Interview with iLiKETRAiNS

ASHLEY: I'm not strictly a musician, but I was asked to join the band to provide a visual element. I think that's quite apart from the vast majority of bands - we've really tried to have an aesthetic that's all encompassing.

DAVE: It's very useful for us because it means that we can do all the aspects of the band on our own, in a very DIY way. Sure we signed up to a label, but we self produce, design all the artwork and make all the videos ourselves. We're very much a unit working together, which makes sense in today's music industry, I think.

PART TWO: iLiKETRAiNS AT THE MOVIES

ARTROCKER: How did the stop motion feature film of 'Elegies to Lessons Learnt' come about?

ASHLEY: I'd been trying to make a film for everything we released. Then one day we were in a service station on our way to a gig, and our manager said to me 'well, this (LP) would be an amazing opportunity to make a full length film'.

ALISTAIR: So we locked Ashley in the basement for weeks on end... to see what he'd come up with when he came out.

DAVE: Yes... we slid water and bread under the door for him!

ARTROCKER: Alot of the characters in the film seem to be doomed, but quite strong and enduring at the same time. Do you relate to that type of personality yourselves?

ASHLEY: I felt quite close to Donald Crowhurst. He was a yachtsman who'd lost his mind out on the Atlantic. After reading a book about him that was partially taken from his own notes, I related to aspects... like all the little things that went wrong, just piling up on top of each other. Alot of the film is about that.

PART THREE: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

ARTROCKER: With the historical tragedies in the film- the Great Fire, the Plague - are you saying that they have contemporary relevence in the sense that they're 'lessons learnt'?

ALISTAIR: Yes. Actually, strange things started to happen with this album. We wrote the song about the Great Fire, and then there was a massive fire just outside London. We wrote about the plague and then bird flu came along. We had 'Remnants of an Army' and now Britain's stuck in Iraq again.

ASHLEY: So the next album's going to about winning the World Cup!

DAVE: One of the big themes is that there's always this big thing hanging over a population. There's always something that everyone has to concentrate on - the end of the world. The downfall of the human race... it's gone through history past the Cold War to when Britain was at war with France.

ARTROCKER: Do you think people need that psychogically?

DAVE: It seems that way. Today the 'thing' hanging over us would be terrorism. It concentrates the population's energy towards something. It brought communities together more, at a time when people were dissapearing into their own worlds, onto their own computers and becoming individuals. Then everything became cohesive again, almost.

ARTROCKER: Do you buy the idea that if a population's living in fear then it might influence the way they vote?

DAVE: I'm almost certain that things are propagated by politicians in order to keep a population under control.

PART FOUR: PERCEPTION

ARTROCKER: You're obviously a dark, emotive group. Does it piss you off when the media compares you to other dark emotive groups?

DAVE: It's to be expected really! I think most of the press find us a bit impenetrable, so they don't really touch it. They can write it off very easily as a bunch of miserable guys writing a bunch of miserable songs about history. But there's alot more to it.

ARTROCKER: Do you ever get an interviewer going: "So why don't you guys just cheer up, huh?"

DAVE: The thing is as people we're really not miserable! We're realists, and we try to see the world for what it is. We're not down about the way things are - we're more observational than doom and gloom.

ALISTAIR: Alot of it comes from logic, and being a little bit older than lots of the bands coming out now. They haven't experienced the horrors of the world! (laughs) I wouldn't go out there if I was you...