STACK #152 Jun 2017

4 3 2 1

were done. We pulled down what we didn’t want them to hear. It was so obvious that Johnny was going to play in songs like Plastic Machinery ; that was perfect for him. He played harmoniously with the piano, you know what I mean? I’m sitting there playing the piano and he’s f-cking playing away on the guitar. It’s like we’ve been in the band for 28 f-cking years. It’s incredible how things like that work out. But that’s how it is: you kind of instinctively know that he’d be good on a certain track. It’s not written towards that person, it’s just that you know for a fact that it lends itself to Johnny Marr, or this lends itself to Stephen Morris and Gillian [Gilbert]. They worked more on the rhythm thing with synths.

to do something because that’s as much a part of art as a piano player or a guitarist. So Tim [Burgess, vocalist] is friends with them on Twitter, and we’re big fans of theirs, so we asked them to contribute their ideas through words. It just made more sense to get people to come and guest rather than  for us to do an album on our own again. I’m interested in digging deeper into that.With the musical collaborations you have on Different Days, how did you identify who you wanted to work with on each track?  Did you listen to a track and think ‘We want Johnny Marr for this one, Paul Weller for that one’? Yeah, basically. We had a song and we thought ‘Who could we have play on this?’ It became obvious to us when we listened to it who we wanted for

We can’t just do something that sounds the same and feels the same - we need to add something

it. We’ve only got a few f-cking mates [laughs].

What level of input did they have? Did they help write the song or just come in and put their style on it? The songs were 98.99 percent complete; the vocals and everything

I know you were out here last year, but any plans to come out again to

stack.net.au