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Is "The New Sound" a tonic for these times? One hopes so: the album boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time. Maybe Associates were the last act to walk the line between the ridiculous and brilliant with such a teflon-coated aplomb.

Is the record an attempt to break away from preconceived ideas of what popular music should be? Let's ask Geordie Greep. "Music can be so much more than learning to play the same as everybody else. It can be anything you want. It's strange to me, to follow the dictates of what has 'proven to be what people like' about a particular kind of music. With recording 'The New Sound', it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. And with every impulse I had, I was able to completely follow it through to its conclusion. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this 'we can do everything' feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it's good to do something else, to let go of things."

How the record came about is another thing to marvel at. Over thirty session musicians were involved in its making, on two continents. Geordie Greep; "Some of the tracks we had recorded already, elsewhere, but it just wasn't right, so we re-recorded them with new people. Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They'd never heard anything I'd done before, they were just interested in the demos I'd made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days. Then we did the overdubs later, in London."

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Eddington Avenue,

Cambridge,

Cambridgeshire,

England,

CB3 1AA.