Interview Jay & Alonza in Free magazine (Free is a free magazine you get in a certain record shop)

(I have used this colour background because it's the same kind of colour they always use)

Alonza Bevan and Jay Darlington, in every day life bassplayer and keyboard player in Kula Shaker, have decided today to make their frontman's life, Crispian Mills, a bit easier. While Mills is busy somewhere else doing interviews in the Amsterdam hotel, the duo have a nice chat with free.

Kula Shaker is in Holland to promote their new album peasants, pigs & astronauts, the Oh, so important second album. Of the first album, K, that was released over three years ago (over two years ago, more likely - me) millions of copies were sold worldwide. That record contained a couple of very successful singles. The new piece of work had a different approach. Peasants, Pigs & astronauts is more a unity, a kind of concept album, without commercially promising highlights but of a constant and surprisingly high quality. However, the record contains one song which stands on itself in all its beauty, Great Hosannah. The next single, to be sure. 'well, erm' Jay starts, 'that's not going to happen. You think it's the ultimate single? I really think it's too long. I'm afraid that most radiostations won't be playing it because of its length of over 6 minutes. And then you have a problem. We could shorten it a bit but I don't think we would be doing the right thing by doing that. The song is like it is. But OK, you have your way, we will talk about that later. For the time being, two songs are real candidates for the new single, Mystical Machine Gun and Shower your Love. Those two, we think, have that real single-quality.'

'Magic', says Alonza, 'is one of the main ingredients of a song. And there has to be a lot of emotion in there You have to be taken on a trip by it, so to speak.' Jay : 'There isn't something like "the Secret of a Song". A song is one big secret. Outsiders will never know the right ingredients of Coca Cola, or Kellogh's Cornflakes. That kind of thing stays a mystery. And that's the way it works with songs by Kula Shaker. Or any band for that matter. On the other hand, you don't make a song using a certain formula. If such a thing existed, any band could be successful. That's not the way it works. A song is the result of the cooperation of a couple of people who add their own 'secrets' to it. The thing I find very important myself is that there is some honest emotion in there. The way you have that, is for everybody different. Honest emotion, it's that easy and so hard at the same time.'

'It has been difficult', says Jay, 'to make the right choice for this album. I mean, we had in total something like 20 songs ready while there was only room for twelve at the most. Those twelve, that have made it to the final, fit in just perfectly with each other. They form a complete unity. More than ten songs didn't make it. Not because they weren't as good or something like that. No, just because they didn't fit in the chosen frame. They wouldn't have done justice to the whole. And it's just that that we have defended at all cost during the making of the album. PP&A couldn't become a collection of tracks just standing on themselves, it had to become a unity, a whole. While they also had to be strong individually. We did make it difficult on ourselves, that's true. Some tracks - Last Farewell and I'm still Here for instance - were written especially because there was a small piece of feeling that was missing, because a link had to be made between two other songs.' 'We also started to look very differently at the writing of the songs', explains Alonza. 'We were approached by Joe Massot, the director of the 60s movie 'Reflections of Love', the movie that preceeded 'Wonderwall' for which George Harrison wrote the score. We just went into the studio and started playing using the movie images. We had never worked in that way before and it was a revelation for us : the great freedom to do what you wanted to do. The sudden understanding that you don't have to follow any rules at all to write songs. That was a very great experience.'

Jay : 'Using that experience, we made the album. Who says that we have to sound this or that way? Because it's a logical sequal to the first album? Man, that isn't necessary at all! We were very pushed at first. Come on, the second album has to be finished. And we weren't sure if we could fulfill the expectations. But after that movie all the pressure was gone and we had the feeling that we could do anything. Liberated!' 'We also put a song from that movie on our new album', says Alonza, 'Radhe Radhe'. And that's maybe the best proof of that freedom that we had all of a sudden. It's a mixture of the most diverse influences: starting with a swinging brass band and going to very modest Indian music...we just did what we felt like and this was giving us great songs!' ' I was just talking about the pressure we were feeling', says Jay, 'But that pressure mainly came from within us. When we started working on our second album, we were obsessed about the idea that it had to be better than 'K'. But nobody from outside the band had ever told us that. Nobody demanded that. Even the recordcompany has kept its distance on that point. They gave us total freedom and now I realise how good that has been for us.'

'Over a year ago', Alonza says, 'We left for LA to work with George Drakoulias and Rick Rubin. It was kind of a blind date. We knew them from their productions, of course, but not personally. During that time 'Sound of Drums' was made. But that's it. We didn't feel like we should work with them for a complete album. Their way of working was very different from ours.' 'But during that same trip,' says Jay, 'we met Bob Ezrin, who has produced a big part of PP&A. Not in LA, by the way. It's nice to be there for a while but it's not a very inspiring place. Not for us anyway. It's all so meaningless. We would never be able to make a record there. That's also a reason why it didn't work with Rick Rubin. He didn't feel like coming with us to England.' Alonza :'And that's where we really wanted to record the album. During the recording of 'K', we were more or less led by people of whom we thought they had some experience in those things. I mean, we had never recorded an album so everything was new. Doing that we had made mistakes and we didn't wanna make them twice. One of the main lessons of 'K' was that we didn't devote enough time to the actual recording. We were also very busy with things happening around us that we forgot that a good album had to be recorded. You know, we released a single and we got into the charts right away. And then all of a sudden, they wanted a whole album. It really surprised us all. 'K' could have been a lot better if we had devoted some more time to it. We were very surprised that we sold as many as we did!'