There is a certain type of mentality that blokes have when it comes to music, which is using music as a tool of intellectual one-upmanship or obscure knowledge one-upmanship. Blokes use different mediums to display that one-upmanship. Music is one of them. What fucking car you have is another one. Like the guys on the sales team of some dull corporation somewhere talk about their cars in the same way that cunts at gigs talk about boring and dreary bands. Sport is another one. Guys who talk about fucking sport statistics and what their teams have been up to. Oh man, I find all of that shit totally repellent and boring. And I despise that way of quantifying music. It was a rejection of that. It was, “No, I want to take it back to something that is more primal and embracing the dumbness of making a statement like that. Of course saying something like “I’m going to make records that girls can dance to” is taking it back to the most basic element of pop music. Like, at the very beginning of pop music with Buddy Holly was music to make girls dance. As soon as you cut through all of that pretension, then you can open it up and explore whatever you want. Then it became very exciting.

Did it feel like you were onto something special when you first played back the record?

Yeah. I didn’t know it was going to connect with people. I knew that when we first played gigs in Glasgow that something was happening, just because of the way people were reacting to it. We didn’t sound like other bands at that time. We were different. And they were good songs. I knew that. The energy was good and honest. The record itself was actually a pain in the arse to make in many ways. And I’m glad that it was a pain in the arse to make because it focused us. The producers for all of the other records I got on with really well, and it was a joy to work with them. But Tore Johansson was a first-prize pain in the fucking arse! Producers fall into two categories: those who get to their goal by becoming part of the gang, encouraging you and leading you on to create something great, and then you have those who try to achieve the same goals through confrontation. I’d say Phil Spector is in that second category. Or Bob Ezrin in the studio with Lou Reed making Berlin. That was the category that Tore Johansson was in. We didn’t get on. I remember him pulling me into the control room one day and saying [in a Swedish accent], “One of us is going to leave this studio in tears.” And I was like, “That’s not fucking gonna be me! I know exactly what I’ve got to do.” And it was good, because he had very different ideas of what our record should be. When you have somebody challenging your ideas, it either destroys your ideas or it makes them stronger. You have to defend your ideas, and if it’s a good one it stands up. But if it’s a shit idea it crumbles straight away. So it was cool having that challenge. His idea for the album was to make this extremely lush, layered record with many textures and parts. And I said to him, “Look, you can put whatever you want on the record. But when it comes to mix I’m gonna take it right off.” And that’s exactly what happened. Somewhere there is a hard drive containing a very different version of our first record. But I didn’t want to make a record like that. I wanted it to be stark, bare, with no frills or decorations to it. Everything was the sound of this band playing. And the conflict between me and Tore made something really bold. We were reacting against each other, and ended up making a very cool record.