I think that’s a real good endorsement of the quality of the music, how well all of those different styles hang together as an album. All of the stuff that you guys were doing on that last record, on paper it shouldn’t work but it totally does.
Collen: Right. What’s interesting is that it usually doesn’t work because people will say, “Well, you can’t do that.” I think one of the beauties about the industry right now is that you’re seeing a lot of young kids coming up without an A&R guy or a label saying, “You can’t do that.” So that’s really cool. We kind of do that, although we’re not a bunch of kids, we still have that freedom. I do believe that the industry allows it these days if you want it to. Some people are just stuck in their boxes and I think that the wonderful thing about it with us is that people don’t actually have to be.
Laffy: Somebody said a wonderful thing to us recently, he said, “People put their iPods on shuffle and in a way they don’t want to hear an album that’s the same track after track” and not in a deliberate way, the Manraze album is a little bit like that. It does tend to jump from one theme to another. There’s a little bit of funk, there’s a little bit of soul and there’s a little bit of dub in there, so we are kind of shuffling around a bit.
Collen: That was actually at the Grammys — we were at the Grammy offices and that’s what they said there, which we thought was a huge compliment and they actually gave it as a huge compliment. It was actually really nice — it was like, “Wow, that’s great!” Because absolutely, you’ll be listening to Marvin Gaye one minute and it’s the Foo Fighters the next.
It’s got to be a little bit gratifying that people actually seem to be getting what this band is about. Because with what you’ve done with Def Leppard, I could see you having concerns that you might put this out there and people would just want it to sound like Def Leppard and reject it because maybe it doesn’t fit that mold for them.
Collen: I think certainly with this song more than all the others, it has a bit of a crossover appeal. Everyone that we’ve spoken to so far, some of the really hardcore Def Leppard fans really like this because it reminds them [of that], because you know, it’s the same guitar player and the guy who does that backing vocals. So you hear that sometimes. A lot of the time in Manraze, we kind of try and steer away from it. With this one, we just let it do its thing and I think that was a nice thing to do. It’s great not having any hard, fast rules that you live by. I think it’s nice to change it up now and then and do something different. With this song, it kind of had a little bit of a flair to it, almost like a Def Leppard-y type guitar part, which that’s obviously going to happen occasionally, so we just let it go its way and it’s kind of nice to do that.
Laffy: But one of our rules if we had any was to not be obvious. We felt like it would have been obvious to do cover songs of the [Sex] Pistols or Def Leppard or even Girl. So I guess maybe in a way, subconsciously, maybe that’s why this track has been held back because there is that little bit of Def Leppard resonance in it.
The last album got good reception. Does this song indicate that you might be working on another album?
Collen: Yes! We just got very excited about this [track]. You know, I just had this operation in Paris, but we’re all coming back to London and then we’re setting up little home studio and we’ve got a lot of the demos and some of the stuff that ended up on the album at Simon’s old house, his mum’s place, in the spare room. It was just a nice place [to work]. I have a place in London and we have a base for recording, so it’s really cool to do that. I don’t mean like a full blown drum kit — it’s just like a computerized kind of suite that you can do vocals, guitars and drum programming. It’s literally walking distance from where we live and everything. So that’s really exciting. We actually found an old cassette — Simon had this old cassette and before it was going to be called Manraze, we threw these ideas around – The Fay Wrays was one of the names was one of the name that we thought of. There’s a demo [from that time period] of acoustic guitar or something, of us goofing around and the first thing that comes up is this great idea that it never came to fruition, so I think we’ll revisit some of these things.