He mimics the high-pitched rings of a triangle.

How did you get to the Mother Records deal?

"You've heard about our deal before that?" asks Simon. "Well we had the nine months of pretending we've split up and were going mad and we had all this George Micheal legal style wrangling to put up with. Mother were kind of waiting in the wings, 'As soon as you're out of this mess boys', y'know?"

"Andy Lease the A&R man, had been a fan of ours. He was a publisher and he wanted to publish our music," begins Crispin. "He approached us halfway through the wilderness thing. He asked us if we were after another record deal and we replied 'yes'. He asked us what we wanted and we said 'this' and he said 'okay'. So that's that as they've got shit loads of U2's money to spend and we're more than happy to help spend it."

"After that we had more of a clear idea of what we wanted to do and the way to do it and we couldn't see a way out of this other deal," admits Simon.

You've been touring for a while, when are you going to sit down for a nice brew?

"I don't know. We're busy at the moment with our tours, we'll be off to tour with Cast soon," adds Simon.

"Well, we're really helping them sell out their huge venues!" laughs Crispin.

Interviewed by Andrew McLean 1997
All photography © Andrew McLean & The Longpigs 2005