You’re back in the UK again quite soon after your last tour. What makes you decide to come back here so often?

Um, the response here has been great.  Obviously part and parcel of that has been Bob Harris playing us and that’s pretty high profile.  It’s the kind of thing in the States – there’s so much payola involved in getting somebody of that stature to play your music, you know, and Bob just reacts out of passion for the music – and he’s still on the radio. I think in America, radio’s in a place where people who are passionate about music don’t get on to big stations, and the people who do have big stations are kind of in the back pocket of the big labels.  But occasionally something bright and shining slips through and you think “how did that get played?”  And we’re an indie band right now, we’re not signed but we’re talking to three different labels right now. So what I mean by all that is that it’s been a kind of nice ride over here. We can always come back here to regalvinise, and the plans right now for the band – there’s the solo record coming out in December and then maybe a new band record coming out in February 2003, so the plan is to actually find two guys here in the UK who’ll actually be part of that band.  And it’ll say a lot about what’s happened to us the last couple of years anyway – we’re spending more time here than we are in the States really.

Obviously you took part in the Americana One festival we put on at the end of August and a lot of the press including the Guardian were pretty impressed with your performance – how was that for you?

The festival itself? Ah, it was great – I didn’t know what to expect, you know, and it just seemed like a room full of people who were ready to listen to music.  And I enjoyed listening to Peter [Bruntnell] – it was awesome hearing him. He’s just got such a great tenor voice which you don’t hear a lot in americana music, someone who’s got that rich kind of voice. Enjoyed Witness too – it wasn’t what I was expecting, it didn’t have the alt-country thing going on as much as I was expected – it was almost more like Radiohead, but it was pretty cool.  I enjoyed it a lot, yeah, and it was great because there was a lot of different music there.  I think with American festivals you get a sort of sameness about a lot of the music.

“Foetal Position” is your debut solo album of course – how do you feel it differs from the material you recorded with VOL?

You know, in some ways it’s not that different.  The interesting thing about it is that it’s an internet record only.  The record that’s coming out in February is definitely more of a pop record – the songs on that record like “Wintergreen, She’s So Liquid, Life on Other Planets” which we closed with tonight, we recorded five new songs to round out the record more in that direction, but for me the record was sort of galvanised by this internet company called Paste Music who handle me right now. They just said, “look, give us three records in twelve months – can you do that?” and I thought “heck yeah, I write more than sixty songs a year, I can do that.” And so I think the songs on “Foetal Position” are good but I think the record lacks focus. It feels like it kind of goes all over the place to me – some of it sounds more decisively americana and some of it sounds more pop, you know, with that Athens, Georgia thing to it. So personally for me, I like listening to the songs one by one, but the record as a whole doesn’t feel cohesive. The February record should feel a little more cohesive.  So in a way it almost isn’t the first solo record really – the next one will be the statement I want to make as a solo artist.

And we’ve been doing the pop thing even as a band before that. I was so glad to see Wilco release “Summerteeth” because we had sort of felt something like that would be coming – that year and then us the following year.  Everyone released a pop record – the Jayhawks, the Old 97s did a more kind of jangly record, we did a pop record, everyone was moving in that direction it seemed like.

So given that the record has been recorded in your name and not the band’s, did you feel like you could be more personal lyrically with it?

Probably that’s true, but you know the real reason behind it is that at retail, the name Vigilantes of Love – this came above from people above us, like an attorney and a manager – and their attitude was, like, think about this now – ten years, fourteen records, always the bridesmaid and never the bride. I mean, none of those records were smashing, none of them were stunning in terms of acceptance.  So it got to the point at retail where it was like, “Vigilantes of Love, critic’s darlings, but can’t sell records” – I mean that was the way the band was being defined.  We heard this from the guys at retail who were in charge of selling the records – and it’s the second part of that phrase, that you can’t sell records, that you can’t get out from under your skin. I just thought, maybe that if the Vigilantes of Love run was a sentence, then maybe it was a bit too long. Maybe it’s time to put a period at the end of that sentence and say “that was then, this is now.”  And that’s really what it’s all about.  It’s not “I’m sick of playing with you guys,” it wasn’t that at all.  In fact Kevin and Jake are still very much part of the way I make music because we’re sort of connected in the way we write songs and pull them off.

Has it affected the way you feel about labels at all then?

That’s a good question – and I can kind of let this cat out of the bag too.  Paste is on the verge of becoming a label. They were an internet company and now they’re finally finding a way into retail, so they’re kind of trying to define what a new label might look like, and I’m glad to be on the first end of that wave, whatever that is.  My attitude is, like, indie labels have a tendency to release four to five records a quarter, but it’s kind of like origami where they make the little paper birds – it’s like they throw them up in the air and whichever one flies the longest, that’s the one they chase, but the other four fall on the ground. And it has to fly pretty quick – it’s like if your record comes out of the blocks and it doesn’t do anything pretty quickly then you’re dead.  Unfortunately for us, “Summershine” came out and eleven days later the World Trade Centres were on the ground, and they pulled the record.  We felt like we’d made a really cool record, but nobody heard it. And the label was completely faithless as far as putting anything into it went.  We pleaded with Compass, we said, “look guys, I thought this was about a partnership, we’d like to see you re-release the record in Spring,” but they just weren’t going to do it. 

So did you feel let down by them?

Yeah, we did.  It was adversarial enough for us to say to them, “look we’d just like to be let go” – we kind of had to fuss and moan about it a bit but they let us go.  I mean really it was kind of a bad marriage, they were kind of more of a “newgrass” label – I think they wanted son of Audible Sigh, and we didn’t give it to them. We gave them what we had and they were like “what are we going to do with this…” even though it’s funny because their distribution and their radio team thought it was one of the best things they’d ever put out, but I mean, go figure, you know. Who knows? If I was sitting in the same position with their hat on, I might see things the same way. You’re talking to me as someone from the art perspective, as someone who wrote the songs – do I think the record could have another injection of fuel?  Absolutely. But somebody back there in the accounting side thought not.

Given that, if you got to the stage of being on a more major label again, would you consider re-releasing it?

Yeah, we’d love to.  I think the plan is to buy the record back from them and give it a proper birthday party. We had a couple of people here on the radio side in the UK who said songs like “Putting Out Gasoline” could be a single – you could probably hear that on radio two daytime. And we thought, yeah, let’s do that sometime.  Be quiet, work slow, and see what happens.

The other presenter who’s a big fan of course is Nick Stewart from Virgin Radio.

Oh yeah, he’s been so kind.  I mean, that’s the thing, we’ve been so well treated over here, but I honestly think that there just seems to be a depth in the average listener – that they’re a little bit more discerning over here.  You listen to a lot of different types of music.  I’m talking about that post College rock into that thirty something crowd, maybe even that forty something crowd now too.  In America, it’s about whatever the heck’s playing on MTV, and now radio is being dominated too – it’s almost as if there’s walls going up around certain kinds of music.  But I tell young bands all the time, it doesn’t take selling a million records to make a living out of it – you work, you go out and you find your fanbase, make your niche and stay in touch with those people because they’re the blood.  Not the record company, not the PR person, it’s the fans. We’ve been lucky, that’s where we’ve stayed.  And part of that’s the Athens, Georgia way of doing things – we weren’t looking for record deals, we were looking for ways to connect with people.

Although from your biography you’re obviously a committed Christian, it’s never been layered on thickly throughout your music – did you ever flinch from the idea of VOL being labelled a Christian rock band?

Yeah, I shudder to think every time it even comes up, and I usually tell journalists, look, you know, I am a Christian but the term has way too much baggage for a lot of people. There’s no doubt that the church has bruised people, hurt people and all that, so I usually try to distance myself from it. In terms of my beliefs, I really do believe Christ walked out of a tomb 2000 years ago, and it’s like, what’s so strange about that? Millions of people believe that, so let’s talk about the songs.  It’s the reason why I get out of bed in the morning, but it’s not an agenda. When I stand on stage, I’m not about making you believe the way I believe. I think there’s enough beauty and truth properly understood in the Christian faith for it to be life affirming for every single person in this bar tonight, every single person in Chester, every person in England, you know.  It’s about taking a risk, stepping outside of our skins, loving other people, accepting where they’re at and trying to build a better world.

And being in a van on the road for three or four years, we got to see an America we didn’t even know was there. It was at a time our economy was sucking really, really bad – it still is, and we saw people who came to the shows so many times who said “you know, I lost my job two weeks ago and I’m married with three kids and I don’t know what’s coming up. But your records are a source of hope for me.” That is huge to hear that from somebody – what can you say except, “man, thanks for coming and here’s a free t-shirt,” you know! That happened a lot.

How are you feeling about America at the moment in general?

I think it’s a confusing and tense time. On the surface, it looks like there’s kind of a neo-political surge of fervour and national pride, but underneath everybody’s really kind of scared, because nobody knows how big this thing’s going to get. You’re never allowed to know.  So I mean, the economy is really bad, but in the polls, most people are concerned about homeland security, Iraq – I don’t, it’s strange for me, but I will say, I am glad even though I’m not a committed a Republican, I’m glad that Bush was in the White House when the stuff happened and not Al Gore, because he was a weak link – a lot of people feel that way.  I know all the guys in the band feel that way.  God knows, maybe he is a little warmonger and we just don’t know about it.  Presidents are kind of funny about the way they reveal their colours, aren’t they? They make such a play towards everyone’s affections, they want to be liked so badly. It’s not impossible for them to say one thing at a convention in Cleveland, Ohio and then the evening news says something completely different.

A lot of people over here would prefer Bush wasn’t the one with his finger on the button!

No, I know, he doesn’t go down well over here at all.  But it was Tony Blair who carried things for him. For me, in this whole situation with Iraq, there’s so much secrecy.  The information’s meant to be from scientists who defected and said they are building chemical weapon facilities, etc and our CIA say, well, we’re just reporting what was told to us. I think the guy’s clearly a tyrant.  Hussein, that is, not Bush! [laughs]  Make that clear!  Just in case there’s any confusion! But one day, who knows!  I’m sure it looks the same at their end of the world.  I will say for me personally, as someone bringing up kids, I do think there’s something wrong when you’re living in a country that consumes 70% of the world’s resources and it’s only 10% of the population.  There’s something wrong with that.  It’s time to put something back in and I think that is one good thing about this.  A lot of people went, “Why does the world hate the USA?!” and it’s like, well the world hates the USA for a lot of reasons that are actually pretty valid – because of economic and political policies that we’ve pursued. It’s almost like a cold war that’s never stopped, and in some instances it’s backfired.  The rocket launchers the Afghans were using against us were the ones we sold to them 15 years ago! There’s something a little odd about that.

You’re playing the Further Beyond Nashville festival this year – how are you feeling about that?

That’ll be great, meeting up with old friends and everything, and we hope to have the band a little bigger.  Again, we may have two guys from here joining us.  I don’t know what to expect – the showcase things tend to be a little crazy sometimes.  I never know quite who to see – I usually pick out two or three things I want to see and then zero in on them. 

Finally, what are you planning to do after this tour’s finished?

We’re getting the record ready – a solo record called “Locket full of Moonlight” is coming out.  It was recorded in six days, real quick, but different band – some of it’s a return to form, some of it has a bit of “Audible Sigh” kind of feel and some of it’s just a little bit noisier. Probably the most desperate song I’ve written’s on that record, the reprise of the title track, and it’s pretty spooky.  But then that’s the Paste Music thing again – they’re like, do what you want, there aren’t any market requirements so you can be your true colours.  It’s for the fans and I’m really proud of it.

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