In retrospect, how smart an idea was that?
Not smart at all really and in the end it cost us £70,000 [$108,000] to give it away for free. And we’re still paying that back now. But it felt like the right thing to do at the time. We didn’t know we were going to lose 70 grand at the time but it scared the living daylights out of a lot of record companies all across the world. But there’d be no point in doing it again because it’d be a cliché and passé. The Charlatans, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails all had similar ideas then within that online framework. But because we’ve all done it, no one wants to do to it again which means that people have started buying music again. Are you still living in L.A. and how does that affect the songwriting process? Yes, I’m still living there. The songwriting process has always changed for the Charlatans and it’s very rare that we get together and jam. Maybe we did that once for this album but usually we swap ideas over the internet. We wrote together for the first album and then for the second alb
