Ad Nauseum used to mess around doing Cardiacs covers in rehersal. I thought at the time I'd be able to still work with Ad Nauseum, but the rest of Ad Nauseum were a bit worried that it wouldn't work, they wanted me to stop writing songs for them. I'd rather it was completely different. I've picked something from all of them, but I'm still learning at the moment. Recently I got together with this keyboard player who lived down the road and we made this really horrible pop music for the hell of it.
Cardiacs music seems to be more song orientated now.
The recent stuff I've written, I think are my best things because I've written them around vocal melodies and tunes and built them up around that which is the way I think a song should be written, now. Yeah, I was coming up with chords and not so much tunes as instrumental bits, now I've got the idea that a good song is when you can strip it down and it still sounds good on guitar and vocals. If it's something complicated especially you can't really introduce it to another bunch of musicians until its roughly recorded in its entirety and then if it sounds good in that form you shouldn't do too much more with it. So although it's a case of actually having to sit down and think of it, to put your mind to it, the end product ends up sounding the way you like to listen to things anyway - there's nothing pretentious about that at all. I was very into the punk thing, the Sex Pistols and all that, there was nothing complicated about it, just a good feeling, that's what I liked.