JS: 11 albums in 30 years is not really prolific is it?

PW: True but you have always been busy and are not one of those bands that split up and reform all the time.

JS: Well ha-ha we have actually split up a few times but behind the scenes. I have left the band at least four times. We started in order to play two gigs in a pub in Bradford and that was it. Well when I say we, I mean me and Stuart [Morrow] the original bass player. We had been in various bands since 78 and had started New Model Army as a three piece. We had originally had a five piece but it was a case of, we couldn’t be bothered with all these musicians and went back to three. We didn’t think we were doing anything or going anywhere or being famous it was a case of just doing it like this, for the hell of doing it. To some extent it still is, obviously over the years people have changed and circumstances and managers too but the basic starting point of, ‘this sounds good, I’m enjoying this,’ is kind of the same.

PW: Obviously a lot has changed over the years. How does this affect they way you have worked in bringing an album to life and have you a set pattern or any time scale perhaps that decides when the time is right for you to go back into the studio?

JS: The way we work mostly, in fact almost always, is like this… In fact one of the reasons why ‘Strange Brotherhood’ was such a bad time was because we didn’t do it by this template. We went into the studio and argued about what a snare drum should sound like before we had written a song and that was the problem with that era. We never write anything on the road as to me writing songs requires even more focus and sort of energy than even playing gigs and I just have enough for that on tour. But what we do is all the time we are collecting ideas so we have one cupboard marked ‘musical ideas’ into which we put guitar riffs, bass runs, bits of jamming, particularly drum beats and for me chord sequences. Occasionally there will be a bit of a song, a singer song-writing sort of thing but mostly not, it’s mostly bits and ideas.

In the other cupboard goes stuff I want to write about, which could be a rhyming couplet I thought of at some point when I was walking down the road or a story someone told me in a pub, or just a rant, pages and pages of rants. That all goes in the ‘lyrical cupboard.’

Then what happens is everything has to stop. Last year it was last October and we were free to write an album. So 1st of October, down to the room, a basic studio set-up and we start pulling stuff out. Is that a drum beat, well that will go with that riff. The first thing you write is always rubbish and the second thing is normally pretty rubbish but there is a germ of something good in it. I don’t believe in writers block, I just believe you work through it. You carry on working through it and if the first song you write is rubbish you just chuck it away. But you take an element of the third song which is kind of good but doesn’t quite work and you put that together with that and finally you find you have a half decent song. The first song written for an album is never the best. Then you start working and what happens is one thing leads to another and once you get used to the idea of what you are doing, you are listening to stuff in your head and it just falls together.

PW: The evolvement of technology has obviously had a huge impact on the music industry. There are great advantages as far as being able to interact with your fan base but things are not necessarily reciprocated with albums being leaked and downloaded. You have a very loyal following, who I am sure would want the finished album but inevitably the new one is online. What impact have you noticed from this?

JS: We were slightly taken aback this time with the speed with which it happened. Of course you know its going to happen, when you send out promos it’s going to happen but probably the day after the very first promo was sent out it was up there on all the torrent sites and that was a bit of a shock to us, certainly a big shock to Essential, our new distributors. There’s no point losing sleep over it, so I don’t. Will it affect sales? The jury is very out on that, some people say yes, some people say no. Again, I don’t think about it. It’s a fact of life.

PW: Moving onto ‘Today Is A Good Day’ it’s evident on just the first spin that it is a lot more in your face and heavier than the last few albums. Indeed there is at times almost an urgency about it. Did you feel it was time to up the ante and make the music harder and faster, perhaps in line with the more vociferous vocal approach?

JS: No…. ha-ha. It’s just what happened. When Marshall joined the band after we did ‘Carnival’…I actually really enjoy ‘Carnival’ and have a real soft spot for it as I think it is full of really good ideas, someone said to me it’s kind of punk prog! I’m really keen on some of the vocal set-pieces like on ‘Too Close To The Sun’ they are kind of odd, construction wise. ‘Carnival’ was put together at a difficult time, Dave wasn’t around, Nelson was always miles away and then we went out on tour and Marshall joined us, he was the right person at the right place at the right time, playing the right way with the right spirit and he has been good for us. Since he joined we find within the band we are kind of balanced, there is a balance between five different people that kind of works. There is much less politics in the band and five people are quite equal. With less politics going on it has made it easier to trust each other more. We started doing that with ‘High’ but ‘High’ had a couple of problems. We didn’t love the mixes and we recorded it in a particular place that Chris Kimsey chose, famous for its old gear. It was in London and I’m not sure how comfortable we were. Learning from that we had Chris Kimsey to produce, Tommy [Tee manager] was very insistent on that because Chris gets things done. Tommy was always terrified that left to our own devices we would go off on tangents and we do, especially me, I’m a tangent man. Chris keeps us on track so we chose him again but on the basis that he came up to Bradford and worked in our puny little studio. We are comfortable there and using our studio as a control room and the next door room, we had heard stories that this little room sounded brilliant to record in and we took everyone’s word for it.

It’s upstairs in the top floor of a mill in Bradford which is kind of a hippy heaven. Downstairs floors were all party space and stuff like raves and all of that. The top floor was us, Paradise Lost and a number of other groups. Chumbawamba were there and it was a nice atmosphere to work with all these bands there. We were using the end room, which Robert used to record little bands in and he always said it sounded really good. In our home environment we just felt comfortable and I think because the band politics had kind of subsided and in this band there is a lot of trust so everybody was trusted to perform and I think that there is something about ‘Today Is A Good Day’ that is over and above almost any of our records in some ways. There’s a lot of performance going on, no clicks except for the last track, it’s a band playing in a room in a spirit of ‘this is great’ trusting each other and what they were going to do. You can hear all the songs start at a certain pace and they speed up except for ‘God Save Me’ which gets slower and slower and is like you’re wading through treacle. All of which makes the album really listenable because almost every fucking record these days is made with clicks, which makes them really boring. It was only the last one that we put together in the ‘modern way,’ we were kind of writing it as we went along as obviously it was written about Tommy dying and it was kind of mine and Michael’s baby with Marshall playing a fantastic solo on it and Nelson playing some great bass too.

PW: The striking white artwork was kind of a trip back in time to ‘Thunder and Consolation’ and perhaps the ‘Vagabonds’ 12.

JS: I just let Joolz [Denby artist, writer, singer and Justin’s partner] do what she likes really. She is a brilliant artist and like us she never gets stuck anywhere. She is probably largely responsible that large numbers of people all over the Western world are now covered in Celtic tattoos. You can trace it back largely to Joolz. This Celtic artwork was in fashion in the late 19th Century and Victorian era and came back in the late 70s and early 80s and she could have stayed there but she wasn’t interested. It’s always do this and then move on, done that, move on and also her artwork’s not graphic, it’s kind of organic, things that are meant to be in the middle are never in the middle it’s always slightly imperfect and has a lot of light and spirit and I think that goes along with what we do.

PW: You have always been political and have plenty of ammunition this time around. The title song obviously acknowledges the global financial crisis, what are your opinions on the current disastrous climate and the greed that has brought it about? I guess the song speaks for itself?

JS: Yes it does speak for itself and people are saying it’s the ultimate anti-capitalist slogan, oh that was you that said that! I have to say I think there is something about capitalism that is quite natural because the essence of all things in nature is change, you know, winter, spring, summer, autumn, birth, growth, decline, death, rebirth, etc. etc. That’s what capitalism allows for which is why it survives. The problem with communism wasn’t that the socialist economy failed to deliver economic wealth well it did but that’s not the point. The point is it tried to freeze a moment in time and that’s very unnatural in the world, nothing freezes and anything that does is dead. The bubble bursting last September was entirely inevitable. It was required and it was a good thing, if it hadn’t happened then it would have happened next year twice as bad. It could have happened earlier and not been as bad but for the fact that all the people on the gravy train were covering up the big fraud. The system works on buying debt and calling it profit, when that’s to extreme proportions everyone wakes up and asks actually where is all this money that we have got and it turns out not to exist. That’s in the very nature of capitalism.

What’s interesting to me is the attitude of ordinary people to this. There haven’t been protests in the streets. Unemployment has only really just been biting over the last 6 months, on the contrary people just shrug and it’s almost as if ordinary people never bought into this shit in the first place, ordinary people have an almost ancestral memory that you have a run of good harvests and then you have a bad harvest, it’s in the very nature of all things. Most people thought, well we’ve had some good years, well here come the bad years, shrug! Most people are used to the fact that life is hard; it’s only the politicians and the greedy fuckers in the city who aren’t. The annoying thing is the huge extent to which we have to bail these fuckers out. Socialism came to the rescue of capitalism in the sense that we bailed them all out so in theory we own all the banks so I don’t know why we don’t just nationalise them.

PW: Although musically things are upbeat, lyrically things are at times very dark. Certainly ‘Autumn’ with its gorgeous chorus and ‘Peace Is Only’ are very maudlin. This is hardly surprising with the tragic and unexpected death of your long time friend and manager Tommy Tee. Were lyrics here a tribute at all?

JS: The only song written after Tommy died was ‘North Star,’ written for and about him. ‘Autumn’ was actually written in October last year, to start with it’s my favourite time of year, today is the perfect day, there’s a chill in the air, it’s blowy, to me it feels like things are changing and I’m excited by that. There’s an interesting thing about death in that we are very much protected from it in society but it is an everyday part of life and absolutely inevitable and all around you all the time. We are all going there and I haven’t got a problem with that. There’s a lot of fiction and literature about vampires and living forever, which is a rich vein as how would it feel to live forever? In most cases it is a bit fucking grim to be honest. It’s like being super rich and when you are you can buy anything and nothing has any value. Same with living forever, as you can have anything any old time. It’s because everything is dying that everything is beautiful [songs lyrics] so you can get really deep about it. It’s a lovely song and when the chorus comes in with the choir, first of all I find it quite uplifting and it’s also quite funny. There is a sense of black humour about it.

PW: One thing I said in my review is the fact that every song of yours tells a story, it’s one of the things I always have loved about the band. Where does your inspiration come from, life, environment and have you ever thought about writing a book either factual or fiction?

JS: I’m a lousy fiction writer! I also live with a poet and novelist who is extremely good at it so… I have always liked songs that have a snippet of a story and as a writer I don’t even want to know the whole story, I like snippets. All the songs that I like the most are not the inner side of the head and thoughts, I find that incredibly boring. Occasionally I do it but I try not to too much. I don’t want to as there’s only a certain amount in there, other people have got stories and I like songs that have got a time of day, weather, light because as soon as you hear those words you have a picture in front of you and they take you somewhere. Someone said to me ‘all your songs are like bloody weather forecasts’ and it’s true as 99% of them have got weather or light in them somewhere.

(It is at this point Justin’s phone rings and there is a bit of a problem that needs sorting so the last few questions are taken pretty much at a run. Mind you he had certainly given great detailed input into everything else. )

PW: Of course there are still some more reflective, mellower and poetic numbers on the album. I was interested why you decided to include a solo track ‘Ocean Rising’ from ‘Navigating By The Stars’ on the album?’

JS: It’s just that the band version was different enough to warrant it really.

PW: ‘Mambo Queen Of The Sandstone City’ is a really intriguing title. For a start it reminded me of The Doors at intro before going off on a boogie. What and who is the song really about?

JS: Whatever you want it to be!

Answered with a wry grin and I had a feeling he was going to say that, so no answer to those of you wondering.

PW: It seems like you are always on the road, I take it home is still Bradford even if you might not see it that often? How do you keep yourself occupied with all that travelling?

JS: Daydream. Drawings great for someone with a rich internal life but if you are happy to sit there for hours and hours with your own thoughts it’s good, if you like to be active then it’s awful but I’m a daydreamer. Looking out the window of a moving vehicle is what I feel best at.

PW: You are just about to head out to the USA, how do you anticipate this going? I don’t see Texas on the itinerary.

JS: Nope not this time and not for that reason [recent live album title, ‘Fuck Texas, sing For Us] it's such a big country and we barely touch any of it.

PW: Is there anywhere that you haven’t yet played that you really would like to get to and where are your favourite places?

JS: [Without a second’s hesitation] All of the countries we haven’t been to I want to go to them! I would like to play Iran but I think it’s very unlikely, we are meant to be playing in Beirut at some time which would be good. We have never played in Russia and I would like to go there.

PW: London in particular has lost most if its good venues since you first played there. The final Astoria gig was a bit emotional but I guess The Forum or The Town & Country Club was once your spiritual home. Do you miss some of the old haunts?

JS: Difficult to say… I miss the old Marquee in London, which I loved and The Queens Hall in Bradford. I might miss the Astoria in time, I have seen a lot of good bands there and it was a great place to see a band.

For more on the band check out http://www.newmodelarmy.org
http://www.myspace.com/newmodelarmymyspace

Interviewed by Pete Woods

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