Vitamin C? "Urgh, yeah." Oil of Echinacea? "I’m on those, I think I would be dead if I hadn’t taken them."
Mattie Bennett, cold-ridden front man of Straw is sat sniffling and coughing in a van parked in a busy service station.
"I think it’s Northampton, but I could be mistaken. I dunno, the van doors open, we get shovelled out and we play the gig."
The band are currently nearing the end of a mini tour to promote their new single ‘Sailing Off The Edge Of the World’ and the forthcoming album ‘Keepsakes’.
Originally, the tour was to visit Bristol but things changed at the last moment. Was this in any way a snub for their once hometown? After all, their new label Columbia is re-launching the band as a London outfit with no mention of the bands past local history.
Their previous incarnation was as Please, who were signed to Arista subsidiary Sugar. Have they said goodbye to the city for good?
"Well yeah. Straw has been ousted from the Bristol scene because everyone has moved to London except for me. But I am still a Bedminster boy. Duck (keyboardist) and Andy (drummer) moved up there.
"We got the opportunity to work in a house with a studio in the basement belonging to Pete Thomas, drummer from Elvis Costello And The Attractions. He went over to America and needed someone to house sit. So I’m up there during the week and I come back to Bristol at the weekend," he said.
In a sense it’s second time around for Straw. Originally signed to WEA they enjoyed minor success with their debut album ‘Shoplifting’. The Singles ‘Weird Superman’ and ‘The Aeroplane Song’ skirted the edges of the top 40, and found them championed by the likes of Chris Evans.
You would think that backing from the Virgin Radio DJ and heavy daytime airplay would afford some stability. But in 1999, on the eve of playing the Bristol Community Festival, the band pulled their appearance, left WEA and parted company with their former bassist Roger Power, who has since been replaced by Dan McKinna.
With the success of bands like Toploader (who many consider Straw to be in similar musical vein), how well does Mattie think the new material will be received?
"Well, the lucky thing about the current situation is that each time as we’ve launched ourselves we have got more and more control over what we have done.
"The current climate has changed quite a lot in the last couple of years, it seems that a lot of people who, before weren’t really interested in music seem to be going out and buying music again. Like with Toploader [Straw supported them last year on tour], It’s interesting cos they get really negative press, yet they’ve sold 8 million records.
"It doesn’t seem to correlate anymore that if the NME hates you or likes you. It’s down to people deciding and I think that’s got a lot to do with the Internet. People can sort of sample you wares and they don’t need to be told what to or not what to like. I like that aspect," Mattie added.
As well as the melodic beauty of ‘Sailing Off The Edge Of The World’, there has also been another taster from ‘Keepsakes’. Last year a track taken from Straws’ ‘Homework EP’ ‘Watching You Sleep’ - with it’s simplistic wealth of plodding, metronomic beats, simple guitar hooks and electro loops - indicated Mattie's approach to singwriting had taken a major departure from the eclectic and hectic pop of ‘Shoplifting’.
"‘Keepsakes’ was a phenomenally easy thing to do. With ‘Shoplifting’, it was written by mopping up all the old leftover Please songs after we split up, that I’d not written or not finished. I sort of wrote 27 songs in 2 days.
"Basically it had 3-5 years worth of writing in it whereas the new album was written in 3-4 months. We worked in the way that, the morning we wrote the song was the morning we recorded it, it was very much by the seat of our pants," he said.
Lots of the songs on ‘Keepsakes’, are about putting myself into strange situations, like how would I feel if this happened, what would I do? The sort of situations where on first listen you may think very little of the concept, but on the third or fourth listen you form different ideas of what it’s about.
"Like ‘Watching You Sleep’ it’s a song about watching someone sleep, but it also be about a stalker or working in a morgue!"
Since we’re on the subject of death warmed up, Mattie sounds it, coughing and spluttering again. "Can’t wait to get back to Bristol. I’m just gonna sit around with my dog and my girlfriend." You see, there really is no place like home.

Victoria Sparks

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