"I was really into them for a long time in the 70s and it coincided with early drug influences and when I jumped from the kind of psychedelia that the Beatles put forth to kind of what was happening in our own backyard on the West Coast with the Airplane and the Dead and Quicksilver.. The Beatles stopped so I never got the chance to see them, but the Dead came around a lot and so you got to see those bands. The Grateful Dead delved really deep into acoustic music, that was really important, and later their famous electric records, but Anthem of the Sun was in their early period. One of the things I keep talking about with my new record Electric Trim is that it was really created in the studio and I keep mentioning Dark Side of The Moon or Pet Sounds or Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when I should be referencing Anthem of the Sun Anthem of the Sun was the kind of record that they were trying to construct in a studio. It’s a studio experience of a live concert experience, so they were mixing all this stuff they recorded in all the studio with all these different live takes, slowing things down and speeding things up and thinking of all these trippy aspects of the way the sound exists in stereo space. A couple of those guys, especially Phil Lesh trained alongside Steve Reich at school and studied Luciano Berio and all this 20th century modernist stuff, so he was aware of where music was going on that level and they were just at a cross roads where they weren’t sure they wanted to be a straight ahead rock band. They had moments of being a rock dance band and then they had other aspirations. I love listening to Anthem of the Sun because it may not be perfect, or achieved what they really wanted, but it’s one of those records that set its sights really high and whether or not it got all the way there it achieved something really unique. There’s not many records that sound like that, not just the fact they were splicing together live tapes from 30 different gigs, it was kind of a ridiculous stoned or drugged task from the beginning but they threw their back against the wheel, and tried to do it. If you ever listen to that record with headphones it’s so rich. I was really into them for a long time but once New York City punk and all that stuff happened I kind of dropped it like a hot potato and went onto other stuff and it was only in the last 7 or 8 years that I’ve come back to my appreciation of it through a number of different avenues. I was involved a couple of years ago with this record that this group The National put together called Day of the Dead where they covered 60 songs or something and they asked me to cover ‘Mountains of the Moon’. There were a couple of good Dead songs I was listening to at the time because they related to a song I was doing for my record with The Dust – Last Night on Earth and when I went to record with them they played me a lot of the songs they were working on and whether you like 30 minute noodling electric guitar solos or not you can put that aside and say the thing that impressed me about what they were doing was how great their song writing was. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter especially, wrote a lot of amazing songs together and that’s what really struck me – that’s why I liked these guys way back when because they had really great songs. Their songs are like the 60s era American songbook. And it was also in this period where I was thinking that I wanted a lyrical collaborator and so the idea of Hunter’s role with Garcia in that band especially or like when Dylan turned to either Robert Hunter or Jacques Levy for inspiration when he was working on Desire Dylan doesn’t need a lyrical collaborator - why’s he working with outside lyricists? And yet at some point he thought “I need someone else to shift the viewpoint”. So that’s what inspired me to ask Jonathan Lethem to work on Electric Trim. We’d known each other for a long time and I just felt like this was a good time to get someone else’s input, put another voice in the mix. Every single aspect of the record, words, lyrics, tunes didn’t have to spring from me. Music can be very collaborative and I’ve kind of come up in a very collaborative situation with Sonic Youth for so many years – every song was listed as all four of us writing it, ‘cos that’s ultimately what happened. In Sonic Youth, it was only a very rare occasion where one of us came in and said, “Hey I’ve got a new song this is how it goes…”

"I've read since that Hex Enduction Hour was going to be the last Fall album and that Mark was going to split the band up if it didn't work. The rest of us weren't aware of this. I guess it could have been like David Bowie splitting up the Spiders From Mars onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, but obviously this proved not to be the case. I put this in here because it was the last Fall album that I did, and everything that we'd learned just came together. I was on Live At The Witch Trials, but that was a pop album. It sounds like a totally different group… well, it did have different musicians on it, I guess. Mark obviously wasn't clear on what he wanted The Fall to sound like at that point in time; Dragnet was just the sound of a load of kids who couldn't play being thrown in a studio and being excited and being in their favourite band but… [laughs] well, Dragnet is a mystery to me, that album… I remember recording it and the production… it never sounded the same twice. I realised that wasn't how we sounded live. It didn't sound like The Fall. It sounded amazing in its own way but it didn't sound like The Fall. It didn't capture what we were doing. But with Hex Enduction Hour, everything came together at that one point. We did some of it live in a cinema in Hitchin and some of it in a studio in Iceland that had lava walls. Apparently it's still talked about to this day, The Fall's stay in Iceland. No one went to Iceland then, The Stranglers had played there, Jaz Coleman ran off there to find the ley lines, but that was it. I think we first went there because we were invited by Einar from the Sugarcubes. He instigated it. It was so bleak there. There was no tourism. And the mentality of the Icelandic people was like that of The Fall, to be honest. It was a real case of us versus them. They were out on a limb. Iceland didn't integrate. It was a really strange community of people. They were really nice but otherworldly. That was my swansong really. I mean I'm on that Room To Live album as well, but I listen to Hex and I hear a glorious racket. I think that's when Mark really got to grips with what he wanted The Fall to sound like, and ironically you find out later that it was going to be the last Fall album. Mark's stream of consciousness really comes together, the way he makes words up like in the title, he really got a handle on where he wanted to take his own art. And with the band it was all because we'd been playing together for a long time. Steve Hanley couldn't play bass when we were together in [pre-Fall group] The Sirens, I taught him the root notes and I couldn't play guitar either… I still can't, if I'm honest. Steve found his feet and found his sound, so he became the engine room of The Fall. The sound of it is right, despite being recorded in these two totally different environments. I remember when I heard 'Hip Priest' on Silence Of The Lambs, because I was the only person left in the cinema when it came on… I tell a lie, it was just me and the wife. Jonathan Demme was a massive Fall fan. Yeah, it was peculiar that… but then again it's the music that a serial killer's playing in his house, so is it really that weird? Mark's given me grief over the years, but how can you take any of it to heart? Anything he says is water off a duck's back. He's a character… almost a cartoon character. I've got a massive soft spot for Mark and I'm a massive fan. Round the corner from here there used to be a venue called The Arches Bar and a mate of mine was having his birthday party in there in the mid-80s. I was upstairs, and my mate said Mark Smith's downstairs and he wants a pint with you. So I thought, right, well, we've both grown up since then, let's have a drink and put it all behind us. So I had a couple of pints with him, and we had a really good time together. I'd been listening to The Fall, he said – and he'll deny this – I've got your album and I'm keeping an eye on what you're doing and I think it's great. I mean we were both drunk, but by the end of it we were kind of mates again. Then about three months later they reissued a load of Fall albums on Cog Sinister, so I rang him up and said, 'Am I going to get paid for any of this?' And he said, 'No you're not!' [makes noise of phone being slammed down] So it was straight back to square one."