Were there traditional setups in the studio, with guitars going into pedal chains into amps, or were there some leftfield choices, too?

Paul: “What we did for Wild Light and what we’ve done for No Man’s Sky is tried very very hard to capture at source the sounds that we wanted, so the mixing could really just be about mixing and not making everything sound good. So we kind of build a wall of amps in the live room of the studio that is everything we have, and everything Dave Sanderson who co-produced the record, has. Anything that the studio happened to have lying around, too.

“They’re all mic’d up, and when we record guitars, we do it through whatever amp sounds best at that moment for that particular song, take or part. Then also record the DI cleanly, and if we can’t get the guitar exactly right in terms of the sound quality, as long as we get the take then we just re-amp it through as many combinations of amps with as many different mic placements until we’ve got the sound we want.

“And Joe’s got a couple of amplifiers that are very low wattage, cranked really high and they used to be antique radios with some nice old scratchy valves in that a guy we know has converted. Those have got a really nice, buzzy, waspy quality.”

Joe: “They can be quite scratchy. There’s a few of them knocking around now. They tend to have a single old valve in, and quite often that’s a Russian valve that’s not made any more, so I suppose it’s like a Neil Young approach: you’re really pushing those to become very hot where they’re almost going to break the amp.

I’m not a particular gearhead in that sense - I just think certain pieces of equipment can’t be faked; they are completely unique to that piece of equipment

“None of these things on their own are groundbreaking; they’re just instances of analogue equipment that sound unique. They also sound unique with other pieces of gear. There’s this real fine line when you’re using equipment that’s vintage in some sense and just sounds like nothing else.

“I’ve got three or four Electro-Harmonix Stereo Memory Man pedals, the old flat ones. You can hear the difference between when they stopped making the old capacitors and when they put the new ones in. I would absolutely maintain that one of those pedals sounds different to the other three and sounds better, and it does things that the other won’t do. But that’s real geek stuff and I think you have to combine that with a healthy attitude of using some cheap new synth and feeding it through.

“I’m not a particular gearhead in that sense - I just think certain pieces of equipment can’t be faked; they are completely unique to that piece of equipment.”

Did you bring a range of amps in from your own collection?

Joe: “I’ve got an old OR-120 that is a ’76 - that’s a great amp; that does everything and it’s more powerful than some PAs I’ve had to play through, to be honest. There’s an old Vox at the studio; my mate Tom had a Marshall combo amp. We just used what was hanging around.

“One of the techniques we used was to send a guitar or synth through five or six amps, and then often going through different iterations of pedals and mic’ing the amps all up separately and then you have a choice of sending two or three of those to post-production.

“That’s a really interesting way of doing things, because it means you don’t have to make those decisions on the shop floor, as it were. You’re sort of putting that off to the mixing stage, and in album terms that’s when you have to make the decision.

Paul: “It’s about having as many options as possible but having a clear idea of the song spectrally when we were recording it… God, that sounds so pretentious! [laughs] But it’s understanding where everything sits in the whole sound.

It’s about having as many options as possible but having a clear idea of the song spectrally when we were recording it… God, that sounds so pretentious!

“Because what’s the point of recording a gorgeous full-bodied Deftones-style guitar if, actually, you know that the song is already full of these massive synths that are filling it with a load of mids anyway. And that’s the kind of song that you’re going for, so why doesn’t the guitar be this little mosquito, tickling your ear. Those kind of things are what we think about a lot more these days.”

Do you also use plugins for guitar effects as well?

Paul: “Yes, we’re certainly not purists. We’ll use whatever, even if it’s some freebie plugin - if it sounds good, we don’t care.

“Having said that, the studio that we made the record in, and the place it was mixed in as well, had some hardware [by Thermionic Culture] called the Culture Vulture that adds super-crisp distortion to everything. We pretty much put them on everything.

“There’s an absolutely fantastic Convolution reverb plugin in Ableton Live [version 9], which we almost certainly used. But not as a sensible reverb to mix, more as an insane endless space drone-y guitar thing.

It’s not quite the distortion alone that we’re after; it’s the intangible reverb of the room, it’s the hiss of the amp, it’s the combination of everything

“Whilst we’re not in any way purists, it does feel, because of the kind of band we are and kind of pervert noise in all its tones and frequencies, for that kind of bite the hardware stuff tends to win out. If only because of the recording process and the liveness of mic’ing and hiss.

“Plugin distortion might model the distortion perfectly, but it’s not quite the distortion alone that we’re after; it’s the intangible reverb of the room, it’s the hiss of the amp, it’s the combination of everything.”

Are there any particular pedals that you find yourself going back to as workhorses in the signal chains?

Joe: “Most of our last two records have been put through a [Electro-Harmonix] Memory Man in some sense - even if the delay is mixed out, there is something in those capacitors that warms everything up, so we’ll often record drum parts and then put them through the guitar rig, through the Memory Man and re-record them out of the guitar amp.

“We’re doing a lot of stuff like that at the moment, where you can build loops and breaks from the drum kit, and then move that into the electronic side. Then you can play along the drums to the drums, but they have an acoustic feel to them.

We’ll often record drum parts and then put them through the guitar rig, through the Memory Man and re-record them out of the guitar amp

“I’ve got an old Big Muff that I found in a puddle in Paris; it was in this flooded venue years ago, and they didn’t want it. So I rehoused that, and I think that’s an old '70s one. Again, that sounds like nothing else, so when put on the spot, I suppose I am a big fan of analogue gear, but it’s not my religion.”

Paul: “In 65, Joe’s had about four billion pedals and I’ve had about three. Recently became four. I’ve got clean and I’ve got distortion, and the distortion is usually amp distortion rather than a pedal. I have an Akai Headrush which I’ve been using for 15 years. It’s the only delay pedal I’ve ever had. It’s a looper, but I use it just for the delay. I’ve been through a few of them, but I’ve stuck with that one.”

Do you share guitars in the studio?

Joe: “We’re not really precious about who is playing what in the studio. We’re more interested in what makes the right noise, so even playing live this autumn, I don’t think we’ve ever decided whose rig will look like what, because we haven’t worked out how to get the sounds. We have a pool of stuff, and we took a bunch of guitars into the studio.

“I tried to have a nice choice of stuff. I use a lot of Fender stuff - a Custom Telecaster and a Jaguar, and a standard Telecaster as well. There’s just a good range of tones between those instruments. I’ve recently bought an old Gibson ES-125 hollowbody with a P-90 in, which is on quite a lot of Wild Light, although it wasn’t mine when I used it then; it is mine now. That’s a great guitar, and I think Paul used that quite a bit as well.

I don’t really have the budget to be a huge gear collector; I’m more interested in keeping 65 on the road most of the time!

“There’s all sorts lying about. I don’t really have the budget to be a huge gear collector; I’m more interested in keeping 65 on the road most of the time! But when I can, pedals have been a huge part of the conversation for me for the whole of 65’s career, because I’m not particularly good at programming, I’m not particularly great with computers, but pedals are a really interesting interface, I suppose, between effects and the human that the 20th century has created.

“They’re a really interesting thing when you think about it, because they are these little boxes of noise where you have a direct hands-on relationship with the sounds that you’re making, but you don’t really need to know too much about hardware or software to use them; you just plug them together, so they’re a very democratic way of making music. I’m trying to limit how many I take on tour, but something like that Memory Man… we’ve put whole mixes through that Memory Man after the mix. That’s cool if it works, man - you’ve just got to do it.”