There was a feeling of it’s kind of now or never. If we don’t do this record soon, I don’t think there’s gonna be a record. And I just thought, well, look, I want to have a record out. I don’t want to just go out and do the back catalog forever. And I thought, well, whatever it takes, let’s make it work. And I went into it with that attitude. I didn’t really sit down and talk to William about it but I think we both realized as well that if we were to go into the studio and screw it up over petty bickering that it would have been a massive opportunity that we’d blown. The kind of World War III in the studio that I had almost been having a nervous breakdown about didn’t materialize. Actually, we kind of bonded and got on quite well.

For Munki____, I understand you and William recorded separately from each other. How did the process go this time? Where did you record it?

We recorded at various places but mostly at the producer Youth’s place in Spain. He has a studio in Spain. Well, it’s a house with a studio in it. We did a couple of tracks at his place in London just to see if the whole idea was gonna work. It did. So then we went to Spain to do most of it and that’s pretty much where it was recorded.

Were you and William both recording at the same time?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the exception of the fact that there was a producer involved it was pretty much the way it used to be in the early days. It was just me and Wiliam just getting on with it. And there was no arguing and it was all pretty productive. Like the old days. No matter whose song it was, anyone was free to pitch in any ideas or rearrange it. Basically it was all very open. If you had an idea, you didn’t feel you were stepping on anybody’s toes.

Steve Gullick

Photo by Steve Gullick

There were a number of female guest vocalists. Sky Ferreira, for example, appears on “Black and Blue.” How did you guys get in touch with her?

She came to see the band a couple of times in America a couple of years ago. It turns out she’s a fan. We were just getting the album together, and we realized there were a lot of duets. So we started asking our friends, ‘Well, who do you think we should get?’ And she had just done a vocal with Primal Scream. So we had asked Bobby [Gillespie, once the Jesus and Mary Chain’s drummer in addition to singing with Primal Scream], who do you think we should get to sing on our record, and obviously he said Sky, so, of course, why not? So we asked, and she was keen, and she did a fine job.