"Missing Link" - "It was written after our American tour, when we were feeling very stressed. It sounds wide awake but tired. Maybe there was some American influence this time, because of when the record was written. But I always think our music sounds English, because it's cynical - and that's what we're like, isn't it? That's why we piss off the rest of the world."

"Crystal" - "We'd been listening to (Stevie Wonder's) 'Innervisions' a lot, and I think the rhythm, bass and drums have got this Seventies soul feeling.

"Innervisions" obviously captures a period of time for him, and for me 'Crystal' captures a period of time that was quite traumatic for us."

"Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" - "I never buy women's magazines, but I often flick through them in newsagents, and I've noticed that there's been this running theme that men are aliens, and women are these wonderful spiritual beings who really shouldn't have anything to do with these awful creatures called men. Then you read men's magazines like 'Esquire' and 'GQ', and again it's all this stuff about how 'men are like this, and women are like this, and how we all want to kill each other!

"The whole media thing at the moment seems to be that the next big war has to be between the sexes. I think that's a load of bollocks. We ought to be friends, and work together and create together. In all these things like racism and sexism, I think the only way forward is integration, not segregation."

"All Of One" - "It's a welcome release. It's really poppy. Lyrically it's still quite heavy, but musically there's a lot more air in it - it's like a Victoria sponge cake!

"I still feel like quite a novice when it comes to writing. Great songwriters like Smokey Robinson can start a story in the first verse, take it further in the second and then tie it all together. I can't do that. I write subconsciously."

"Unreadable Communication" - "It's got a nice ambient feel to it. We love having a really sexy kind of pulse to our music, but usually we bury it in noisy guitars. On this one we decided to keep it really exposed - but then halfway through we decided we had to have just one loud guitar on it! We wanted it to be really dramatic. It kind of falls off the cliff at the end!"

"Turkey Crossing" - "That came about when we went to Glastonbury last year. We went in this transit van, about 10 of us and my dog Turkey, and it was really hot. Turkey started panting - and, just for fun, our drummer started playing this rhythm on the hi-hat around the rhythm of the panting!

"We remembered that rhythm when we came to do the recording. So we kept throwing a ball down the garden for Turkey to fetch until she was panting, then we sampled the panting! It meant that the speed of the track was decided for us. It had to be 140 beats per minute, because dogs pant at 140 bpm!"

"For a long time, we didn't have a proper title for it - it was just called 'Turkey's Song'. Then, one afternoon, I was having a siesta - and I kind of half woke up to find this old Rock Hudson film on television. And he mentioned this place called Turkey Crossing about three times in the film, so I decided that that was meant to be the title of the song!"

"Super Blaster" - "The lyric was just me waking up and going downstairs, before I'd even brushed my teeth, and singing the first thing that came into my head. I must have been reading E E Cummings the night before, because there's all that stuff about 'your hands being smaller than the rain,' - which is in one of his poems. But for me, the best thing about it is the lovely slinky guitar line."

"Left Of Mother" - "That's about what people want in their partner. People want their mother - but then again they don't, because there'll be something about their mother that they don't like."

"There are 14 acoustic guitar tracks on it, all with different tunings, all building into one chord. It sounds like the weirdest acoustic guitar you ever heard. We wanted to experiment, and not just make another electric record."

"Sweetest Pie" - "It's the pop song. On that track we particularly wanted to create a drum sound with personality. So we put our drum Monti in this old metal lift with just two mics on the kit, and got this huge sound."

"Cuckoo" - "It's about Dean and I looking back to see what we've created - not just on the album, but in our lives.

"I think the song's very, very dreamlike. It sounds just like what your subconscious is like. It's a head song for hedonists."

(article nicked from 'Melody Maker', 21 August 1993)