I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.
One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.
My dad spent his whole life getting into fights for telling what he believed to be the truth. Basically it comes from my dad-and he's screaming right-wing, so there you are.
People in bands don't have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid.
I had a series of mini-breakdowns where the public persona - this thing, this face, this person who writes this music... I would walk past that person in the mirror or listen to that person playing guitar and I didn't know who they were.
I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.
If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.
Coming from Britain, I was terrified of meeting all these other artists, because artists over there tend to fight with each other a lot, the premise being that there's not enough room for everybody.
I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state.
Music is more difficult - try naming a political band. The Dead Kennedys. The Dead Kennedys are political, but they are more funny than they are political.
This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer's block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what's going on has really helped.
We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us.
