Modest Mouse - Deliver Us From Evil

I went to the Botanical gardens. It's fucking amazing there, one of the best places I've ever been to. Let's hope it doesn't get washed away soon. Isaac Brock has heard of Britain's ongoing weather travails and wryly suggests things may not get better anytime soon. "Seems like the planet is trying to wash us off it, or drown us out or something. It's trying different things in different places. We're getting overdosed with too much shit everywhere. It's rain with you guys. Or Australia, how about too much SUNLIGHT, see how you like that, ha ha! Maybe we fucking deserve it anyway."

Brock, mildly eccentric and most certainly opinionated, comes over all bashful when it is put to him that he now fronts one of the world's most popular indie bands. Modest Mouse, formed way back in 1993, recently found their latest album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank debuting atop the Billboard 100. "A-list? Yeah right! I think we got to number one by default. People who are really into music like ours are a lot more likely to buy a hard copy of the record. In a weird way, pop music in general and top 40 pop bands are a lot more likely to be affected in this download era, 'cos kids are more likely to do that. So I guess it's kinda like cheating for us to end up at the top of the charts." Isn't that being a little, ahem, too Modest? "Shut up!"

Always reasonably popular among the indie cognoscenti over this side of the Atlantic, interest in the Mouse has been stirred somewhat by the addition to their ranks of one bona fide guitar legend. The re-emergence to the spotlight of Johnny Marr, co-founder of The Smiths, has proven to be quite the PR stunt. But is there more substance to it than that? In any case, how does one go about signing up Johnny Marr to your band, and why hasn't anyone thought of that before? "I just gave him a call. Our last guitarist had quit and he was interested. It just worked out that way - wasn't much too it. We were both equally as cautious at the beginning as to how much either of us wanted to commit to it, so we just decided to get together and play music and see how it went. It worked out great so we decided to work on the record. It gradually became what it is now, which is that Johnny is a member of the band."

Given that Marr has been the inspiration of a generation, it seems reasonable to assume that a man of such stature will make his presence felt wherever he goes. "I know he has added something different, but it's not anything I can answer with certainty. There is no definitive way of analysing his direct impact 'cos it was just about us all writing together. I couldn't pin it down more than I can say what influence adding a second drummer has had. It just is what it is. We'll have to wait and see where the future takes us. To date, we haven't really had a prescribed formula for how we go about writing our music. When we start a new record, we deliberately don't think about previous records. However, this time around, the one thing that I will strive to do is, rather than the six of us sitting in a room trying to write (when we wrote the last record we did all write together), my ambition is to write stripped down songs and then build them up for there."

Brock, whose demented live performances invoke Frank Black as possessed by Satan, has allegedly referred to both he and his bandmates as a bunch of oddballs. This is something he is quick to deny. "Oddballs? No, I wouldn't have said that. I will admit that we have an interesting bunch of characters in the mix; everyone is trying to come from odd places, but that's for me to enjoy and it wouldn't be fair to try and discuss that." He is, however, more forthcoming on discussing some of the many bizarre incidents of his life to date. For instance, Brock was raised within the Grace gospel church which had affiliations with the Davidian sect of David Koresh - the self-proclaimed 'final prophet' whose ranch was destroyed in 1993 in a standoff with the FBI, killing 74. "The church we went to was a branch of the same church that they went off. I think it's a tenuous link. To be honest, I think that those guys were out of their fucking mind where they went with it. My sect was distanced from the David Koresh thing. It was still pretty silly all the same."

Forced to attend Sunday school, Brock recalls, as a six year-old, being impelled to speak in tongues – a bizarre scenario which challenged his inner genius, which rose majestically to the challenge. "I started singing from Mary Poppins. It was the song Um-diddle-iddle-iddle-um-diddle-ay etc etc [the song is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious]. It was my way of having fun. C'mon, church is boring we all know that!" Brock, never shy to disguise his lack of respect for religion, describes the moment he had his 'epiphany'. "One Sunday they had this Christian hippy come in and play confusing guitar songs about the lord and one of the songs was about Noah's Ark. The song explained that the reason there weren't any more unicorns was because they were kinda headstrong and vain and wouldn't get onto the ark - and that's why there are no more unicorns. I remember thinking to myself, 'What a load of bullshit, are you kidding me?' I mean, the Bible is a weird story to tell anyway, so why not haul unicorns into it? It all seemed pretty fucking out there to me, Strangely though, I still spent years, every time I did something wrong, apologising to a god I didn't believe in. Figures."

Brock, no stranger to the standard rock 'n' roll hard living cliché, admits that getting done for driving under the influence of laughing gas was more than a little ironic. "That wasn't such a great idea. Mistakes were made but I don't make those kinda errors anymore. I don't really do anything except drink and smoke weed anymore, and neither of those behind a wheel. That was just a bad idea which speaks for itself. Now I find I have a lot more time to do more interesting things. A lot of shit I used to do, I never found myself being all that creative on it. If I did even feel creative whilst taking it, it usually came to nothing. It's fun to write music when you've had a few drinks, but unfortunately, weed can make everything sound good. I don't really have advice for people who want to get off drugs other than to say stop, but I'm sure they get yelled at a lot by other people anyway. It was complicating my life, let's leave it at that."