Galleons - Toy ships on Albion's shores

Looking at photos of the band, I was struck by the fairly wide age gap between the members. Can I ask how the band came together?

When Joe and I wrote the ad to look for members, we wanted to find people who liked the kind of music we were trying to make, rather than seeking out a specific type of person. We put out an ad open to people of any age, on any instrument, just to see what would happen. A lot of bands seem to put "aged between 21 and 30" etc., which I imagine is tied to some kind of marketable image, but we thought that sort of thing was meaningless when it comes to being part of a group that plays together. It's worked out really well in terms of band dynamics. Phil is the oldest member of the band, but it's usually Joe who needs the afternoon nap.

There's a huge number of great bands in Brighton and it's hard to keep track of who's coming and going. We have friends we run into at shows, but there's always something new happening. I think The Brunswick In Hove is the place where we play most often. Amy Hill runs an amazing free night there, and it's a pretty good starting point for settling into the Brighton folk scene.

Probably the fact that we have two lead singers.

A couple of songs were finished just a few weeks before we went in to record, and a couple are at least ten years old and have been reinvented across the different bands I've been in. Most of them are from this past year though. I'm not very good at actually finishing songs, so we always have loads of scattered pieces to mess around with during rehearsals, and things tend to take shape gradually.

As far as inspiration goes, the main themes that set this record apart from the first one are animals and conflict (not both at the same time). Some of our most devoted listeners find modern music not very engaged. I tend to agree - the new folk scene isn't very engaged. I think the best politically or socially minded music has come from hip-hop, metal or grime artists. I've tried writing more politically-oriented songs, but I'm not very good at it. "Whale Song" is about people suggesting subjects for you to write songs about.

We really wanted to record the new album to a decent standard, but we were all pretty broke. We had a bit of money saved up from the last record and from gigs, but with six members, most of the money we make gets sucked up by transport, gear, accommodation, and the odd tempting sandwich. We looked into Pledge and realised you could have fun with people who liked your music and make a bit of money to go and make more music.

Some of the many things worth remembering: a few special people who came to one of our rehearsals, which turned into a mini wine-fuelled gig; a lovely man called Alan in America who backed us to write a song for his wife; we wrote a song for someone's daughter, one for someone's dog, and one backer even made a cameo (playing the moon) in a video we made for our first record. In short, it was brilliant.

Two albums in a short space of time, but some differences are starting to emerge. Could you point out a few, in terms of tone, arrangements, songwriting, etc.?

We wanted the album to sound a bit different from the first one, but we didn't want to sit down and plan out exactly how, if that makes sense. I think it's because, having played together for a while by then, everyone felt a bit more confident about bringing in and pushing new ideas, and we just put them all together.

It's definitely a more rock record, and we spent more time thinking about the arrangements. Some people felt that on our last record everyone was playing all at once the whole time, so we tried to leave more space within the songs. I love both the Pixies and Nirvana, who I think are a great example of how important dynamics are in songwriting.

Then we were given a Casio keyboard to play around with, which gave us an amazing range of random sounds to experiment with. We were lucky enough to find friends to add vocal parts and some strings, which gave the songs an extra dimension we couldn't add on the first record.

You've been compared to several different bands, without anyone ever quite capturing the real spirit of your songs, which I find very personal but also rooted in English folk tradition. Can you point us to a reference point for your music?

I love English folk, though maybe not so much its most traditional form. Modern English artists like Fairport Convention, Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, Trembling Bells, Richard Dawson and The Imagined Village do a great job of reworking traditional songs and styles and adding something new to them. I think if you don't do that, it just becomes some kind of historical exercise.

Among my favourite non-folk bands are Nirvana, Pixies, Joy Division, At the Drive In and Belle and Sebastian. Joe loves blues, Bob Dylan and Dire Straits, Phil prefers Jackson Browne and prog-rock, Beth is into First Aid Kit and the Cranberries, Viktorija listens to Latvian folk, Bach and Euro techno. Josh loves Dave Grohl's drumming and, being twenty years old, a ton of bands the rest of us have never heard of. I guess it's all somehow blended together into our songs!

The basement is something almost too terrifying to talk about. We had Phil and Paul (our first drummer) record the bass and drum parts down there to separate them from the acoustic instruments, but I'm not sure they ever fully recovered!

I usually write songs by playing guitar and then "howling" over the chords until I find a vocal melody I like. Normally, at that point there isn't a coherent lyric for the song, basically just noises - although sometimes the lyrics come first. Then I bring all this to rehearsal and we start putting it all together. When we started playing we always felt we needed to be able to play the songs even with someone missing, because it's not always possible to have everyone at the shows.

We'd love to do a lot more touring. We haven't played many shows outside Brighton over the last six months because we've been busy with "Cloud Physics", but now that it's finished we'd like to go and play as many places as possible. Since we all have to work and there are six of us, it's complicated to organise. Last summer we had a great time at festivals and shows all over the country and we'd really like to do the same again next year. It's really, really amazing that people outside the UK support us too, so if anyone in the rest of Europe (or beyond) has suggestions on where we should go, please get in touch! Or just drop us a line to say hi anyway!

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