Interview by Simon "Barnzley" Armitage
In conversation with Bobby Gillespie

Around 1990 we had a hit record called Loaded and then we had another one called Come Together. And in between Loaded and Come Together, Alan McGee put us on a wage. Andrew Innes had the idea we could build a studio, so we built this studio in Hackney. (That was a really rough part of London in those days.) It was very small but allowed us to have somewhere to write from.

Andrew Innes had a flat on the Isle of Dogs. He had a back bedroom there where he had a 4-track TEAC. He was already interested in recording. This was the early days of sampling, and we bought an old Akai S1000 sampler.

This was the early days of sampling. Before that we were a typical four-piece rock-and-roll band set-up — bass, guitar, drums etc. But by working with Andy Weatherall and listening to house records, we realised we could approach making music in a different way. We could use our imagination. We learned we could write and record without having to hire a whole orchestra — we could just steal the strings from a Curtis Mayfield record.

Suddenly we started writing differently. Innes had the vision to realise we could do this. I have to give him the credit for having the vision. Before that we wrote on guitars, but we started writing on a keyboard. We set up a little sampler, desk, a little mic, and basically wrote Screamadelica. We went to bigger studios afterwards to build on the ideas we had, but the genesis was started in that little studio in Hackney.

This was before Hackney was trendy. It was on an industrial estate on a council estate. Jake and Dinos Chapman, who are friends of mine, have recently switched their operation to a warehouse in the same street. But back in the day it was really rough.