You might remember back in July that ITM reported on the news that Ministry Of Sound label boss James Palumbo had let loose a particularly violent tirade against New York electro duo Fischerspooner, citing them as the single biggest failure of his career. That wasn’t all he had to say either, launching into a scathing attack on the duo – the bulk of which you can read right here. Needless to say, it was pretty ugly. Being the ambulance chasers that we are, when ITM had the chance to interview one half of the enigmatic pair, Casey Spooner, earlier today we were keen to ask the Fischerspooner frontman if he had any response to Palumbo’s verbal attack. As it turns out, we didn’t even need to ask as Spooner had personally read the original piece and was more than happy to spill his side of the story. Oh boy.

“Let me explain it for you guys, because I really want to put it straight,” Spooner said laughing. “We were not like that at all. We didn’t demand anything that James Palumbo said we did (like that we must fly on a Concorde and that we had to stay in Claridges). We didn’t want anything from Ministry! At the time we were doing really well with our gallery and performances so we weren’t even thinking about music until all these record labels started chasing us trying to sign us. We turned everybody down and just said ‘no’ to it all. One morning I got a call from my lawyer and he told me that Ministry really wanted us to come over to England and they wanted to fly us over on a Concorde. A Concorde!” Spooner says, still in disbelief. “I was like ‘well fuck yeah’! Why would you turn that down? So they booked all of that in an attempt to win us over. They did it, not us. And when we got there I personally booked and paid for our room at Claridges, it had nothing to do with Ministry Of Sound,” he explained.

Having refuted Palumbo’s diva-esque allegations of the group, Spooner continued recounting Fischerspooner’s ill-fated marriage with Ministry Of Sound, refusing to hold back. “We went over there with all the intention of telling them we weren’t interested in signing with them. I was really just in it for the free Concorde flight! And besides, I didn’t want to sign with Ministry Of Sound anyway, it was this trashy, Ibiza-disco label that had no connection to our scene,” he chuckled.

“But when we met James Palumbo, I think we were won over, because, I’ll say this about James, he is fucking crazy,” Spooner exclaimed to a round of cheers in the background on his end of the phone. “He was so insane and cool, not like anyone else in the music business that we’d met who were all serious and really corporate. James was saying how he wanted us to do the Millennium Dome and he wanted to have a giant inflatable penis on the Thames. And it was that wild craziness that got us in the end, I’d say.”

“They built things up to be really big and they wanted to make us seem like this huge band that would be a turning point for Ministry Of Sound to move from putting out dance singles to being this label that was about artists making big albums,” Spooner sneered. “At the time, we didn’t even have a manager so I was personally in contact with those people everyday and it seemed like we were poised to do all these really huge things then all of a sudden they stopped returning my phone calls. I got a message from one of the Ministry people who said a whole bunch of new staff were all leaving and the label was dissolving.”

Having let loose about the bitter dissolution of the MOS/Fischerspooner partnership, Spooner shifted tone, seeming genuinely upset about the label debacle. “I think about it and I still have no idea what happened. And it disappoints me. We get blamed for everything like it was our fault, but really it was Ministry who destroyed us,” he declared. “They were the decadent and excessive ones and that just destroyed us.”

Unsurprisingly, Fischerspooner have done some serious label hopping since the demise of their MOS deal, later skipping out on EMI to form their own imprint FS Studios to self release their latest album, Entertainment.

“We are involved in everything; we choose all the art, we do all the photos, we hire the graphic designers and I write the fucking liner notes for every record,” Spooner told us. “It doesn’t matter if it’s with Gigolo, Ministry Of Sound, Capitol or on our own, the workload is always the same.”

Fischerspooner play Melbourne’s Beck’s Rumpus Room on October 16th, proudly supported by inthemix. Stay tuned right here to read more of our explosive interview with Fischerspooner.