I'd been trying to get an interview with Skimmer sorted out for ages, but due to my incompetence, my bad organisation and my general crapness it never seemed to happen. Luckily I bumped into Kevin before the band supported the Queers in Manchester and he was nice enough to agree to do an interview despite my various mess-ups. So, at last, here it is!

How's the tour with the Queers going so far?
It started on Thursday, so this is number six. We've had four great ones and one not-very-great one. Darlington last night was a shambles really. Good place, nice big pub, very few folk turned up. No one, and I mean no one took any interest. It was bizarre, and that's not just for us, that's for the Queers as well. For us we had two people clapping at one stage, coming down to no people at some stages, and the Queers had about three people clapping! It makes it all the more bizarre that the other four nights of the tour have had really, really big attendances and lots and lots of people dancing, for the Queers particularly, some for us too, and absolutely great reactions for both of us so it made it all the more strange last night that there was no interest.
That's surprising considering that the Queers are a pretty big band.
Too right they are! There was the stage with the Queers playing on it and the mixing desk about 15, 20 foot behind, and the only people between the mixing desk and the Queers were me and Andy! The rest of the people were either at the bar trying to buy drinks, there were a few people sitting to the right hand side mostly talking amongst themselves and watching, and there was about ten people standing to the left watching. That was so strange! We had this one mad kid who was dancing, but he wasn't really... proper! He kept trying to grab Joe's strings and he'd stand on stage for a couple of minutes. It was weird. That was one to endure. I think most tours have one of those. But the rest of the nights they've been good. We got just over 200 paid in at Leeds, just under 200 at Edinburgh and around 150 at Derby and Birmingham I think. That's guesstimating those two. They've been really good, and tonight - Manchester! It's good. They're nice people; the Queers have turned out to be genuinely nice people.

Why is it that you, and other British bands, seem to go to Japan so much? What's so special about Japan?
I think any band would go to Japan given the chance!
Why?
I don't know. From our point of view it came about really going back to the days when I was in The Sect. There's a label in Japan called Snuffy Smile, of which "Snuffy"'s taken from the band Snuff, obviously, and the "Smile" word is taken from a Sect song which was called "Smile"! When we got Skimmer together he started trading records with Crackle and Dave and Becky mentioned that he used to like The Sect so I just contacted him and said "Do you want us to tour over there?" Nothing ventured... and sure enough he said "Yeah!" It surprised me! (laughs) So we went over and Chopper went with Broccoli some months after that in our wake, and after that it's just spiralled and there have been three or four of us who've gone over. We've done two tours over there, Chopper did two tours, as did Broccoli, the Hootons went once I believe. I think you can draw a parallel to when American bands come to England and there's quite a lot of interest, well, there was three or four years ago. It's a similar thing in Japan with English bands. We're quite revered for some unknown reason!

Do you get given presents and things like that?
You certainly do! That's wonderful! You turn up at these venues and the first thing you do, you get handed drawings! It's great! People do you drawings, they buy you little toys... last time I had a big bag, a big polythene supermarket bag full of these plastic toys. There were these little guns to shoot balls... it's so sweet! The thing about giving gifts is part and parcel of the whole thing over there. It's just politeness. To this day you'll see Japanese people at nearly every Skimmer gig. There's two tonight. Normally they have camcorders.

Yeah, I went to see Snuff and there were quite a few Japanese people there.
Yeah. It carries over. It's good! They're very loyal to you. They?re obsessive! (laughs) Loyal, we'll stick with the word loyal! They're great, I wouldn't say a bad word about them.

Is it true that gigs are really expensive over there?
Comparative to England, yeah. The going price for seeing us and Chopper last year was about 2 500-3 000 yen, which is about £15-20 a night, which is a lot of money to see Skimmer! That's the going rate. It must be said that in the last year or so when I've been looking at flyers for Japanese bands that there are quite a lot of cheap shows over there now, like 5-600 yen, which is only £3-4. That's good; it seems to be coming down for local bands, but out of town bands, they stick a big premium on. In the past it seemed to be the same for Japanese bands, they were also quite expensive. I think, in many ways, it helps cos it justifies us going over there cos we can actually make our money back, whereas the other way around, when Lovemen come over here, cos they're here at the moment, we can't give them hardly anything towards their flights. We can give them a bit of band money for each gig they play, but when Navel came over all we could give them in total on the four shows was about £350, which is quite good for England - it's more than we'd get - but it doesn't cover your flight cost or anything. But the cost of living in Japan, going back to are the gigs more expensive, things generally are more expensive.

This is just an irrelevant aside, but do you know toilets in Japan? Do they really wash your arse for you?
Some of them do! There are such things! I've sat on such things! Oh yeah, they go from the whole gamut from basic Western style ones to Asian style ones which are just like a flat hole on the floor. An interesting story, which I've got out ?The Lonely Planet? it must be said, is when they started introducing Western style toilets in Japan thirty or so years ago, ?60s or ?70s. Japanese people were so used to squatting on the floor they had to tell people not to stand on the Western style toilets and squat on those from a height, because people were doing that! They had to instruct them to use toilets as we know them today. But there are such things as little jets of air that come and warm your bottom for you, and heated seats. I can't say I actually had one that had a brush that came and did the business for me, but... yeah, they're very innovative, put it that way.

I'm sorry about that, I'm just intrigued by toilets! Alright, when you formed Skimmer how come it took you so long to record an album? Cos Skimmer started in about '93, and the album only came out last year.
I think in many ways it's cos Crackle at the time were just in the market for doing singles. I was happy being on Crackle. Each time we got a bunch of songs together we'd just go in the studio and send them to Crackle and ask if they were interested cos there's no contract as such, it's just done on the basis that if they like what we do they'll put it out for us. So far they've not turned anything down by us. Each time we just go and record six or seven songs, choose our best three or four and say "Are you ready for another single yet?" That's the way it seemed to work for the first two or three years, really. The time just seemed right last year, or two years ago as it is now. We said "Is it OK if we try and do a full length album?" We put it to them rather than they put it to us, and they said yes, as long as the songs were up to scratch again. So we did. There's no one real answer to why we didn't go and do a full length album in the first place, it just seemed more logical to put out the songs when they were fresh cos we could turn them over quicker. It was just a matter of three or four months from writing them to getting them in the shops as a single. For me to write an album, it took me the best part of 1997 to come up with the 21 songs, so an album's something you have to plan a year or so ahead, and all the time we wanted to keep bringing a steady stream of records out cos if you stop people forget you. That's a harsh truth. If you leave it for a year or two without making a record it's almost as though you've never existed. You've got to start from scratch again, or people think that you've gone away cos you weren't any good, then they won't buy your records and you won't make any more!

You seem to be playing a lot of gigs at the moment. Is that because you're not going to release anything in the next few months or so?
No, it's not! In many ways '97 was a very quiet year for touring, mostly because a lot of the time we were just trying to keep turning new songs over and that many gigs weren't offered to us, and we weren't actively phoning people up and getting tours or anything.
You seem to be playing up until around April/May this year...
Yeah. That surprises me cos at least two of those I've only found out about on the Internet last week, and no one's asked us yet! There's one in Derby and one in Leeds. I've contacted both of them. They both want us to play! The third one I found out that no one's asked us at the weekend, apparently there's a Birmingham all-dayer with Funbug, and we've not been asked about that one yet either! I don't know these dates, and I think that the Derby all-dayer and the Birmingham all-dayer may be the same day. That's OK, they're only about 50 miles apart...
Would you do both?!
Yeah, it'd be good fun! I'd quite like it, except I'd like to see all the bands as well.

Does the constant driving about ever get you down?
The driving can be hard at times. Some of the long drives back if you're just doing a one-off gig... yeah, I've struggled at two or three o'clock in the morning. I actually came home from the Queers gig... we've been staying over every night but we had the night off on Sunday cos Glasgow had been pulled so after Leeds we got Sunday free so I drove back home Saturday night. I didn't get home 'til about three o'clock, and that was hard. That was really, really hard.
Do you ever consider giving it all up when it gets like that?
Not really, no. I enjoy it too much! If all the nights were like Darlington last night it would be futile and you'd think "there's no point, there's no one enjoying it," but for every Darlington we'll have ten good gigs or so. Some of the gigs on this tour have been great. We've not had many bad gigs in the last couple of years. The Japanese ones are obviously gonna go well, and we've been a bit picky. We've not taken everything. If people offer us a gig and I think it's not really worth us doing it I don't bother. I try to concentrate on making sure if we do a gig it's in the right venue with the right promoter, even if it's only a support or even lower than that! Even if it's a small venue, it doesn't matter as long as I've got an idea that it's gonna work, so hopefully you won't see us play too many duff venues or empty places. They've fallen nicely for us the last 18 months, really. I organised the Navel tour in October. It was only four shows but it went really well. This Queers one came along, that's another eight shows. We did a set in July to coincide with "Vexed" coming out, and they all went quite well. We've tried to do them in little blocks, little tours where we can.

Can I just ask about your lyrics? I know you've got some lyrics that are typical girl songs, but you've got some that are a bit more introspective. What kind of mood are you in when you write stuff like that? Is it when you're really down?
The lyrics, strangely enough, come to me really, really late in the development of a song. They're very much the last thing. We'll go in the rehearsal studio which we do for two hours every week. I'll have songs often prepared, a song maybe every two weeks, and we'll go in, we'll get all the music worked out and I'll just be going "blah, blah, blah" or making some nonsense over the top of it, just noise really, and often I'm that lazy I won't actually write the lyrics until the day before we're in the studio. We'll come to the studio, it'll be booked on the Sunday and Friday night I'll have no lyrics for about six songs and it's a matter of having to go in and say right, I've got six songs to write on Saturday, and just sitting down, locking myself away and coming up with ideas. The ideas are the hard thing. The lyrics themselves you can sometimes work around, but you've gotta have a theme for a song. Some bands do just write line after line with no real meaning tagged to each line. It could be any old nonsense. To carry a theme through... it's not that bad, it's just finding a theme that's gonna work to a particular tune. The introspective ones don't actually come when I'm sat down thinking "Oh, woe is me..."

So you don't write them when you're in a bad mood about something?
I can't do. The only one off ?Vexed?... one of them came almost immediately. I'd written the tune, we practised it, and on the drive back from Birmingham to Walsall where I live, it's about 30 minutes. I was driving back and the whole first verse of "A Postcard from Home", I just started making it up as I went along. "A Postcard from Home" came in about an hour, and that was on the same night that I wrote the tune. That's almost unique! The rest of them are just hammered out. It's almost like work the way I do it. I just sit down and force myself to do it. It's not attached to a particular mood, though.
Most people seem to write better when they're at one extreme, like really happy, or really depressed. That's how most people seem to work.
I know, but I'm always really happy! I'm always on a high it seems. I don't do drugs. If I was to do speed I'd be intolerable! I'm too quick as it is. I bounce from foot-to-foot and I talk at a hundred words to the minute which is good for interviews cos you'll get a lot out of this! I've always been the same since I was a little child... (laughs) there's a Skimmer lyric! It's true, though. I've always been one of these people who bounces around and is quite hyper.

Does anything piss you off?
Very little. My girlfriend gets a bit pissed off with me cos I can't argue! I've been going out with Julie now for 14 years and we haven't had a big argument cos I can't argue! If she gets really stroppy with me I just concur with her! It makes her even more angry! (laughs) I'm impossible to argue with, and I think that must be really hard. No, very few things piss me off. I get fed up like everyone does but I'm very rarely angry. I've got very little mood swings, which I think is a negative to me, really. I don't express my emotions at all. I just smile all the time!

Do you think you express your emotions through your lyrics?
Yeah, I think there's some truth in that. Yeah, very subconsciously. I can't say that everything I've written is based on experience but there's certainly bits of me in them. If I look at them I can say yeah, that's probably quite personal really. A lot of other people couldn't have written it. I do, I think I do express emotions in my lyrics. That's not to say all my lyrics are based around me cos that'd be false, but there are bits of me in there.

This is off at a tangent again, but what's your favourite novel?
Probably my favourite author is P.G. Wodehouse, cos he's such a good lyricist. He's genuinely funny and he constructs his words beautifully. I read a lot of Wodehouse. The plots are a bit cheesy at times and I can take that or leave it but the way he writes is great. I get inspired from the way he makes people laugh. It's very good humour. It's just humour with words. If I've got to name a particular Wodehouse novel... I couldn't really. Any of the Blandings ones are good.

What sort of music do you listen to these days? Do you still listen to a lot of ?punk??
I do. I always have done.
What kind of bands do you listen to at the moment?
Most bands, when you ask this question, they go for music that doesn't really appertain to the music that they play at all, which I find strange. The After School Special album I've played a lot...
Oh, is that good?
Oh, it's a great album! I love three chord pop music. Things like the Connie Dungs, they're a great band, and the Cletus stuff, all that sort of stuff. I love my poppy punky stuff! I find it strange that a lot of bands playing this music will go off quoting the Beatles and ?60s bands... not to say I haven't got those things. There are one or two aspects of that I do like. One that isn't really punk is Jonathan Richman. Grew up with Jonathan Richman. Again, lyrically he's great. It's stripped down music. I like stripped down music, be it late ?50s rock'n'roll or... quite a few genres where the music's just stripped down and basic. That's all punk is really, but loud, and there's a lot of distortion behind it and it's speeded up. Stuff like Jonathan Richman where again it's just one guitar and a few chords and some lyrics put cleverly over the top tunefully. That's all you need. I can't say I listen to him that much these days but he certainly is an inspiration, and a lot of stuff of that genre. Anything that's quite simple. I've never liked music with too many layers on it, things like jazz and any soul music, anything that's overproduced. I just like basic stuff really. Even stuff that a lot of other people don't like. Things like the Huntingtons, which I've seen bad reviews... that's a great CD!
Is it good, cos almost everyone says it's crap?
Buy it! It's great! I've got no problems with things like that. They don't make any pretence of what they're about. They're Ramones copyists. If you're gonna copy anyone copy bands like that.

Have you seen any new bands live recently that you've been impressed with?
I like Buzzkill. Again, they're not really punk full-on. They're quite youngish, they're from Huddersfield, they're still developing but there's something happening. I like Buzzkill. Erm... Dugong from Wakefield, they're a good band as well. They've not got a record out either yet. Cone are good. They're very good. Played with them on Saturday. There are several round the country. I've had various demo tapes. The Hobbes demo tape I enjoyed. There's lots of others. It's quite healthy. It's just so far underground that no one gets to hear them. That's the only problem.
So do you think it would be a good thing if bands like that got more radio airplay?
It'd be ideal, but where's the outlet? It's such a minority of people seemingly know about it that I don't think it'll ever get radio airplay cos it hasn't got enough power...
Peel plays stuff, but that's sandwiched between some crap...
That's just what I was gonna say. You have to listen to a lot of dross to get a good song out of it. He's played every Skimmer single I'm glad to say so far, and he's played tracks off Vexed and the compilation CD when that came out. Peel's one little light in the darkness where radio's concerned. But what can you do? You can't force people to play it. It would be nice to have some outlet but there's none there, so all you can do really is go and see bands, distribute tapes, read fanzines and try and keep up to date. In many ways I think part of the appeal is how far underground it is these days. If it was so mainstream I think some the people who are involved wouldn't be that interested anymore. They'd go and see something else that's just as underground. Long may it stay this way, with no money and nobody coming to the gigs... no, that's not strictly true.

Vexed is out now on Crackle and comes highly recommended from me, as does anything that Skimmer have put out.