Posted on May 20, 2010 - by Post Punk

Zounds: New Opportunities

Steve Lake © Tariel Khadzhyshvil

Derived from the basement dwellings of the cassette culture that gave birth to Fuck Off! Records, Zounds were the epitome of the ‘caught in a trap’ hippy movement, which saw itself confronted with the realities of an up-and-coming punk class. Having rubbed shoulders with bands such as Poison Girls and the X, they were not to be sniffed at. But after their van broke down outside the house of the legendary anarcho-punk band Crass, their fate was sealed. Propelled into the anarcho sphere, they started producing records, and later released their first and only album, “The Curse of Zounds”, on Rough Trade. Distorted’s Ayisha Khan chatted to lead singer, founder and last remaining original member of the band, Steve Lake, in a rainy alleyway round the back of London’s historical 12 bar club.

Ayisha: Hi Steve, how are you?

Steve: Yeah I’m top of the world!

Ayisha: The band first started out in Reading with loose jamming sessions. At the time, was there ever a conscious band agenda going on? You have said before that you were absorbed by your alienation from the general world but also mainstream.

Steve: Yeah yeah yeah, I think that our attitude on it actually was (that) our agenda was really to have a band and not to have a band at the same time really. ‘Cause I think we were really keen to be a band but kind of felt that the whole music industry was full of bullshit anyway, and all the people that we knew that kind of wanted to be a band, they were into some kind of star-trip or some stereotypical idea of what it was like to be in a band…and actually we were all quite intimidated by those ideas. So we were really into playing but we didn’t really have any foresight about how to go about that.

Ayisha: So you weren’t necessarily going out to be a band but you just wanted to make music?

Steve: No, we just wanted to play really and although there was always this loose idea that we would have a band and do gigs, at the same time we were kind of very cynical about that and the idea that people wanted to be rockstars or popstars or something. Although secretly we did want to be, you know.

Ayisha: When you started out the band, what were the political influences – police and cold war etc? What was going on at the time that started influencing your music early on?

Steve: I think in terms of the sort of lyrics and the music was this feeling that actually we were really kind of outside of everything and a lot of the sort of things that we wanted to do, which usually involved kind of going out to things like free festivals and stuff, we always used to, you know, run into a lot of hassle with the police and the authorities. And then the other thing that influenced me was kind of realising actually that I’d been trained to be factory fodder for, you know, really kind of mindless manual labour and actually I had no opportunities in life other than having a really boring life in a factory.

Ayisha: So when you were younger, when you were growing up – I know you grew up without parental support and all that– how did that affect your own music? I mean did that affect your decision to become a musician in the first place?

Steve: Yeah yeah, I don’t know if that’s what made me want to become a musician, but the effect that it had on me was to make me feel very kind of insecure, vulnerable and very paranoid about things, so once I started writing, those were the things that came out. In the writing, you can see it in songs like ‘Fear’ and I think I never really felt like I had a place in life actually.

Ayisha: And what kind of key music did you get influenced by when you were younger; did any of that actually influence your music later on?

Steve: I think that everything you hear influences. I remember when I was a really little kid, you know, and I was at school in the 60s, obviously there was things like The Beatles and The Stones and The Small Faces and The Kinks, and that sort of thing was happening. And at first that was the sort of thing that was really influential on me, particularly a band like The Kinks ‘cause they were writing about the situation of people in England, you know, living in kind of working class areas,

Zounds © Tariel Khadzhyshvil

lower middle class areas.

Ayisha: And that was slightly controversial for the time. I know some of their songs were banned by the BBC.

Steve: Yeah, yeah that’s right. It was kind of that stuff that a lot of people was into and as time went on, I particularly got into a lot of sort of German bands who were doing kind of weird avant-garde music. So I was really into that and stuff like that. You know some of them had sort of psychedelic music, particularly bands like The Pink Fairies and some of these bands that had quite a sort of like street-level kind of take on their music. So they were groups that would always be playing free in the streets and kind of doing happenings and stuff. And I was really inspired by that…that really fed into the whole punk thing, you know the DIY thing. So that was really important as well.

Ayisha: I am going to move onto the subject that you get asked a lot about – Crass. I know the story about how you met up with them. What was so interesting about them as people and were you previously naïve to any of the anarcho stuff that was already going on or were you already aware?

Steve: No, no I wasn’t. I mean I met Crass before I heard any of their records and the thing that appealed to me immediately was that they were very nice, they were very friendly, they were very funny and they had a similar attitude to us about operating outside the conventional sort of music business. So actually then a short time later when I saw them, you know, and got hold of their records, actually I was quite surprised that it was so strong and seemed apparently aggressive, ‘cause actually they weren’t like that as people at all. And my first connection with them was just as people who were very like-minded. I mean most of them were a lot older than us I have to say, but you know, they had been through a lot of the same things. So that immediate connection was just with them as people. But the whole term anarcho-punk – that term didn’t exist then. And I don’t think that term even existed when Zounds were gigging the first time. Mainly people referred to it as like ‘oh the Crass bands’ or ‘the Crass family.’

Ayisha: I know that there was a use of a generic kind of style, really typical of anarcho-punk, especially the artwork.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, although in the beginning – I was talking to someone about this the other day – in the beginning, the first few records that are on Crass actually are all quite different. You know, there’s their record and our record, which are quite different. They had a group called Poison Girls that were playing with them a lot, and their stuff, some of it’s like musical songs or kind of like German cabaret stuff, and then The Mob was also associated with that. And they always played really slow. I mean they never did that kind of fast, thrashy thing. It was all a bit more kind of poetic, you know.

Ayisha: Say with ‘Subvert’, lyrically was that inspired by any of that (anarcho) stuff you were talking about?

Steve: No, no that was inspired by my own experiences at work. As I said to you, I just knew that I had this fucking life mapped out for me of doing these really, really crap, and unskilled, undemanding, unimaginative jobs. And its things that used to happen at work. I know the lyrics are ‘you can be an agent…for revolution’, but actually it wasn’t that thought out and I worked in factories and sometimes the work would get so boring. Like I was working in this pizza factory once and sometimes we’d just like turn the heat up on the ovens and set fire to the ovens so that they’d have to close the place down for a few hours. So some of it was quite petty.

Ayisha: So that ‘rebel without a cause’ kind of thing but looking for a kind of place to fit in?

Steve: Yeah, yeah. You know I wasn’t really that focussed on things. But it’s just that I knew that I didn’t want to be in that environment, and that’s what that was about.

Ayisha: I’m going to move on to when you started getting more publicity, you know with gigging. You’ve already mentioned Poison Girls and Crass and the other ones…The Mob and all that. Did you find that the gigs were, at the time, much more important than doing any recordings or demos or anything?

Steve: Well we really wanted (to), you know, doing the live thing was the thing. I mean we were really keen to get a record out, I think at the time just before we did the record for Crass. But immediately our thing was just to travel round and play gigs. And at first we weren’t really thinking about records.

Ayisha: And Fuck Off! Records put out stuff on tapes. But you did actually say that it was better live, the atmosphere and everything.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and you know, we did put out stuff on tapes but you just like go round somebody’s house in their basement and record some terrible thing on a little cassette recorder and put it out. But it was the only means of recording the music really. So yeah, we were really much more into the live thing, absolutely.

Ayisha: And more live stuff you did like Here & Now free festivals, you’ve already spoken a bit about. I just wanted to get a kind of idea about what the general scene was like at that time in the 70s. I’ve talked to some other musicians like Knox of The Vibrators. He said that his band was playing in greasy pub joints. Is that kind of what you were doing or was it bigger than that?

Steve: No, no I mean basically we were putting on our own gigs when we weren’t playing at free festivals. The scene in London at that time was a lot looser than it is now. You know (now) all the venues are tied up with promoters and deals and this, that and the other. In those days, in the late 70s in London, there were a lot of like community halls or rooms above pubs, you know, places like sort of Windsor Castle over in Harrow (road), or The Elgin.

Zounds © Tariel Khadzhyshvil

Ayisha: ‘Cause with London in particular, do you think that actually changed everything?

Steve: It changed us, ‘cause we came to London and suddenly you would go to one of these places, The Bull and Gate, and say ‘look we’re gonna put on a gig.’ And we were like a big community of kind of squatters and punks and hippies and bohemians and there would be enough people. You know, the band would put on the stuff themselves and there was enough of a community kind of into it all to get that going.

Ayisha: I think that leads on quite well to my next question, which is about the psychedelic roots and the hippy stuff. Did you feel that that was kind of key in your musical traits? I mean was that recognised by the punk scene or was there prejudice against you being kind of 60s?

Steve: Yeeeeah, I mean, you know, er…yeah I don’t think a lot of people really kind of were aware of that at that time. But yeah we were obviously just not one of those rama-mama punk bands. And actually a lot of people kind of appreciated that really, you know.

Ayisha: ‘Cause I know there was that grey area where you know, you’ve got people left over from the 60s, born too late.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I’ve been doing gigs over the last couple of weeks – some with Zounds and some solo gigs. And, you know (there’s) all sorts of people there, and there’ve been some people who have kind of followed us from those early days, those pre-Crass days, who would have seen us at gigs when we were doing like the free tours and stuff and who have kind of stuck with it through that. And then a lot of those people got into the punk thing because of bands like ourselves and The Mob that they knew kind of suddenly, you know, encompassed into this kind of ‘Crass family and bands’. So a lot of those people opened up to Crass and Poison Girls and those other sorts of bands. It was kind of a two-way thing. But I mean yeah, some people thought we were just stoned, dreary people.

Ayisha: Would that be the same with the media at the time, like New Musical Express (NME)? Didn’t they write a bad review about you; the fourth or fifth gig that you did or something?

Steve: Yeah, I mean I think actually they did a review of the second gig and kind of, you know, sort of like wrote us off as being this fucking useless hippy band.

Ayisha: I’m surprised because at that time they were a lot more open to stuff like that.

Steve: Yeeeeah we were kind of just pleased people were actually just starting to notice us.

Ayisha: I guess all bad publicity is still publicity.

Steve: Its ok, you never really care about what the NME say.

Ayisha: Going back to what I was saying before about your choice to self-ostracise yourself from society: was that due to coercion from the police in particular or society’s low tolerance towards the kind of life you were leading? I mean what was it like to be in that youth culture at the time?

Steve: Yeah I mean it was really fun except when you were out on the streets and you’re being hassled by the police and we used to get a lot of fucking hassle by the police all the time, you know, and I really didn’t like that. So, yeah and the other thing was just finding places to live so that’s (how) the whole squatting scene, you know, had kind of developed because actually there was no way into the mainstream. You know, it’s like in this song we do:

Steve Lake © Tariel Khadzhyshvil

Did he jump or was he pushed?
All the world cannot be wrong
It must be me I don’t belong.
I never turned my back on society
It’s society that turned its back on me.

So it’s like I felt like they didn’t want not just me, but all of us that were in that situation; whether it was jobs, housing, the law, and all those things.

Ayisha: Sounds like a really difficult time to have lived in.

Steve: Yeah but it was really great and it was really exciting at the same time, you know, and we made our own opportunities and a lot of us were sort of imaginative, creative people. So actually it was a really vibrant time because as well as (when) you felt under attack, you also were kind of in your communities in yourself and thinking of new ways to live and new ways of doing things. So actually it was really exciting, we had a lot of fun you know, that is the thing. It does seem sometimes when you think about it in retrospect that it was really kind of depressing and everybody was like on your case. But actually we did have a lot of fun. Sometimes I think it was easier in a way to have fun because there were spaces where we could create things, whereas now I think everything is very corporate; all the opportunities for people are kind of closed down actually and you (have) really got to fit in.

Ayisha: On fitting in with the music industry itself – I saw Pere Ubu actually and David was saying that at the time his music didn’t make sense to other people, but obviously that is irrelevant. But did you get people that were actually saying the same thing to you in that kind of ignorant way?

Steve: Yeah it makes sense to me, I love their music. Yeah, yeah I think so, you know. Particularly when for some reason you’d find yourself in a much sort of straighter venue with people that kind of weren’t into the thing that we were doing. Yeah and it was like people just thought that you were mental, frankly. You know, they thought we were fucking mental (laughs). No offence to the mental of which I am probably one (laughs).

Ayisha: On your website, you had the history of Zounds and you spoke about the glam rock scene that was running parallel, which was more exposed than the underground movement. Media were kind of saying that they were the proto-punkers, because they were the ones that brought punk on, but not necessarily in my opinion. Like New York Dolls – I personally think was closer to rock and roll. Still is. I mean I’ve been to their gigs! They were trying to be really controversial, but really it was punk and the other stuff that was going on, that you were involved in, which was more controversial?

Steve: I think the stuff we were involved in was actually a genuine kind of alternative, whereas the New York Dolls – and you know, I love the New York Dolls, I love Johnny Thunders as much as anybody – but yeah they were hanging out with David Bowie and Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. And they were in this kind of New York media.

Ayisha: London was like the glam rock city; it was called that at the time. I find that interesting when there was other stuff going on at the time.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah but, yeah so we would have still felt kind of outside of that (and) those people. Even Iggy and The Stooges…and in those days hardly anybody liked fucking Iggy and The Stooges. And now everybody loves them. At the time, nobody had an Iggy and The Stooges record. But, you know, even those people, they were kind of in with the sort of arty media kind of set, so it was almost like a sanctioned kind of alternative. And you know, I don’t know how much of a real alternative it was, because as I was saying, it was people just trying to make their way in the music business. I mean maybe we were a bit fucking serious and pompous, but although, as I say we had a good time – but we felt actually that there was more to it than kind of the pose, you know. It was kind of also about the way you lived and what you did, you know. It wasn’t just like putting on a bit of make-up and hanging out with Andy Warhol.

Ayisha: ‘Cause that’s what I felt like when I went to see New York Dolls; I did feel like it was kind of Rolling Stones disease, like ‘look at me’ kind of stuff. Which I feel other punk musicians have said…that they were kind of avoiding that even though they may not get paid that much at the end of day. You know, it’s a way of life really.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t know if it was on a TV programme that somebody said that ‘you know the New York Dolls were to The Rolling Stones like The Monkees were to The Beatles in a way.’ It’s like a sort of cartoon version of it and, you know, I think that has a bit of truth to it, really.

Ayisha: Going back to Crass: you said that they were quite popular beyond the anarcho scene, although your association would have benefited even if it was on their terms. What do you mean by ‘beyond the scene’?

Steve: Oh god absolutely, yeah, yeah. What I mean by that (is) in kind of commercial terms; you know a lot of the sort of anarcho bands had a particular kind of agenda but, then a lot of the punks weren’t into the anarcho thing. I mean they just liked the sort of noise they made so actually they would sell a lot of records to people who just liked noisy punk, you know, whereas I’m not sure that the other bands on the scene did really.

Ayisha: Did you kind of miss your roots in the hippie scene or was that still there at that time? ‘Cause I know you were shoved centre stage with Crass. Did you get alienated by that at all?

Zounds © Tariel Khadzhyshvil

Steve: Yeah, yeah I mean I think the thing with us, is I think we were sort of alienated and that led to quite a lot of frustration actually ‘cause we also wanted to progress musically. You know the thing about Crass was that they were just into the politics. With ourselves actually I like all types of music. I really love music; it’s very important to me. And we felt actually the more gigs we did – I think this led to our breaking-up, you know – there’d be a certain type of audience, there’d be a certain kind of expectation and you’d end up doing a certain thing. And we’re thinking, actually we’re playing to all these people who call themselves ‘free and anarchist’, and this, that and the other, but actually in some ways it was a very close-minded, yes a uniform kind of situation. So that was really kind of frustrating.

Ayisha: Did you think there was any hatred between hippies and punks?

Steve: I mean Crass were the biggest fucking hippies going (laughs). But no, you look at all that sort of first wave of punk, you know. Johnny Rotten, before he was in The Sex Pistols, he was selling acid at The Roundhouse on a Sunday afternoon, which is just like a big hippie venue. You know, and you find like a couple of years later, The Damned are covering Jefferson Aeroplane albums. So it was the same for everybody; everybody was into all that.

Ayisha: It was what influenced them to start with; you know they didn’t have anything else!

Steve: Yeah it’s kind of like Stalinist revisionism where everybody was like ‘Oh no I never liked that, I was always into Iggy, I was always into the New York Dolls.’ No you weren’t! I’ve been round your house, I’ve seen the records! (Laughs) You know, you’ve got the fucking Grateful Dead and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, you’ve just been down record and tape exchange, you know, and sold them all. Everybody was like that, everybody was like that.

Ayisha: What was the attraction of playing abroad, like Holland and Belgium?

Steve: Belgium was really good: they really liked us there. You know, I’m a very shallow person, so anybody that likes me, I like them. And it was great and we were really well supported there. We met some really good people: band called the X, who we toured with a bit, who were still going and are really great people. Much more sort of politically committed than we ever were, ‘cause although the politics were kind of in the music, you know, I’ve never been like a political activist. I’ve just been somebody with a lot of opinions, a big mouth and into music, really. So I wouldn’t pretend that I’m kind of somebody that is out at the barricades. But it was really nice over there, yeah, people were very supportive in those Benelux countries and in Germany and we always did really well. More people would come to the gigs over there than over here actually, it really was for us a pretty underground kind of scene.

Ayisha: And when you signed to Rough Trade, was that desperation to earn money?

Steve: No it wasn’t desperation at all, no; no it’s just that we wanted to release another record. I mean money never came into it because we never had any money and never expected to have any money. As long as we could play and then record. And erm, no and it was this thing that we were going to record again for Crass but suddenly they had this thing of like ‘oh actually we’re not going to become like a record company and just put out loads of records.’ You know, ‘we don’t mind doing a record with a band, but we don’t want to get into developing their career or whatever.’

Ayisha: Some bands start off getting signed by another band but they try and get their own label at some point.

Steve: Well we went down to Rough Trade, and said look, ‘cause we’d done this record on Crass and we think somehow we’d just try and bring out our own record, and Rough Trade was the place you went who kind of knew how to do that. They were like the big independent distributors. And we walked in there and we met Geoff Travis, who kind of ran Rough Trade, and said, ‘Oh like we’re from Zounds.’ And he just said, ‘Oh great, well sorry I haven’t come along to see you. Really love the record. Well what can I do?’ ‘Well we wanna bring out a record.’ And he said, ‘Well do you want to do an album for Rough Trade?’

Ayisha: Was it quite a smooth transition? Did you find with like mixing songs and stuff – did that change at all?

Steve: Yeah yeah, I mean because when you’re on Crass you do things the way they want to do it and I’ve got no worries

Steve Lake © Tariel Khadzhyshvil

with that. Nobody forced us to be on the label. And they said, ‘Look this is the way we work’, you know, ‘If you wanna do it?’ And we were happy to do it ‘cause we were really keen to get a record out. Once we were on Rough Trade, you know, we were kind of nominally producing ourselves. So, we were kind of put into the studio with an engineer, kind of like told him what to do and he didn’t do it, and the record ended up sounding like it sounded (laughs). Which we weren’t very happy about, we never liked any of those records.

Ayisha: Did that cause any friction in the band at all then? When abouts did the problems start with the break-up and gradual deterioration of the band?

Steve: Er…err….I’m not…er, not at first but yes as we progressed…I don’t think it was so much that…I mean it was all really quick. It seemed like it went on for ages but the whole thing, that phase of the band, because that wasn’t the original phase of the band ‘cause the people that were in recording those records with us, they weren’t in the band originally, but I’d got them in. But that’s the kind of line-up people always think of. But it wasn’t really a kind of musical thing so much as personal differences, and when we’re all kind of living in the same street, there’s kind of, you know, personal differences, things develop between people.

Ayisha: Were there other responsibilities at all?

Steve: Yeah, I mean in the end the reason that I stopped was like the woman I was going out with got pregnant and I kind of was in this position where [there was] another person I was responsible for and that freaked me out a big deal. I mean everything has always freaked me out, everything. And I didn’t like the scene, ‘cause as I said we were being forced to play in a certain way and I wasn’t feeling that anymore. I had enough of the scene, I had enough of kind of living in Brown road, people turning up expecting you to find places for them to live, people was round your house. You know, I just had to get out of it really, I just had to get out of the whole scene for a while and that’s what I did.

Ayisha: Then you released ‘More Trouble Coming Everyday’ – can you tell me what that song is about?

Steve: Well that song really, well the title is ripped off from a Frank Zappa record.

Ayisha: ‘Freak Out’

Steve: Yeah that’s right. Yeah and it’s an old doo-wop sequence. But mainly it’s kind of about the situation. The first verse is just like any sort of teenage situation where you’re living at home and you wanna do this, that and the other and you have all those kind of like parental and family responsibilities. And then the second verse refers more to the riots that were going on at the time. You know because the riots were happening in London, Bristol, Birmingham and it kind of refers to that really. You know, there’s trouble all the time. I was just going to sort of say a couple of lines from the song but I can’t even remember them at this point in this alleyway.

Ayisha: I really like ‘Knife’ as well – it’s very different, but not in a bad way.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and that was one of the last things that we did and I think that was that thing where we were really trying to really kind of develop. You know, and we had like a synthesiser and a trumpet on it. In fact the guy that did that trumpet, he started doing bass for us because the band was kind of falling apart. We got this guy in, and I think he’s in Ian Brown’s band now, he does all the brass and vocal arrangements, and so he’s done well for himself. But I’m still in the rain in the alley, you know, doing it for the kids (laughs).

Ayisha: You said at the end (of the history of Zounds) that Rough Trade was trying to get money for you from licensing for the Italian-only singles collection. Did you feel disappointed at all at that time because you didn’t get a lot of money back from what they thought you’d get money back from? It wasn’t about money I suppose…

Steve: No, no, yeah, oh yeah that thing with the Italian…Yeah well, you know…Italy – what a great place! But it’s one of those things where sort of like ‘we’re gonna do this compilation; it’s a limited edition of a 1000 pressings.’ And I was talking to a friend of mine in Belgium, he was a record distributor and he’d bought 4000 of them (laughs), so we were kind of aware that people were making money off what you were doing. But it wasn’t ever really a big thing with that. One of the many things, you know, immaturities that I have is that I can’t really handle money.

Zounds - The Curse Of The Zounds

Ayisha: Money and achievement aren’t related necessarily, but do you feel like you haven’t achieved what you wanted – to be more recognised? I mean at that point, what was going through your head?

Steve: I don’t know. It’s hard to know what was going through my head actually. Erm, I think I was kind of disappointed when we split up the band and then I realised actually it’s very difficult to get into a position where you can make records and somebody’s going to pay for them. So that was the frustrating thing really; (it) was that suddenly I’d put myself out of the game a bit.

Ayisha: When you went solo, what other artists and musicians did you work with? Say in recent years – who’ve you been working with?

Steve: Nobody that anyone would have ever heard of, but mainly these guys, Paul and Paul, and just people that live around where I live. So you know, kind of for many, many years I was either not playing, not operating at all, or just like any guy that lives in an area and just does local gigs.

Ayisha: So why did you decide to include a band on this tour?

Steve: Er, because I get asked, I’ve always been asked, you know over sort of recent years, I’m always asked to do Zounds, because for many years I couldn’t really feel it and I didn’t feel close to the songs?

Ayisha: It’s not like a reunion or anything like that?

Steve: Nah, the other guys will never come back.

Ayisha: Am I allowed to ask what they are up to at all?

Steve: Yeah, the other guys – one of them works in television, which you know obviously means he is the spawn of the devil and is not allowed round at my house anymore. And he’s very hurt by that obviously, but you know over the years I’ve become a sort of cruel and vicious person and I can’t really have him coming round my house basically. The other guy, Joseph, had his own band for years, Blyth Power, and they still play. And a couple of years ago when I had a different line-up of the band, Josef came along to the gig and he actually came up and sang a couple of songs with us. So my relationship with him is fine, you know. So I’ve had a few people over the years in and out of the band, which is fine. The important thing is that I get on with them and that they play well, and make me look better than I really am (laughs).

Ayisha: Is there any music today, like modern bands that you listen to? Any punk music?

Steve: Er (laughs), nothing really, you know I’m kind of aware of modern music ‘cause I’ve had kids and they’ve grown up, you know. And my son is into, mainly a band called The King Blues and I’ve seen them and I like them and they’re very nice and they’ve got good politics and stuff. Beyond that I don’t really listen to a lot of music. Mainly I almost only listen to a guy called Billy Childish, who was around from the early days of punk, and I go and see his band every month, you know. And I listen to him a lot. And I listen to a lot of old records.

Ayisha: Do you listen to your own?

Steve: I never listen to my own records! My children are banned from listening to them. They’d never play my music in my house or they would not be allowed to live in the house.

Ayisha: One last question: ‘Demystification’ – is that still your favourite song and if so why?

Steve: I think it’s my favourite because, you know, it kind of expresses the fact that I don’t know anything, I don’t know what’s going on and people are forever trying to kind of, you know, bullshit you and pull the wool over your eyes and tell you situations…and I think I just love the sound of it; I just think there’s something about the sound of that record that we never captured on anything else on the album, and I’ve never really been able to capture again. And I think it’s like a bit of a fluke really. But there’s just something really creamy and lovely about that record and so I think, yeah that’s still my favourite.

Zounds are due to begin recording a new record in June with release scheduled for later in the year.