You've received a lot of criticism for "borrowing heavily" from your influences, especially Wire. Obviously, your attitude is more "let's see how we can fuck with this"…
Absolutely. I'm living on this planet, I have information coming towards me, and I'm using that. And I think that's completely fine, you know? I don't understand people having a problem with that. The annoying thing is, in dance music, it's fine that people use samples, or whatever. What's the problem with that? Music is about communication; it's not about keeping things to yourself.

One of the most punk rock things you did recently was to walk off the stage at the Reading Festival after playing only one song. Did you get a lot of flak about that?
No, and I don't think we could, really. I think people were so glad to just see someone try and do something. The interesting thing was, we did that, and the stage manager at Reading absolutely freaked. He's going, "you've got to go back on now, 'cause you're going to ruin it for all the other bands. People are going to start throwing mud." I was like, "good! Let them throw some fucking mud!" That's what I want to do. I don't want to be stifled by journalists sitting in their bedrooms wanking over their record collections, I want the kids to be out there fucking chucking mud at me.

A lot of people are aghast that it took you so long to make a follow-up record. What was going on?
Basically, we went on tour for about two years, which is totally inappropriate for a new band to do, and it was a real mistake. As a result of that, Annie left the band, and the whole sort of dynamic of the band changed. Donna and I were just both damaged, really, by such extensive touring. None of us knew each other that well when the band started doing very well, and we just weren't communicating properly. Then there was kind of like a year and a half where it didn't seem to me that Elastica was going to continue, and I carried on writing in my basement, but not for an Elastica album, at all, really. I bumped into Annie, and she was like, "let's rehearse," and it was kind of fun again. So, in the end, I actually thought, "well, fuck it, we've left this long, we got to the point where no one believes the band still exists, no one even expects a record to come out, we've got like 10,000 pounds left in the bank, let's go in, spend the last of our money."

We went into a really punk little studio, and recorded my favorite songs from each period of writing, as one band in one place, in six weeks. I thought that was the only way that the album was going to have any kind of cohesion, because at that point, I was like, "how the fuck am I going to choose from all this music which has been made by all these different people?" When I listen to the album, I know what songs we left off, and I know how good they are, and I know what other versions we had of everything, and I can hear the faults in it, but for me, it was just so important to just get the record out, and move on from that point.

Do you feel like the band lost momentum, and more importantly, do you care?
The band completely lost momentum! But you know, I had to step back and become a human being again, and not "Justine Frischmann of Elastica," because it was doing my fucking head in. The only thing I feel genuinely sorry about is actually making the fans wait that long, but I really had to do it to survive, and if I hadn't done that, I would've gone insane, so it's not really something I can apologize about. It was just something I had to do.

The Menace has a lot darker tone than the first album. Is that something you were consciously looking for?
I wasn't consciously. This album is incredibly organic. The first one was, too. The darkness comes out of a real sense of misery and isolation that Donna and I both experienced after what we went through. In one way, we were reacting against the first album -- we wanted to do something different, and I think we reacting against the kind of chirpiness of the first album. I didn't feel like singing about Vaseline, I felt like singing about having doubts about whether or not you're human.

Is the new material you're working on now going in the same direction?
I've actually decided I'm not going to talk about the new material, because at this point, I'm only writing songs for the rest of the band, I'm not even writing them for a new record, so I'm not gonna hype up what we're doing next at all, 'cause that's the only way I can survive. So, I'm not going to talk about a new record until it's out, and at this point, all I'm saying is, I don't even know if we're going to have a new record, I'm not going to make any promises. We're obviously writing, and we're having fun again, but I just think that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Just listen to it when it comes out.
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Julio Diaz is the Editor-In-Chief for Ink 19, the largest music magazine in the Southeast US, and the third largest regional magazine in the country. He is the former Webmaster of The Florida Ska Web Page! and the former Vice President of A&R and Marketing for Citrus Records. His work has also been published in Focus magazine and translated into French for Dig It! magazine.