I love it - you have to remember Matt is the drummer - I'm not really sure what his input is song wise - he might have had the urge to be 'creative' with a guitar beaten out of him. I think we thought pretty similar when choosing what to do next music wise - (a) something different from cable, to try and avoid comparrison and (b) not be so heavily involved in the songwriting.
With cable, being in a band lost many aspects of the fun of it, once we got on a treadmill of write songs, argue with record company about new songs, agree which songs can be recorded, record songs, argue with record company about recordings, remix/master songs, argue with record company about the new mixes, prepare artwork, argue with record company about art work...(do you see a pattern?
) And what made it specially hard would be the deadline set...we would literally finish touring one album, when the label would say 'you have 13 weeks to write a new album'. That meant 13 weeks to write around 15-16 songs (10 or 11 for the album and b sides to cover all single releases). Infectious were pretty hot on us releasing an album every year - they were worried that anythign longer would mean the kettle would go off the boil. Soo it was hard work and we all contributed to the writing - Richie didn't just wack stuff, he would input into arrangement, had a great ear for vocal melodies - we all made suggestions and not just on our own instrument - Matt would often pick up the bass and go 'i imagined something more like this' or I'd pick up a guitar and suggest a change on the rhythm, or swap the chords round, or like I did in song1, just go 'how about this in the middle?' and play one chord for like 16 bars!
so when it came to doing HS6 - I knew what sort of band I wanted to form, but I wanted the others to have more of an active input than me - because If I drove the ideas too much, it would just end up all cabley.
So as a result, there is a backlash - I worry that HS6 is too cabley, I also worry that Cable is all I'll ever really achieve and yet many a cable fan is disappointed by how not-cabley we are.
I'd been listening to alot of stuff like early zz top, sabbath, ac-dc, zeppelin - fuzzed up sleaze rock and I fancied starting a modern blues band with a punk ethic to songwriting. I wanted it to twang and swagger, rather than hurtle along like an express train - just wanted to break away and try that. I remember thinking it would be great if we could make blues rock cool again by giving it a fresh coat of paint. Like what the whole baggy thing did for psychedelic 60s type stuff.
So I was hoping JSA would be at right angles to cable and I was pleased when I heard it. I just wish Darius' work had seen the light of day - it was probably the most imaginitive out of everybody - I contributed some drum loops and a bit of scratching here and there, but what got used in the final mixes, I don't know.
