Howard Marks is appearing tonight at the Camden Falcon as are Manchester's Space Monkeys. The band, formed in Middleton in 1996, is signed to Factory Too, Tony Wilson's sequel to his fabulous record label. Richard McNevin-Duff the band's lead singer and guitarist is sitting across the table happy to explain how the Americans seem to be reacting more if not better to the band than us Brits.

"It's all going upward, vertical. We've got to travel to America soon because we've just signed to Interscope records. It's one of the two biggest labels over there. They've got acts like Ice T, Bush and No Doubt, just loads of fucking huge stadium acts. The manager of No Doubt saw us play over here and he picked up on us and loved us. He was blinded by the fact that we were in a band with a DJ and just thought it would go stella in the States. We hope to release the album in October and around Christmas in America."

As I understand it, it was very similar to your signing to Factory Too, wasn't it?

"Well our first gig, which was at the Hacienda, was what we got signed off
really. Tony came down and missed us, but everyone in the club was fucking raving about us, you know saying "Oh you should have seen the Space Monkeys they fucking blew the joint up." Next thing we know he's come to see us at a party we were throwing the week after. We formed through club culture and we were like just mates going out. We weren't on the normal club circuit you do in Manchester we were more into clubs than bands at the time. We
were putting on these parties, just Djing and Tony came down to one of them and said, "Where's the dressing room?" So we pointed to the car park and said, "It's out there." He was like "Oh cool." So we were all standing in the car park while all these fucking fourteen year old kids were getting off with each other, smashing bottles and stuff and he said "How do you fancy signing to factory?" We were like "Why not, no one else has offered us a deal." >>