" It will eventually come, if you give it enough time...."

You've all been playing for quite a while, could you let me know about a couple of the projects you worked on before Ex Libras?

Kieran: Well, Amit was in Stasi, I was in King Mob and Ross was in Lesser Gods.

Ross: I've also played with Kieran before, a nine piece called People, mainly a funk/soul outfit, which was fun while it lasted. I think Amit's only been in one band before.

Amit: Yeah, one band and solo spots under various guises. When I started playing guitar at 15 I used to play with a guy called Sam and we'd been playing together until Stasi split. I'm a one band man.

Kieran: We've all got mini projects that we work on: Ross does loads of production and engineering for other people and Amit's got his solo stuff so it's a nice culmination. All three of us bring different influences. All my bands have been funk and groove based, so I've had to adapt while playing with the other two. But I brought funk into the band. [laughs]

All three of you are quite independently creative, how does that affect the dynamic when you're rehearsing? Who takes the lead when you're writing?

Kieran: Well, no one really takes the lead. I mean, we'll all come into the studio in some kind of state of mind and we'll just start jamming, getting into a groove and when we're more comfortable we'll come up with different parts. Ross might come up with a drum part and we'll lay something over the top, Amit will come up with a guitar part, we'll lay some bass down, I'll do some keyboard - it just happens like that. The things that we like, we work on. The good riffs become tunes just by constantly working on them.

Ross: Some songs have basically just been written in a twenty minute jam. Everything that we play in here gets recorded so we can always look back on it, and there's never that feeling of "What was that? Will we be able to recreate it?" EVERYTHING is recorded and listened to. Things that we like, we pick out and work on. 'Phat Knickers' [track 3 on the album] was one of the first rehearsals . . .

Kieran: It was THE first rehearsal.

Ross: The body of that song came from about 20 mins of a 5 hour rehearsal. A guy I used to play with was really adamant about recording everything. His ideology was that it was a wasted rehearsal if it hadn't been recorded. He was really jam orientated (god, I hate saying jam and jamming, but it's the only real word I can use), he'd tape everything, go home and edit down the bits he liked, put some bass and guitar stuff over the top of it on a four track, maybe stick in some a capella from an old record and I've always kind of approached things in the same way since then. It takes the stress out, just not worrying about remembering, not getting it again, thinking "when was it great?"

So, at the risk of sounding like a prat, it's all a fairly organic process?

Ross: Well, personally I've got a lot of confidence in the other two and once you have that it's nice to let the walls down, lower your defences. Let everyone make enough mistakes in the early months so they feel comfortable in front of you when things go wrong. You have to go through these things to get to the good bits. It's not about doing it first time. It will eventually come, if you give it enough time and no one's judging you and you're not judging anyone else.

Kieran: There aren't ever many creative differences in the band. There's never been a massive argument, none of that shit. We always give constructive feedback and we're all willing to take it on board, so it's a happy medium.

Amit: It even gets to the point that one of us is playing something they don't like, but the other two are like "no, no that's really good". We trust each other enough to say "shit, okay. I'll play it". [laughs] I didn't like our track 'Phat Knickers' for the longest time, just didn't get or understand it at all, but now it's possibly one of my favourites, and it's only because I trusted them two enough to let myself live with it that that's happened.

Ross: A lot of it is about listening. There's a lot of space on the album. There's no crowding. It's almost like a three way conversation. No one's jumping on each other's back trying to play the most. It's almost what you choose not to play and letting other people take over, letting it breathe as one body.