"......... I would imagine it'd be quite easy for any band to come back from Japan still buzzing off what was happening over there and think maybe it'd be like that here in England. We just treated it as an isolated week separate from what was going in over here."

So have you been writing any new material on the tour bus?

"We try to write songs not on the tour bus, more in hotels and also at sound checks. You can only go through the sings in the set so many times. You don't really want to go through the full set every sound check. So we start doing other stuff because as long as you get the levels right it doesn't really matter what you play. On the tour bus we read and play a lot of scrabble. We've got a bit of scrabble book going on at the moment."

Mansun are often associated with the eighties as a key influence. However Chad a great deal to say regarding this matter.

"It's the eighties and the seventies. We're fans of music from both decades. I think the reason why people notice that is because we are one of the few bands that mention those two decades! I mean there's the nineties and then there's the sixties and the music is just repeating itself in the nineties, as if the seventies and eighties didn't fucking exist you know? So the fact that our taste is so eclectic we tell everyone because we're not ashamed of anything that we're into. We like our pop music as much as we like rock music. We tend to like the darker side of pop music. The kind with melancholy tunes, nothing too aversely happy. Basically a good tune is a good tune regardless of genre or the year it was made or what the artist was wearing."

And what of Mansun's trademark drum machine sound?

"That was very much through necessity as much as by design.........." >>