarist, "It’s like pulling when you’re not trying really."

Exactly.

Scott 4 were talking to Ben Ladkin, in October 1998.