Music Q&A:
The Lovely Eggs

What informs your music and songwriting?
Oh, just the magic and mundaneness of everyday life really. We live in Lancaster, which is a bit like Twin Peaks. The Pendle Witches were hanged here and even today they’re turning lunatic asylums into luxury flats and putting men in prison for feeding ready meals to pigeons. It’s nuts really. So that gives us a lot of inspiration for our songs – just living in this weird place! Also, the author Richard Brautigan has been a big influence on us. Just the way he approaches his writing. He always looked for the magic in his own everyday surroundings and made normal life magnificent through his own kaleidoscopic vision and I think that’s a really great way of trying to get through life.

How have you evolved as a band over the years?
When we first started the band our number one agenda was for our music to have no rules!! We really wanted a lot of freedom, both in a musical sense and also in the sense of not having a record company telling you what to do, what songs you should write etc. So our early tunes were very experimental. Almost little sketches of everyday life. We didn’t really want to sing about big universal themes like love and that. That was boring so we sang a lot about death and random stuff and made cut-ups. We think our sound has changed a bit over the years just from wanting a change. Over the years our sound has got heavier but still with a big element of weird shit going on and we’ve tried more stuff out and we write longer songs these days than we used to, but that could all change depending on what we feel like. That’s how it is when you do your own band. You can do exactly what you like.

What are you up to at the moment artistically?
Right at this very moment we are printing out the packaging to our new limited edition 5″ single. The printer is out on the kitchen table and the little fucker is going for all it’s worth!! We are hand-making these, designing and printing them all and then packaging them and, yeah, it’s us who writes out the envelopes and takes them to the post office. The aesthetic of what we do is still extremely important to us. We hand-make a lot of stuff, we design our own records or work with mates who help us, like Casey Raymond (who does a lot of our music videos and single covers) and Jules from Moonshake Design (who has designed a lot of our recent t-shirts) and David Shrigley (who has just designed the cover for the 7″ version of the single). If something looks crap it’s like walking round with a stone in yer shoe. It’s got to look right and for us the artwork goes hand in hand with the music.

What’s on your rider?
Strongbow, red wine, strong lager, cooking lager. Milk for our boy.

Tell us your most embarrassing or surreal experience.
Playing a gig at a place called the Death Shack in an abandoned scrapyard outside Los Angeles was pretty frigging surreal. David did a disappearing act and I got really worried about him. I didn’t know anyone at the gig at all and he totally vanished. It was totally pitch black and, of course, being in America I got it in my head that he had been murdered by a serial killer. I spent around an hour looking for him. It was like a dream swimming in treacle. Everything was in slow motion. Turns out he’d gone to look at this bloke’s gem rock museum and I discovered him smoking a doobie with this bloke that looked like Kevin Spacey smashing volcano bubbles with a hammer. That was a pretty surreal moment for me. The most embarrassing was when I met Jonathan Richman and my mate and me were both wrecked and she had this packet of Richmond fags and I remember her shoving them in his face and saying: “Look, they’ve got your name on them!” Not only is his name not Richmond, he’s renowned for being a bit of a straight edge so I just wanted to fall down a hole at that point!

What song do you wish you’d written?
Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel.

What’s your worst lyric?
“Look at him with his dogdirt eyes.”