JJ: Do you guys have a standard approach to making albums, or is it different each time you go in?

ZG: I know that when we go in, we don’t know what we’re gonna have when we come out. (Laughs.) Unlike most bands who know their material before they go into the studio, we don’t have any idea clue, we invent it as we go along. Insofar as that, there’s not really a standard procedure, but – like I said – jamming and preprogramming a couple of tracks is mainly the route we take and then just add organically as and when we feel something is right for a track.

JJ: When you’re going in to improvise like that, how much planning do you do before a take? Or do you just start from scratch.

ZG: No planning, really. We might just be spending an afternoon jamming any kind of weird thing that comes to our minds just for the fun of it, but the DAT is running all the time. From that session, there might be three or four really good ideas that came out that we could use. So we sit down and figure out how to tie them altogether, find bridges between them and so on. I mean, we don’t even know how fast the track is gonna be when we sit down and jam or anything. It’s just a product of real spontaneity.

JJ: How much do you discuss your improvisation in general?

ZG: How much do we discuss it?

JJ: Yeah.

ZG: You mean between ourselves?

JJ: Yeah.

ZG: How do you mean?

JJ: Like, after a show, say, do you discuss how it went in terms of playing off of each other and…

ZG: Oh, yeah! Sure, sure… if there’s a great moment in the set, we’ll all be buzzing about it the minute the gig’s finished. A good jam after one of the tracks will always get us sort of happy and we’ll talk about. But things very rarely stay in the memory and, unless we’ve recorded it, it’s just a one-off moment that happens in the gig and we’ll never revisit it.

JJ: Do you ever listen to the shows? Do you tape them yourselves?

ZG: Yeah, we do, whenever we can – sometimes – not as often as I’d like. But we do try to tape the shows as much as possible.

JJ: Is there a typical Ozric Tentacles rehearsal, or is it all just sort of unstructured jamming kind of stuff?

ZG: I suppose prior to a tour, when we roughly know what tracks we’re gonna play, we concentrate on getting those tracks sounding as good as possible, so you’ve got direction in that. But if we’re going for just jamming, then there really is no script at all. We’re just having a laugh, really, as mates would of any age.

JJ: How do you structure your shows? Do you go from a setlist?

ZG: Yeah, we’ve got a setlist. A lot of what we do is a fusion of programmed music and live played music — a lot of tracks are fused like that. So, we need to know beforehand. There’s a lot of loading and technicalities to do before each track, so it’s best to know what you’re gonna play next, otherwise are just long gaps and a bit of an awkward silence.

JJ: Do you keep the same setlist for the whole tour? Or do you alternate from night-to-night?

ZG: We work out a general setlist for the tour and then we tend to swap individual tracks out with other tracks that we already know, just for a change for ourselves and for the audiences. We often change the encore about as to how what we feel, what we wanna play.

JJ: How different do songs get from night to night, in terms of length, and in terms of vibe?

ZG: Ah, well… some songs are very pre-set, from beginning to end you know exactly where it is, and where you are, and how it’s gonna be, so there isn’t a lot of room in that. But, we reserve other tracks for jamming at the end of or jamming in the middle of — we open up a section and jam it for a while and stuff. And basically that’s different every single night. It just depends on the mood and who’s doing what and who has a crazy idea. It’s all completely spontaneous, all the jamming.

JJ: How much does the audience effect the improvisation? The specific audience…

ZG: Loads. Loads. If we’re getting a really good response, if people are jumping about and being loony and all that, then we play better. So, the madder the audience is, the more fun we have, really.

JJ: Sort of related to that, what would you qualify as an ideal audience? Would it be jumping around or…?

ZG: Yeah, I think so, actually: people who love it and [are] jumping about, going completely nutty; losing it. (Laughs.)

JJ: So, now, the obvious American journalist question: how are American fans different from British fans?

ZG: Well, they don’t tend to go as nutty, really.

JJ: Oh?

ZG: Although, I have to say, some of the gigs we’ve done on this tour, at the moment, the British fans didn’t go particularly nutty either. But I would say about the American audiences is that they’re particularly attentive and listen very closely. They might not be thrashing about like nutters but they are listening very closely and you get a very appreciative applause. You can tell the quality of the applause that come back (laughs), which is really nice, actually, very nice — more so than English probably. It’s hard to say, really.

JJ: Most American audiences have probably only had a chance to hear the two most recent albums, and maybe one or two that came out on I.R.S. over here, and most are definitely going to be seeing the band for the first time this time around. Is that gonna shape your approach at all, or are you just gonna sort of carry on with what you’re doing on the tour right now?

ZG: Yeah. I think we’re gonna basically take this set to America. We’ve revamped the set and they won’t have heard it. We’ve got some new tracks in there as well. I don’t think there is any cause to change it. We’ve been taking it around England, getting it tighter and tighter, and by the time we get it to America, it should sound really good.

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