ALL THEIR EX's LIVE IN CAMDEN...
THEY are full aware of the age-old maxim that travel might broaden their minds. But sitting here on this strange sofa in a strange house in a strange street in a strange city in a strange land listening to some stranger repeatedly screaming "Rock My World!" above a cacophonic eternity of speed metal, Russell and Moose were fast arriving at the conclusion that their little minds were about to be blown!
     How on earth had they come to this? They tried to remember but this girl, this Deadhead, kept on and on about her friend who'd been killed in a motorbike accident that very afternoon. Oh and, f---, the walls kept changing colour. Best just to grin and nod and try to piece it all together slowly before somebody else turned into an alligator.
     There's been a few drinks on the flight from Heathrow. Wayne Hussey was on the plane. And a shower-curtain-ring salesman or was that in a movie? Then there was the limo from the LA terminal to the hotel. A few more drinks in the bar. Had Mickey Rourke really been in reception? Russell remembered getting into a lift with Elvis Costello and being amazed to hear muzak versions of Elvis' hits playing through the speakers in the corridors. How must Elvis have felt about that? How would Moose feel if it happened to them? What the f--- would The James Last Orchestra playing "Jack" or "Last Night I Fell Again" sound like? Would it sound blue or purplish yellow? Forget that! Get back on track. There are more important things to worry about. Here comes that Deadhead again.
     Whose party was this? How did they get here? Moose remembered taking something and quickly discovering it was something else. How long had they been here? Minutes? Hours? Days? No, hours. Eight hours stuck on this sofa grinning! Ah, so this is America.

     "IT was f---ing surreal I can tell you. We were only there five days and it felt like a lifetime. Moose didn't even want to go. We had to drag him into the taxi cos he's scared stiff of flying. Now, though, now we can't wait to go back."
     Moose the band, named after Moose the guitar-playing songwriter, are going places.
     "I'd never been out of Europe before; it was a real eye-opener I can tell you. I was burbling and sweating the whole time. At one point we returned to the hotel at about five in the morning and it was surrounded by fire engines. We just couldn't work out what the f--- was going on. It was as if someone was staging it all just to f--- with our heads.
     "They were all there--the women with the jugs of death by the pool and all the men with polished faces and white stuff coming out of their noses."
     Russell's breaking into a sweat just recalling it. He shakes his head, slugs on a Sol and, from the comparative safety of his Camden local, describes how David Copperfield the magician just came over to them in a restaurant in LA, set fire to their ashtray, passed a dime through a Marlboro and f---ed off for no reason at all. At least, he's pretty sure that it happened. Moose had a hell of a time in America.
     They only went on a meet 'n' greet, to make themselves known to the record company who'll be distributing their records from now on. In Britain they re-signed to Hut who go through Circa who are part of Virgin. In America they cut out the crap--Moose are on Virgin and an eighth track EP of their latest record, plus tracks from their last two, will soon be on sale out there for the price of a CD inch single.
     "Value for money," says Moose over his Guiness. "That's what we're about. Quality and value for money. That's part of the reason that the tracks on the new EP are so different from one another and from everything else we've done before. We've recorded 12 songs now without repeating ourselves once. I'm really proud of that because what usually seems to happen is that, if you're in a band that starts to get successful for playing a certain type of music, the temptation is to plough that furrow all the way through till you get a kick in the balls right at the end. We're not like that. We'd get really bored if we kept trying to do variations of 'Suzanne' just because it worked. We like to try things in different ways, go down different avenues."

     AS I said, Moose are going places. If, like me, you considered their first EP "Jack", a fevered thing of fragile beauty and "Cool Breeze", their second, the height of melancholic bliss, then "Reprise", the new one, should take you somewhere else entirely. Named after the last track, a one minute two second drifting instrumental, it would be remarkable enough for the gorgeously tender "Last Night I Fell Again" or the ultra-intensive live-in-the studio "Do You Remember?". But it's "This River Will Never Run Dry" which will doubtless attract the most accolades. A close cousin to Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released", it's a lazy, linear Country-based song completely shorn of their characteristic feedback frenzy. Looking back at past interviews, where Russell and Moose have waxed lyrical over long forgotten albums by Country heroes Kris Kristofferson and Lee Hazlewood, the naked honesty of "River" shouldn't really come as too much of a shock even though it does. "No, it shouldn't. We listen to Country music a lot so it's inevitable that it will influence what we do. For us, it's experimentation but, instead of experimenting ourselves into something new, we've arrived at something traditional that just happens to be new for us to play," explains Moose. "It's not completely country. It's more along the lines of 'Midnight Cowboy' and 'Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid' or that Dion album, 'Born To Be With You'.
     "Have you heard that album? I was gonna bring you a tape of it. Nineteen seventy five, the geezer's trying to get over a smack habit and Phil Spector went in and recorded it with him. I reckon it's the best thing Phil Spector ever did. It's a f---ing frightening LP. It just goes on and on and on and builds and builds. We're not trying to make our heads swell or blow trumpets but we were trying to do something the same with this."
     Just as strange-but-inevitable as Moose going Country is the fact that they've done it dead straight. Most people are embarrassed by the format's sentimentality and tend to camp it up like Nick Cave does, using the OTT cabaret approach as insurance against laying bare their souls. Moose doesn't flinch: "We're not a jokey band so there was never gonna be an element of tongue-in-cheek. It's a really sincere song about somebody that you uh......love."
     He does flinch a bit to admit it, I wonder why?
     "I dunno." He laughs. "In country songs, a lot of the emotions tend to be really naked. It's the dude with the long hair and the beard crying into his beer. It's a real cliche. But it's quite pure in its own way. It's like telling it how it is."
     "It's blue collar," says Russell. "There's no frilling things up. It's just saying it like it is. It's like, 'We can just say this to each other. We don't need metaphors, we don't need to 'dance it up' or whatever."
     "That's it," agreed Moose. "If it's a really heartfelt thing, just say it, just do it. I'm a very sentimental person and I'm not ashamed of it at all.
     "It's like most people think Elvis doing 'Green Green Grass of Home' or 'Early Morning Rain' is really cheesy but I just find it totally lovely. Even though I can see the corny side of it, the national TV specials, Kenny and Dolly, there's another side to it we love and understand. Unsung country heroes like Kristofferson - his first couple of albums are just as good as anything ever released but they're ignored because they're country. It's a real shame. We listen to things like that a lot so it wasn't really a big, bold move for us to do this."
     So, do Moose subscribe to Country's inherent machismo--the hard man crying into his beer at the bar, proving he's hard enough to be soft?
     "We-e-ell, that's not quite right for us," says Russell. "It's like we're proving we're soft enough to be ... er... even softer!"

     MOOSE aren't daft enough to think that, by recording "River", they're about to affect a change in the musical climate the way another of their heroes, Gram Parsons, did when he rejuvenated Country in the Seventies. They won't be wearing fancy cowboy duds. Country isn't a fashion accessory.
     "If anything, it's us shedding a few clothes and being a bit more naked and honest about what we should really like to do," says Moose. "Stripping away the sonic guitars and not being pressured to add a disco beat."
     Country's not exactly the happening thing right now, though.
     "That doesn't matter does it? We don't consider that. If it's a good song, that's all that matters. It's like, we know who's out there buying our stuff. When we play London gigs--ULU, The Venue or wherever - we look out into the audience and there's a few Ride tee-shirts here and a Ned's one there, but we're not aiming at anyone. They can come if they want and they can enjoy it. Anyone can come. And if they don't like it, they can f--- off. I mean, I can imagine that a lot of people who like 'Jack' might detest the new EP because it's Country."
     Russell disagrees, citing the brilliant blend and diversity of styles on Primal Screams's "Screamadelica" album as a sign that people are becoming more open-minded about what they listen to.
     "Well I hope that's right," says Moose. "It's not that we want to sound snobbish, like it's an education where we're saying, 'Listen to us and than go and discover Gram Parsons' or anything. It's just that we don't aim our songs at who we see jumping up and down and stage-diving. We aim to please ourselves."

     MOOSE fully realizes the importance of what he's just said. These are tough times for our indie heroes and the so-called shoe-gazers are finding it harder than most. Think of all the Maker favorites who have released records in the last couple of months and, commercially, they've all been failures. Lush failed to chart. So did Chapterhouse, House of Love, Teenage Fanclub. Some members of the press were so disappointed that the new chart Utopia they'd predicted didn't come to pass that they've reneged on their original critical investments and cashed in their enthusiasm for spite. Moose reckon this led to some pretty unseemly panic in some quarters.
     "I read that interview you did with Chapterhouse and it was really sad," says Moose. "There they were, pretending to be hard rockers just to appease the critics. They shouldn't have said anything. They should have stuck to their guns. If you believe in what you're doing, you can't allow yourself to get defensive about it." "What seems to happen is that after a while being in one of these bands, there seems to be an expectation that the charts should be the next target and all of a sudden, maybe not even consciously, you might find little things creeping into your songs that pander to a bigger audience. And you shouldn't let that happen. Moose say 'F--- THAT' really loudly. "It's like you once wrote that we'd be too myshtying for 'Top of the Pops' and I like to think that's true. There's this pressure, this attitude that goes. 'Oh, you should try and get on 'Top of the Pops' because you'll look so good next to all the shit'. But I don't agree with that because it's a shit programme and if someone said 'You'll look good standing in that pile of shit over there', I wouldn't go and stand in it for all the money in the world. So why should I do 'Top of the Pops'? I'd rather spend an hour on the toilet.
     "But all these bands fall for it, don't they? They want appear on 'Wagon'. Why? If I had the chance, I'd storm on and beat the f--- out of him, whip off his toupee or something."
     Moose tell me that "Jack" went Top 100 and "Cool Breeze" went Top 75 but they won't consider suicide if "Reprise" doesn't go Top 50 because they don't believe a record should be deemed a failure just because it doesn't chart. After another pint or two, I take this line of argument a little further and suggest we start getting snobbish again. Let's have underground music that doesn't care that it doesn't sell a lot and doesn't get on TV because the general public are too thick to appreciate it. Let them buy their crappy Bryan Adams singles and leave us alone to flourish without worrying about reaching, seducing or subverting the moronic hordes. Let the others follow Moose's lead and have no fear of what others term failure.
     Moose admit they're erratic live and they thrive on it. That's why they love Teenage Fanclub--they're a mess too. Moose leave mistakes on their records because they add to the spirit of the thing. Moose make a virtue out of necessity and get off on using old equipment, recording quickly and cheaply. Moose are not perfectionists--not in the way that it's usually meant anyway.
     "We're not in the business of trying to sound as contemporary as we possibly can," laughs Moose. "I'm not bothered whether any of these bands get into the charts or not and maybe they shouldn't be bothered either. Getting into the charts is not a reason to write songs, it's not a reason to exist. We just want to write good songs and enjoy it."
     So how do Moose reach a wider audience?
     "We don't even consider it. I think we'll get bored before anybody gets bored of us. We'll know between us when it gets a bit f---ing ropey. There's an in-built element of quality control. But, at the moment, it's still a big adventure. Every time we go in to record, every time we pick up a guitar, every time we try to write songs, every time we wind up in a situation like that f---ing sofa it's an exciting experience. Isn't that the way it should be? Seems to me it is."

     OH, and if you fancy it, Moose recommend: Kris Kristofferson's "Me & Bobby McGee" and "The Silver-tongued Devil & I", Gram Parson's "GP" and "The Return of Grievous Angel", and Dion's "Born to Be With You".