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With the Inspiral Carpets, we did some 25 gigs last year; playing at every major festival … we were on the main stage at Glastonbury - the first band on after The Darkness, which I don't think will be happening again! This year I've been working with my new band - The Lovers and we've just put out a new album called "Abba Are The Enemy. Spitualised Are The Wombles."

Yeah ... It sounds like a doctorate for a pop music degree, but it came from my general obsession with mediocrity and just seeing fifth-rate soap stars doing Abba-mania on ice on a Saturday night - I find all that un-ambitious and depressing.

We didn't consciously set out to make the album sound like this band or that band, Steve (Hanley) was in The Fall for 20 years and his bass sound is very full … If you hear Fall records now they have the same full sound, because they got someone in to sound like Steve.

^{There's two instrumental tracks on the album too - "Temperamental Jimmy" and "The Third Cumming", which are very different to the rest of it ... I mean "The Third Cumming" is almost heavy metal in its sound.}

Mmm.. That could possibly be us (The Lovers) taking the piss out of the Stone Roses and their "Second Coming" album.

We were just having fun on this album. I mean the debut album from any band that has the lead singer of The Inspiral Carpets it - people might expect the obvious thing on the first track - me shouting'my bollocks off for five minutes! So it seemed like a good idea not to do it, so that people can actually hear the band and not just me screaming my head off!

I've done a few song writing workshops, including one at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal with 60 people! We all wrote a song together … which is interesting with 60 people. It's something I try to do more end more as I really enjoy doing it.

You can't teach people to write songs - all you can do is make people believe they can write songs, and realise they can be creative and write songs. You can't force people to write.

Some Inspirals' stuff, some of my solo stuff, a few cheesy covers may be even the occasional song by Janice Joplin as she's not around any more to sing them - though they'll probably a massive international hit by someone like Moby (Tom then said a very rude word here ... which we just can't print!).

No mp3s -I'm a bit of a Luddite.
I'm listening to some old compilation albums of Kate Bush! I've three daughters and I'm getting them in to listening to that. I actually hated Kate Bush when she first came out - it took me 20 years to realise that she totally brilliant! I find quite good 'girl music'. I know that's going to cause problems. But I find it very sensate and feminine - very different from what I do.

I also like a band called Grand Drive who play country rock. And there's loads of good bands coming out of Manchester too: There's The Forest, Nine Black Alps. There just loads of good bands coming up.

I'm actually putting a compilation album out from the band I was in before the Inspirals, called Too Much Texas. We supported New Order, The Beloved & House of Love and we did a Peel session. We put a single out on the Ugly Man label - (which might be where the comment about the Inspirals being the ugliest band in Britain may have come from). The alubm will be called "Juvenillia" and we might even do a couple of gigs … that's the plan but I haven't told the rest of the band members yet!

There's more stuff with The Lovers - there's a single coming out and the album's going for release in Germany so we'll probably be touring there and Austria too.