00:08I think Suicide Alley is important because it was the first time, Richie wasn't in the band at the time,
00:13he took the picture of the front cover, but it's the first time we got anywhere near to realising that
00:21we could be a band.
00:23And without it, we'd probably, I don't know if we ever quite got started, really, it was, I mean, it's
00:29pure punk, it's the fastest thing I've ever heard on it again, it's like speed metal, it's so fast on
00:35that record.
00:36And we were just trying to follow the rule, the kind of like, the old Clash thing, the Burning Roads
00:40told them to write about what was happening outside the window on their doorstep,
00:44and that was one of the first pop times where we'd kind of written about the place we came from,
00:49I suppose.
00:49Yeah, I mean, I hadn't started writing lyrics with Richie at that point, and it was just about spilling out
00:55the pumps in Blackwood, really, and just ultra-violence.
01:04I can't imagine another band actually writing this lyric, really.
01:08I'm getting it to number two.
01:10Yeah.
01:11In the charts.
01:12That's an even more bizarre thing about it.
01:14Sean's always been a big fan.
01:16He's always been a believer.
01:20Yeah, well, you know, by anything.
01:21Just because it's more pop than anything, but then the lyric is just so obtuse and perverse.
01:28No, I'd say it's just about looking at the nature of sainthood and kind of demonisation and just seeing that
01:36it's just not quite as simple as that.
01:38It's got that great sort of sample at the end, which with Nixon himself, just, it ends with, I am
01:43not a quitter.
01:45Certainly felt that applied to us as a band.
01:52I'm going to just still love playing this live.
01:54I just think it's so effervescent and so full of freshness for a band in their 40s on their 10th
02:01record.
02:02I really like the title and the words and the video with Michael Sheen.
02:07It's just one of those moments where everything comes together.
02:10You know, I could just sit there and listen to the fucking drums for all day.
02:13Sean's toms and everything.
02:14I love them.
02:15The closest I'll ever get to Neil Peel.
02:16Yes.
02:17It was really the first time Nick had just sat down and just followed his own music and just wrote
02:23most of the music, you know, to his own lyrics.
02:27Because Nick had a direction, wire, sorry, had a direction, it took me a while to realise it was going
02:33to be a single.
02:33So he's kind of learnt a lot of lessons just through that experience itself, really.
02:40To have the first number one of the new Millennium coming after we'd sold out the Millennium Stadium, amazing gig.
02:49And, you know, kind of reaction to the supposed bigness and blandness of This Is My Truth coming back with
02:56something which was,
02:57starts with that Chomsky sample, you know, and it was really horrible to record.
03:03There was no joy in the recording at all.
03:06No, there wasn't.
03:07There'd been a demo of it flying around for a while, which was more like a kind of Nirvana unplugged
03:13kind of vibe.
03:14That's right.
03:15But, yeah.
03:17The thing about it is it's actually not a particularly political song.
03:20It's actually a song about us.
03:22You know, Hello, It's Us Again.
03:23It's like a rewriter, You Love Us, really.
03:25It's actually just that idea that, you know, ten years on we might have become one of the biggest bands
03:31in Britain,
03:31but we're basically still the same.
03:36Actually, because we recorded it in the Power Plant, which was up in North London,
03:41where Maggie may have been recorded, and we've never managed to get a lot of these sounds back.
03:46The drums or the guitars or the vocal sound or the bass sound.
03:50It just was a magical little moment recording it.
03:52I think it's when just the kind of genuine thrill and energy that a band has actually comes out on
04:00the record.
04:01It's just not easy to get that.
04:02I think you can hear our excitement of being in a studio probably with a brilliant producer-engineer, Robin Evans.
04:09You can hear our excitement, and you can hear that we're just ready for it as well.
04:13But it's really weird that, I wouldn't say they're not the most sophisticated sounds,
04:18but it's the closest, I think, we've ever got to The Clash, really, in terms of sounds.
04:22You can hear that.
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