An interview with Tim Gane of Stereolab, conducted in October, 1997
 

It’s the sound of space, the sound of moog, the sound of fun.  You can close your eyes and drift to any time or planet you want.  You can dream, fantasise of floating in a space bubble, warm, safe, out there.  “We hope to have created one new reason to BE together, if for no other purpose but to reveal how in fact we will never be apart.”
 
The [then] new album, Mars Audiac Quintet, seems less live . . .
Tim Gane: None of them are particularly live.  We do some songs live, but generally we don’t have songs before we record.  I don’t usually know what’s going to happen.

So you don’t write the songs before hand? 
Rough ideas, maybe 30 seconds long; chords and a melody maybe.

Do you prefer playing gigs, recording, or what?
When you’ve been playing a long time you look forward to recording, but when you’ve been in the studio a long time it’s nice to just play.

Were you looking forward to the tour?
I’ve been really busy up to last night [this was done on the first night of a tour].  But yeah.  I never used to like playing live when I was in a band before [McCarthy].  I don’t feel that comfortable on stage, I don’t like being looked at.  Now I can enjoy the music more and if it’s going well it’s really nice.

I remember seeing you last year in Bath and it must have been going well cos you seemed to be having a really good time.
Yeah that was alright—people had set up lights and curtains and that.

It makes a big difference if you look like you’re having a good time.  What did you make of America?
I like it, I like America.  Over a 9-week period there are good bits, boring bits, and really boring bits.

Do they like your sound?  Or is it very Europeanised? 
No they like it.  We’re talking about a relatively small, culty type audience.  We played Lolapalooza on the second stage, and sometimes there were not any people there.  There was quite a side show.  People seem to like us.  We don’t sell masses of records but we sell alright. 

What were the worst bits? 
We played in Philadelphia with Weezer and everything kind of culminated and it was really tiring—we’d done loads of things.  Sometimes we had to play twice in a day and then drive to the next one and after a while you just get really tired.  After 7 weeks and you’ve got play six gigs in a row, sometimes you just think, “I want a break”.  But you always have to play whether you feel like it or not.  But most of the time it’s good, you know.

Do you find you all get all right—9 weeks is a long time.
It doesn’t work like we progressively don’t get on.  There might be periods when a couple of us might have an argument about something.  Of course, if you’re really tired and doing a lot of things and always together that does increase the opportunity for people arguing really.  It was actually a lot less than it has been before.

You were saying about the number of records you shift—how important is that to you?  You’re certainly not unsuccessful.
No, no, it’s good.  It’s surprising, more than I thought our type of music would sell really to be honest.  I don’t really think you can do music to sell a lot of records.  Maybe some people can.  It’s really about just doing it because you’re passionate about music and wanting to put music together.  And obviously you make a record as good as you can and the way that you like it.  But selling records is like just a reaction, it just happens.

What d’ you think are the advantages of having your own label?
The advantage is that you can do what you want more or less.  We haven’t got to please a PR guy or record label head.  We’re on Elektra in America, and surprisingly enough they don’t really interfere; we give them the records and they release them.  The decisions are ours.  I’m not sure they understand what it is we’re doing.

What IS it that you do?  How would you describe yourselves?
That’s the hardest question of all that is.  Like when your auntie says, “What do you sound like then?”, and your auntie doesn’t know anything past The Beatles, and you go, “Well, we’re a bit like . . . I don’t know—we’re repetitious, melodic, slightly minimalistic music.  I don’t know, it’s just a sound.

How has it developed?
It hasn’t; it’s probably stayed the same pretty much.

Are you happy with that?
Yeah.  It does develop, but we develop it in the way that we want.  We’re not suddenly gonna have fiddles.  We often get this thing about we only have one song and we haven’t really changed since we started.  There is quite a large amount of change, but it’s still in a relatively narrow area.  I think that’s just the case because we do music that we like, that we care about.  We do music that absolutely interests us and we can put everything into it.  Music isn’t so effective when bands want to go off into whatever new—y’ know, the baggy scene comes along . . . We don’t do that.  I think you have to do music you believe in , music that means a lot to you.

Laetitia’s lyrics . . .
The thing I like about them is they’re not slogans—they’re very open to interpretation.  That’s the way I like words and music to be incertain senses.  Other people will read into it something that’s not there, sometimes people will read into it much more than she was putting in and that’s really good.  They still have a basic meaning, but you can expand on it.

How do you see your music developing in the future? 
Basically I don’t write songs until we’re doing a record.  I usually do them about 2 or 3 weeks before, so I never know what it’s going to be like. 

What would you like it to be like?
I like to like achieve in the best possible way to go to the full limit of an idea, and a lot of our songs are returning to themes we’ve used in the past and trying to use them again in a different way.

Do you see yourselves as a pop band?
Yeah, I think we’re more of a pop band than a rock band.  I don’t think we’re indie, though I suppose some people think we are.  I think good music should leave space for the listener to fill in themselves.  I like people to make up their own minds.  It’s not really my job to tell people what to think.