The following is an interview with Severin:
"We didn't really intend for there to be this length gap, we certainly didn't take a year off or anything like that. But we toured "Superstition" right up until March of 1992 and then we got involved with the "Batman Returns" movie and putting together a second singles compilation album and that took us up to the end of the year. The actual writing and recording didn't take very long, it's just all the stuff in between. We did a lot of festivals and a tour of Australia. We tend to break things up for some reason rather just going straight through, trying to finish something and then release it."
"In some senses, if we were the same band from the beginning maybe we'd be able to work more continuously as opposed to breaking somebody new in. But new people always bring a different kind of element to the band, so maybe that's what helps us change our sound a bit.
"For us, it's not really a celebrity thing. It's more that we grew up as fans of music and just wanted to be in a band. Siouxsie hasn't got into acting, or anything like that. We're a live band and I think that growing up as a live band has helped us a lot. We did two years in kind of secret, playing live. There was a certain amount of spotlight on us from the beginning, but not nearly the kind of pressure that new bands are put under now. So we were able to build up a really solid live following who have remained loyal to us over the years."
"When you said things were 'underground' or 'alternative,' they really were. It seems that as soon as you form a band you're thrown onto the cover of a magazine, or you're making a record or you're on MTV with a video almost immediately. People were able to develop outside of the spotlight a bit more and the people who really wanted to follow them had a chance to. So the people who would follow you around were really passionate about what you did, and it was less of a trend. I think MTV changed a lot of things, and Live Aid changed a lot of things. Back in those days, we kind of caught the record companies asleep and they didn't really know what was happening. All these bands emerged from nowhere and they didn't really know what to do with them because they were so different from the people they were used to working with. The newer bands didn't want to do the same things that the older bands were doing. These days, the business has a bigger control over everything and it trys to steer everything."
"The great thing about the first one was that right up until almost the first show, everybody was really nervous about whether it was going to be successful, whether it was going to work, whether the bands would even get on with each other. It was a bit of a risk, but as soon as it started off it was obvious that all the gigs were going to sell out, and it was really, really exciting. The first bill was a lot more diverse than the other ones, I mean you had Ice-T, Butthole Surfers, us, Living Colour. You couldn't get more different bands from each other, but yet everyone got on back stage and it was sort of like a traveling circus."
"If we hadn't have done it, I guess our management and our record company would say 'yes, yes, do it' but I don't know. I'd hesitate. We certainly wouldn't go it again, we wouldn't want to spoil our memories of the first one."
"We had 9 songs at that point, only 7 of which we used on the album, and we kind of thought 'well is it finished?' and we realized that it wasn't and there wasn't the kind of lead single. We wanted to write some more songs, and up until that point we'd produced everything ourselves, and we thought the best way to sort of finish it off was to get in a referee, a producer. We started making inquiries about who was available and it went on for months. Some good ideas, some really bad ideas. People were either busy or they just didn't seem right or we didn't agree. In the meantime, Budgie had done some session work in Paris in the course of which he met John Cale's French manager. It was as if somebody had switched a light bulb on. We hadn't heard if he had been producing anything of late, so we just sent him a tape and faxed him, and he faxed back the next day. It was brilliant. All these other guys had big managers in the way and it took two weeks to get a word out of them as to whether they'd actually listen to the record. Cale came back within one day and said he loved what we'd done so far and was really flattered to be involved. So then it was just a case of finding the right time to write and record some more songs with him, He was really fast, supremely professional as you would imagine. When you're a band like us, engineers and producers come along with their own ideas, like are they really as scary as they seem? So it was good to have it the other way around. What was he going to be like? He was great. He was very funny, very intense, but very cute as well."
"The songs were pretty embryonic when he came in. We did a few days of pre-production and writing with him. He just helped us focus on the material. There isn't a John Cale sound or anything, he's not that kind of producer."
