Chris: Ah, that's a good question. You'd have to ask Phil, he's the, what do we describe him as? He's the Don Filippo, the Godfather, who runs operations who nobody ever sees. He said to me ‘Oh, you should have a song called Politick.' And I said ‘Oh, all right'. It's as simple as that.' Because if he says something you do it, unless it's something naff, , but we liked it because it sounds Eastern.. Russian, sounds (laughter) is it rubbish? But it is meant to be with a K because it sounds, it's all right isn't is, we like it as a song title.

Chris: Well we imagine Politick to be your beliefs about something, your own politic, it's kind of in the same way on our last record, we had a song called Yellow which wasn't strictly about the colour yellow. The grammatical validity of that isn't that apparent I admit but...

John: I agree

Chris: But we like it. It was designed as the first song. You know as soon as it arrived we said, that's going to be the first song.

John: Yeah there was never a, that was the only one that we were sure er the others we were pretty sure, but that one we were absolutely sure from start to finish where that was going..

Chris: Because it seemed like a good idea for a band that everyone thinks does Acoustic songs to have a record that starts bash bash bash bash with no grace or beauty whatsoever, It could be done by a bunch of monkeys. If you put a bunch of monkeys in a room ,before they typed Shakespeare they'd have come up with the beginning to Politick. Like bash bash.

"Politik" was written a few days after Sept. 11. How did that event act as a catalyst for the song?

Chris:Just in the way that it made us feel. Like everyone was feeling -- angry, scared, frightened, and excited to be alive still -- all that stuff. That's what I'm saying about our best songs just come out the way you're feeling on a particular day. You don't sit down and scientifically design them. But that was also matched with the desire to play something really loudly and take it really quiet. That was from listening to Nirvana -- that whole quiet, loud, quiet, loud thing.

Chris: ‘In my Place' is the oldest pivotal song. Just when we were finishing our last record, ‘Parachutes', we were in Liverpool in this little room that had been great on the last record and the record was basically finished so we were all packing up and ready to go. And the album was coming out in about a week. It was a really fine- timing thing, and I was just sat at this organ that my friend lent me, this pump organ, that you have to sit and pedal like that, you know, that was really designed for sea- shanties and drunken sailors but I wasn't either so I was thinking, let's try a sea-shanty, I don't know if I have to do the actions, but these chords just came out and it was at a time when it was just a bit too late on the last record we suddenly discovered things like Jimmy Cliff and all that and even ‘Whiter Shade of Pale'. I'm not saying it's as good as that, I'm saying it's better, no, I'm not, and so that tune we've had pretty much since the end of the last record. But we knew we really liked it and so it's been the lynchpin of this record. Around which everything else has been written.

Chris:That song is about accepting who you are. That's what it's about. I feel funny talking about that song, because I'm worried that everyone hates it. I don't want to talk about us as if we are Shakespeare or Keates, because we're not, we're just a bunch of spotty blokes.

Chris: When me and John went up to Liverpool on the train in November and we were listening to the songs – how many did we have?

John: We had about 8 rough done

Chris: And there was a sort of feeling that it was I reckon we thought it was alright and then I don't know what you were doing, maybe you were doing guitar tracks. I was sitting at the piano, this really old battered piano that was really out of tune. And I'd just heard All Things Must Pass by George Harrison , there's a song called Isn't it a Pity and there's like a circular chord sequence. This is all very anal, but I was thinking I'd really like to have a chord sequence that goes round and round and you don't know where it ends and then this chord sequence just arrived and I thought this is really lovely. And then the whole song just came out and I don't know where from and we recorded it then and there and that was, the piano and vocal is from the day it was written and just that's it that's what made and the best moment of the entire record for me was when after Johnny had heard it. This was about 3 weeks later when we'd come back to this song. I just heard through this wall, l I heard this riff this like and it was what he does at the end and that's my favourite bit of music on the record even thought I probably wouldn't ever listen to it again, probably, but that was a great moment because he you know he's brilliant.

Chris: Our MD [president] at Capitol Records played us a George Harrison song called "Isn't It a Pity" off the record All Things Must Pass. On the plane back, I thought, we haven't got a song as good as that yet. We need to go back a bit. So the next song that came onto the record was a direct rip off of that song, which is a song called "The Scientist" -- the best song on our record. I don't understand where it came from, that song. I could die happy. For me, it's definitely the best song we've ever done

The Scientist sounds a bit like putting someone on a pedestal is that something you do?
Chris : Well yeah, definitely. It isn't about anybody specific, but it is about someone nice. I put everyone on a pedestal, I put Johnny on a pedestal. It's about girls and how great they are and how difficult they are.

John: The instrument on the start of the track is a

Chris: Which track? Daylight?

John: Daylight is a 12 string guitar with a slide like George Harrison with lots of strings.

Chris: And lots of strings

John: And they're all doing the same thing

Chris: But what was amazing is – what you can't hear is there's also a drone, because that riff is really hard to play. I don't want to be rude but he struggled to play it for a bit because he had the melody and stuff so there's amazing little noises on it and stuff and when you learned how to play it perfectly it didn't sound as good, so it's a really early version of John playing the riff so we don't really know what's in there.

John: I think we're lucky that we've recorded a lot of stuff straight down as soon as it was written, because I think half the time you spend your life trying to recreate the moment when you first wrote something.

Chris: With Daylight we were all sat in a room and there was the piano track and singing going and we were all just playing over the top of it And we just recorded all that with Mark who does all the computer stuff with us. There were quite a lot of samples in that really well they're not samples but loops in that song. And then Daylight is blatantly nicked off The Cutter. But we shouldn't really have told you that.

Chris: Is that the most personal song on the album? I don't know. When Pete Waterman sent it to us we thought what a great song, what a great track, just put a few sleigh bells on it and we've got a Christmas No1. But Johnny said no let's do it acoustically like an old Johnny Cash song and we can pretend that we wrote it about a girl that we met in America.

John: The royal we?

Chris: (Laughter) which of course is not the true story. Pete Waterman wrote the song about a girl that we met in America. When I say ‘we' I mean ‘I'. (Laughter). But then its got the best licks, that's the only song that's got guitar licks on the end. We all like Johnny Cash and when we were in America a lot of last year and Guy went completely nuts for country music and so we were we started playing Hank Williams cover. Johnny started learning that picking you know and so we really wanted to put something on like that.

Chris: Warning Sign is an old song, and it's the only song that I didn't want on the record, but everyone else did, I got outvoted…the reason I don't like the song Warning Sign is that it makes you feel sorry for the singer, whereas in fact I know it was written at a time when I was being a total knob. And that's the great joy of music is that one can present oneself as a romantic hero, whereas in fact in real life, that was written inn one of my immense periods of being a dickhead. I think Johnny will agree.

John: When was it?

Chris: About …

John: A year and a half..

Chris: Yeah

John: Thought so! (+ laughter)

John: I think I thought, I think we all thought that it was just a, really it seemed to fit with everything, it seemed to pull everything together .

Chris: It's about impulsiveness you know, it's about doing things now and if you Like someone telling them now and it does fit with everything really.

Chris: You know, certain songs when you're recording get much more attention than others because they're much more troublesome or you're much more excited about them because they're new or whatever. And Amsterdam and Green Eyes they've just quietly gone on the record you know and we didn't spend much time on them. That is, that is pretty much live, and it was just done. And we did it very quickly and then left it for more or less 4 months and then came back and mixed it.

John: We did it really quickly

Chris: It took, we did that in about, that was one of the songs that made it from the first session that made it through and it was just really quick, And it's a nice song. It's the only song that I can think of where the verse and chorus were written 1000+ miles apart and the end another 1000 miles. I think the end was written in Iceland. Iceland is the perfect place to write music I reckon