Arriving next week to headline the run of winter festivals – We Love Sounds and Winter Sound System – is Italian double act Crookers.

ITM’s Dave Ruby Howe caught up with Bot from the winter festival headliners to get the skinny on their tour plans, hooking up all the superstars on their debut album and the joys of Italian cooking.

Hey Bot, how are you?

“Good thanks!”

You’re living in London now, right? How have you been finding it so far?

“I really like living in London. Everything works really well from here. You get pretty good travel. The food is pretty good too, but it’s expensive so I’m getting my Grandmother to send me lots of stuff.”

What’re you up to tonight?

“I’m doing some studio work tonight. It’s a track we’re doing with Harvard Bass. It’s just a collaborative track at the moment, maybe for an EP on Southern Fried of some great dancefloor stuff.”

That’s something that I wanted to ask you about. It really seems that you guys love to collaborate, especially on the new album. What is it about working with other artists that you guys enjoy so much?

“It’s actually something that we’ve always done, but people don’t seem to get that about us. From day one that’s what we’ve been doing. We always like to work with other people because they bring other ideas with them. Even if they’re not in the same style as you, you’re challenged to make it work. It’s really a creative way to work. And you learn new ways to work from that.”

How did you go about getting all the guests on Tons Of Friends?

“Every track that we did for the record was made in a different way. Sometimes we would be alone in the studio making the beats and then the vocals would come in through iChat or something, and sometimes it would all be done with us and the other artist together in the room. That’s what it’s about. You learn how to do something that you couldn’t do on your own.”

Was it difficult to approach all of the people and get their input?

“It’s always very random. It can be online and send someone some beats and ask them to do some work on it or we could be drunk at a festival and just start talking to them. It was never planned. So you see the super famous people on there like Kelis or will.i.am and then there’s other people like Carrie who has never really done anything, but we liked her and wanted to do a track, so it’s just whatever we felt like doing. We didn’t plan to make so many tracks in the end, but we just kept adding songs that we thought were cool. We had to stop though because we just ran out of space. We almost made it a double album but the label didn’t want that.”

I’ve spoken to some other artists about collaborating and they’ve said that it can be really time consuming to deal with artists’ management and labels, did you find a lot of red tape when getting people like will.i.am and Pitbull on the record?

“If we had gone the traditional way and gone through everyone’s management it would’ve been impossible. We didn’t have that kind of money. I think our advance would’ve maybe been able to pay for about one person and that’s it. We met will.i.am in Australia actually, because he was there shooting that X-Men movie or something and then he heard a DJ playing one of our mixes and wanted to know it was by. We were playing at the club the next night so he came back and we met him. And then it was really easy because we could just email him directly. With Roisin, we knew someone who was friends with her and we got him to ask her. Then we sent her like a shit-load of beats and she was cool so we went to London for two days to work. It was really easy and if it wasn’t easy we would just do something else instead.”

Now that they’ve been guests on your record do you have plans to return the favour and do some tracks for other people? Do you want to get on the next Black Eyed Peas album?

“We’d really want to produce for those albums. They sell so many more records than we do. If we did the next Black Eyed Peas album I could probably buy a house. So yeah, it’s something we want to do. We’ve got an album track on the next will.i.am album, I’m not sure when that’s coming out though, and then Roisin has some beats of ours for her album.”

But where do you draw the line with collaborators? Does it have to be ‘organic’?

“If anyone came up and said ‘hey, let’s do another Day N Nite’ we would just say no and walk away. People do ask that though. They come to us with a whack song and want us to turn it into Day N Nite.”

Speaking of Day N Nite, I heard that you guys didn’t get any money for that remix.
“We just asked for the stems on MySpace and did the remix. Then we sent it to Fool’s Gold and it didn’t even make the 12”. We weren’t sure about it ourselves, we didn’t want to play it out because we thought it had too many vocals. After a year and a half it’s gotten so big. It’s cool, we’ve had so much exposure from it.”

You’re coming back to Australia for the winter festival season right after playing here over summer. What is it about the Australian crowds that you guys like playing here so much?

“We really like playing in Australia, it’s always fun to be there. The crowds are always just huge for us and we see a lot of friends. Except for the super-long flight over to you, it’s one of the best places for us to play. We’ve always come to play when it has been your summer, so it will be different for us to do these winter festival sets. I think we’re going to see a lot more of the country this time, not just be on a plane and then go to the gig and then go to the hotel. We might try to get away from the cities because we’re into nature and want to experience that side of the country.

What are you looking forward to in particular this time?

“When we were there to play Stereosonic in your summer, people were still waiting for our album to come out. Now that it is out it’s exciting for us to come back so quickly and feel everyone’s reactions to the album at the festivals.”