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Bio

As Morrissey so eloquently put it, Manchester has so much to answer for. Working For A Nuclear Free City, a new Manc band, seems up to the challenge, brewing up a sludgy dancefloor filler of a sound from ghosts of the city's past, especially the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets, and making it fresh by chucking in plenty of noisy shoegazing guitars and hypnotic krautrock grooves. The result makes them kindred spirits with bands like 120 Days, Fujiya & Miyagi, and the Early Years, and the quartet's debut full-length, the double Businessmen & Ghosts, is a Screamadelica for the new millennium: sprawling, by turns blissed out and hopped up and, above all, a soundtrack to an entire night's worth of dancing, chilling and screwing.

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Interview

Are there non-musical influences on your music?
The Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudi has always been a great influence -- to our music more than anything else -- just because of his sheer ambition. We long to create an audio equivalent to Sagrada Família.

And what sort of musical inspirations might help make the aural equivalent to a Barcelona basilica?
The usual suspects: Radiohead, Super Furry Animals, DJ Shadow, the Beatles, Kraftwerk, My Bloody Valentine, the Smiths, Van Morrison, Talking Heads and other stuff like Eno, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, King Tubby, Yes, Boards of Canada...

Suddenly we're wondering about the origins of your Rock the Rabbit T-shirt design.
Well, we're a bunch of pretentious chin-strokers with a love of French surrealist art. And we're lazy.

Do you have a pre-show ritual?
Does getting blind drunk count?

What do you think of all the changes to the industry afoot?
It democratizes the whole process; we probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the changes in the music industry. But it means there's a lot more shit to wade through -- people aren't really spending years on perfecting the craft of recording.

You've made a double-album. We're guessing you don't think the album format is dead...
Definitely not. I think the album format is still really important -- especially to us. Listening to tracks in isolation is all well and good, but there's nothing like listening to a whole body of work when it's done right. Albums like 3 Feet High and Rising, OK Computer, or Endtroducing work better when you devote time to listen to the whole piece.

We shudder to think what your favorite bedroom album might be.
Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed. The ladies love it!