There was a lot of practicing, and regular practicing, it wasn’t like ‘who’s available on Thursday night?’, it became an everyday kind of thing. Ira: Once James moved to Brooklyn and was actually going to be in the group, our whole approach changed. Although it is one of my favourite records, there were a lot of challenges. We were changing record labels, it was a very stressful time – not making the music, but other stuff. I know when we were making Painful, though, it was kind of a rough period for us. Then, the more successful it was, it gave us the courage to be weirder. It’s where we discovered that creative freedom, to do things we hadn’t done before. That’s the record where we really decided we could do whatever we wanted. Georgia: I think Painful is where the three of us really joined up as a single-headed monster. Ira: James is on May I Sing With Me, but there he’s still kind of the guy who’s filling in, we didn’t necessarily think he’d be around 12 months on. With Matador, new producer Roger Moutenot and the latest (and last) bassist James on board, the band get busy reinventing themselves as noise-rocking sonic explorers. I’m more accepting of the imperfections, which actually makes it easier to carry on and possibly improve. Trying parts that I knew from listening to records was kind of an entry way into singing. Having to do just the one definitely made it easier. It had the advantage that Georgia wasn’t having to play drums and sing at the same time…it was a two-tiered thing: the confidence to sing and the ability and confidence to sing while playing drums. The whole record was done very quickly, we were rehearsing in our living room at the time because we were playing so quietly we could rehearse almost anywhere. Fakebook was trying to present that side of us – there’s a couple of songs we wrote for it, but mostly it was things we’d been doing that way already. It became a repertoire we developed with all these cover songs. So we thought, ‘How can we get out of this stuff?’ – so we brought a guitar to the interviews and started singing songs. Ira: There was a day on tour when Georgia was walking down the street somewhere in the mid-West and she actually overheard people laughing about the terrible radio interview that they’d just heard with us. After losing their bassist, Stephan Wichnewski, Ira and Georgia record a charming acoustic set mainly comprised of covers, including songs by Cat Stevens, John Cale and the Flamin’ Groovies.