How are you and what have you been up to recently?
We’re good thanks. We’ve just recording material for the second album which has been excellent. It’s quite a different process than our debut album, which was a live recording as the octet. We recorded that at the Cowshed onto quarter-inch tape which gave it the warmth we really wanted. This time it is just the three of us working with a great producer Patrick Rowland who’s getting Arthur (Lee) actually playing a piano, experimenting with different percussive instruments and seeing what we can come up.

What are the five albums that have most influenced you?
Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen
Steely Dan – The Royal Scam
Jamiroquai - Emergency on Planet Earth
Miles Davis - In a Silent Way
The Beatles – Abbey Road

Where did you grow up? What was it like for a budding musician?
Robin: Me and Dan grew up in Newcastle and had our first band at fourteen called the Matrix
Dan: That was before the film, I’d like to add.
Robin: Yeah, it was a great name until Keanu Reaves buggered it up for us. I think Newcastle is great city for music. People have a great knowledge and love of music there.
Arthur: I’ve been in London since I was born. Maybe one day I’ll get out of town for more than a few months but as a musician it’s the most inspiring place to be in the country – there is just so much going on.
 
If you could be a musician in any era when would it be?
Rob: I love music from the 60s.
Art: I would be a wandering minstrel in the dark ages or the piano player in a western saloon just as long as I didn’t get shot.
Dan: I’m with Rob… it was all about analogue and facial hair.

Any particular venue you’d like to play?
Dan: I think we’d all love to play at the Royal Festival Hall or the Barbican: a proper concert hall so people could actually hear what we are playing.
Art: Or the Colosseum in Rome, just so we could use the trapdoors.

What was your first musical instrument?
Dan: Classical acoustic guitar, I saw my friend play ‘Blackbird’ by the Beatles and I thought it was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen and was determined that I needed to be able to do that. I’m gutted I put my foot through it one drunken day a few years back.

What books have you read and what films have you seen recently?
Films: Scott Walker: 30th Century Man and Eraserhead by David Lynch
Books: The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler and King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green

Any burning ambitions?
Dan: It’s got be Glastonbury. It looked like we were doing it this year but Rob decided to get married instead. How selfish!