Reading five piece Does it Offend You Yeah? work independently and frankly they don’t give a damn what you think of them. inthemix spoke to synthesiser shaman Dan Coop about the band’s new album Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, selling out, their return to Australia, the ‘Glastonisation’ of festivals, their excitement about returning to Australia and all the juicy bits of their new album, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You.

What’s Reading like as a place for making music?

Well I don’t actually live there any more but, we’ve still got a studio in Reading. Of course there’s the massive festival there, so there was always big bands coming through like Nirvana and Sonic Youth, really huge bands in the 90s grunge scene…so that was always an influence for me and James and everyone in the band. It’s weird, its not quite London, it’s about 30 miles away. So it was always a bit of a mission to get there for gigs. But when you got there they’d always be one of the biggest gigs in the UK so you’d store up all your gig energy just for one weekend of the year!

So is it artists like Nirvana and Sonic Youth, and gigs you saw as a kid that ring true in music?

Well obviously Nirvana and that are in a completely different league to us, but I’m sure we take a lot of influences from bands we saw when we were growing up, like Prodigy, Rage Against the Machine, Portishead. I think we wear our influences on our sleeves a little bit. We’re not shy of saying these were the bands we were listening to when we were growing up.

There’s a lot of talk in your bios and interviews about resenting mass music media and wanting to piss off sell-outs. Who do you regard specifically as being sell-outs? Or is there anyone particularly you resent?

I wouldn’t say resent. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again there’s an artist in the UK called Plan B and I don’t dislike him as a person, but he was this underground rap guy then he started making stuff that sounded like Adele and Amy Winehouse and we wondered, like, where did this come from? I’m not a bitch! You should just do what you like. I just thought it was a bit strange when he came out with that album. I just didn’t think it was that strong of an album and that it was a bit weird.

And in that same vein what’s been best about working independently on the most recent album, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You?

Being able to talk to your record label, and knowing that they’re there to help you out, not to say well ‘we’ve got this Robbie Williams album to work on, so we’re not going to spend so much time with you guys’ just a lot easier to get things done, and much more a family vibe. Definitely more family type stuff going on.

And what would you say is the biggest difference in sound between the two albums?

I’d say it’s just more cohesive really. The last album was a bit disjointed so I think we really tried to make this album sound more together and I’m not sure if everyone would agree with that but what we tried to do is used similar sorts of soundscapes and tried to use similar sorts of drums and synth noises and tried to have more of a theme running through it.

So in that regard as synthesiser have you had free creative rein on the album?

Yeah! We really wanted to put out an album the way we wanted it to sound, to the point where we pissed off our labels so much that we didn’t want to put it out! We had tracks that we really didn’t like that the labels wanted to release as singles and it was like, ‘who isin the band here?!’ It’s out job to give you the music and your job to put it out…not your job to tell us what to write and then put it out. It got quite heated, so we ended up leaving the labels we were on.