Collapsed Lung have just finished touring to promote their debut album, 'Jackpot Goalie'. Tim spoke to Jim (vocals), Anthony (vocals, turntables) and Steve (guitars) after their performance at the Charlotte in Leicester.

You have a lot more equipment than you used to...
A: Yeah, it doesn't do anything, it just gets in the way. The keyboard doesn't actually make any sounds. We brought in Chris on drums purely because we preferred being able to play like that. I think it's been something it's been crying out for for ages. I've been sampling Chris on the records...the last two singles, 'Dis MX' and 'Plaid Fad', have got loops of him playing and it seemed like the natural progression to get the real thing in. And it's just good. There's a track on the album, that we played tonight, which has got no sequencers or anything on it and it's good to play live, to not be latched to the backing track. And if we wanted to, we could just do something off-pat, but we haven't been daring enough yet.

The debut album is out now. It seems to have taken a long time.
A: It doesn't just seem. It has.
S: What? Isn't it September 1994 now?
J: Most of the songs are well over a year old now.
A: It's just been, you know, writing it at a bad time, then it being put back, then the deal with Deceptive didn't get signed in time and on and on and on. It's just boring fucking record company and music business bullshit. But it's what everyone has to go through and we were just unlucky to get it worse than some. And in a way, it's been better like this...
S: Yeah, if we'd have just rushed it out when we'd finished it, it would've been wrong.
J: We were all mullered by then after being stuck in a studio for however long it took to record it. we didn't get a chance to write at our own pace. It was like, 'here's a week and a half in a studio, write six songs'. And it all got a bit frantic really.
S: It's just quite annoying that some of the stuff on the album, the way we are playing it now is better than the way it is on record. Because we were rushed and some of the ideas didn't come about until we jammed them.
A: Which goes back to why we've got a drummer now, 'cos I think in the future, some of the stuff we'd prefer to write like a band.
J: Yeah, and the stuff we write like we already have done, we'll rehearse. Oh, by the way, I had someone complaining to me that we hadn't written the lyrics on the inner sleeve of the album. He said it was a cop out.
A: Well, yes. I'll agree with that.

You've been linked with some rather unlikely bands. You've remixed and appeared on stage with the Inspiral Carpets...
J: Yeah, and look what's happened to them. They got dropped by their record label.
A: We wrecked their career.
J: We're actually professional hitmen. It wasn't the Inspiral's label who asked us to do the remix. It was Creation. They said, 'look, the Inspiral carpets are getting a bit trendy. We want you to do a job on them'. So we said, yeah, no worries, we'll do a remix for them. And we did a remix for them and they got dropped.
A: You read about the music papers building bands up and knocking them down. Well, we're the knock-down men.

There's also a That Petrol Emotion link, isn't there?
A: Yeah, Steve Mack was engineering for us tonight.
J: Yeah, he used to be a big pop star a couple of years ago and now he's our employee.

Another case for the Collapsed Lung hitmen?
A: Probably, yeah.
J: His band split up, then we work in his studio and now that's closing down too. Funnily enough, that's the studio where we did the Inspiral Carpets track. We killed two birds with one stone!
A: We did our very first single at Steve's studio. Jonny, our bass player, knew Steve already.
S: Jonny knows everybody.
A: Jonny knows everybody in showbiz, ever.
S: He's a showbiz whore.

Your songs contain references to all sorts of cult television personalities, like Alan Partridge and Wilf Lunn. Where did they come from?
A: That just comes from writing down things that people like...
J: That was one of mine. I put Wilf down.
S: He was a top boy though, was Wilf.
J: I thought of Peter Bonetti, then I thought of Wilf Lunn for no apparent reason. He just sort of ended up there.
S: I'm quite surprised that we haven't mentioned Mr. Nosey- Bonk yet. We've been talking about him quite a lot recently.
J: I'd have gladly left Mr. Nosey-Bonk out of it. Nobody really likes Mr Nosey-Bonk.

Excuse me?
J: Mr Nosey-Bonk was on Jigsaw when Wilf Lunn was on. They just had these films of this bloke with this bizarre mask on. He looked like that bloke out of 'A Clockwork Orange', he had a huge nose and he'd just, like, hang around kid's playgrounds and things like that. He was really horrible.
S: He used to sort of stealthily move around parks and stuff.
J: He was really creepy and nasty. God knows what he was doing on a kid's programme. It was really evil.
A: As a child, were you afeard of Mr. Nosey-Bonk?
J: I didn't like him, no. I just tried to avoid him. Whenever I was in the playground, I'd keep out of his way.
A: Why are we talking about Mr Nosey-bonk? Can we talk about something else please?
J: But in answer to your question, this is a post-modern album....
A: Shut it. I want you to stop.

Did I hear a Beastie Boys sample?
A: Yeah, you did.
J: And they let us use it for free. We'd like to say now that the Beastie Boys let us use that sample for free because they love us so much. they wrote to us saying 'we think you're fantastic, you can use our sample for free'.
A: That's not entirely true...There's a big Chapterhouse sample in there as well, which has got to be a first for someone vaguely hip-hop to be sampling Chapterhouse. It's not as if there's loads of samples in there, the thing about our music, because we've got guitar and bass as well, we don't rely on samples at all.
J: We use them every now and again as reference points, but the music isn't entirely based around them.

There are a huge variety of different influences in your sound.
A: I'm glad you noticed that, because did you see our review in Select? I've not seen it myself, but apparently it says...
J:...something about 'it's a shame their record collection doesn't stretch beyond Public Enemy and Cypress Hill'.
A: I didn't understand that. Do you? It's just a bit of a misjudgement. It's wrong.
S: I think it's pretty funny, 'cos I didn't really get into Public Enemy until about 1990. [It is worth pointing out that Steve is also wearing an Urge Overkill t-shirt. Select take note.]
A: It's just a weird thing to say. But I think that's part of the reason we sound the way we do, and we have to work a bit harder than other people because we try and pull everything in. What we want to do, partly with the album but mainly after, is try and go in every direction. I don't like it when bands are criticised because they are eclectic.What's wrong with that? I mean, on the next single there's going to be a jungle track.
J: There's two sides of it. One is a mellow, soulful hip-hop track, the other side's a jungle track and neither of them are like anything we've ever done before. If people like music of all different types, why can't they play music of all different types? I mean, nobody says, 'ooh, I like the Sundays, that's the only band I like, so I'm going to sound like them'. We just try and lob it all in.

You're labelmates with Elastica. What do you make of the recent plagiarism debate?
J: I think that we're in for a plague of cover versions albums. First we have Duran Duran's, then we had Elastica's. No, we know Elastica and we think they're great.
A: I would just like to say that the first time I heard 'Line Up', when we played In The City in Manchester with them, they were soundchecking it, about a year before it came out and I said 'that's 'I Am The Fly' by Wire'. I was even singing it during our soundcheck. They must have been so fucked off. It's just totally blatant. So's the Stranglers thing. Completely blatant. But it's dodgy territory for us to get onto because someone could just turn around and say 'yeah, but you sample bands'. But in reply to that, we can say that at least we're honest about it. We're not trying to pretend that we don't.
S: But then, Elastica don't do it and then say 'no we haven't'. They've been pretty up front about it.
A: They've said it's a fair cop. That's as up front as they've been.
J: The thing with sampling though, is that there's no question about it. If you've sampled somebody else's track, then you've sampled someone else's track.
A: But all the really early hip-hop tracks, like 'Rapper's Delight', which is just 'Good Times', by Chic. At the time, they didn't give any credit for that. They didn't even sample it, they just nicked a bit from 'Good Times' and played it themselves. And nobody said a word. And the people who made the record got all the writing credits for it. You can't do that any more.
J: It's all going haywire about sampling, it's getting sad. You can't sample anything without having to pay extortionate amounts of money for it.
A: For example, 'Interactive', the single that's coming out after the album, that originally had a big sample in it, but it would have cost too much money to get it cleared. So we went into the studio and played it. Not the same, but something similar, in the same key and it's a hundred times better.
S: Wait a minute. That's what Elastica do. No, the thing is the bit that we've 'sampled' isn't how the original song went exactly. Okay, some of the notes are the same, but we're phrasing it differently. So when we recreated it, you're effectively playing something new. And it does sound better.
A: More people should do it. I really hate the snobbishness of people in hip-hop. I'm not saying we should be pitching ourselves towards pure hip-hop people, but they've got a real snobbishness about people who can play. Not just people who play on stage even, but people who play on their records. Like the Fu-jees, or the Goats, you know? They say, 'that's not rap, it's 'alternative' rap', just because they bloody play. They're as hardcore as anything else. People have got to realise, because there's only so many things that you can sample that work as samples. And everyone else is going to move on, get bored.
S: The back-catalogue of records that you can sample is going to run out.
A: Exactly. There aren't that many records with little piano, or bass or drum breaks that you can sample, that would work.

And what about that Duran Duran covers album?
A: All I've heard is 'White Lines' [originally by Melle Mel] and '911 Is A Joke' [Public Enemy]. They did them on 'The Word' and 'White Lines' wasn't too bad. It rocked, but why was Simon Le Bon doing the vocals? Melle Mel was there, but he only got a tiny little bit. That was disgusting, because this is the geezer who rapped on 'The Message', you know? And there was Simon Le fucking Bon. We saw the video for 'Wild Boys' on the telly earlier. And I'd just love to follow Duran Duran round and whenever they're being interviewed and going, 'we'd like to pay some dues back to the people who really influenced us', just show them that. And they'd be like 'Oh No!!!'. But '911 Is A Joke' is, quite frankly, offensive in the extreme. The lyrics to '911 Is A Joke', I mean how can Simon Le Bon do that and pretend it's about him?
J: It's about getting no response in the ghettoes from the police because you're black...
A: Yeah, you call the ambulance or the police and they don't turn up because you're black. He probably has ambulances and police cars and taxis following him around where ever he goes. It's ridiculous. I mean, fair enough, do an album of cover versions, but that's a bit of a dumb choice for a song. I mean we used to cover A Public Enemy song. We used to do 'She Watch Channel Zero'. Senser still do that now. But that's a bit different, the lyrics are a bit tongue-in-cheek...
J: But a lot of the lyrics to that are about what a lot of what we talk about in our songs anyway. Bollocks television.

Collapsed Lung were talking to Tim, in April 1995.