Bruce Gilbert: Our feeling was that, having rehearsed, we might as well use it to show other people what we've come up with this time. As it was, we decided (for practical purposes and because it's something we had never done before) to start from the approach of a retrospective, only in terms of what we had picked from back catalogs.

You couldn't have done that previously?
BG: No, because we weren't noted for playing old things. So we thought we'd break our own rule. I just thought it might be fun. We had to come up with a large wish list of what we thought would be interesting, some of which we found out weren't interesting at all, or had had their moment and we no longer felt sufficiently moved by them to do them, even though we could just about get through them in the early stages of the process. Prior to the 10 days rehearsal we went in to rehearse for three days just to see if there was the why and the ways there.

Did you apply this arrangement to some of the late 80's material? Was that a new thing, playing those songs on guitars?
GL: We made the selection of material, and we had to learn how to play our material from records and stuff. That was the starting point. Emulation has never really been in our brochure, or trying to repeat or trying to copy anything that we've done. We found out what the notes were and what it was. Some of it hadn't been played by us for over 20 years. We had a jumping-off point, and since then what we've been working on is where it has to be contemporary, because we're not interested in nostalgia at all. Nobody needs a retrospective.

BG: There's a lot of stuff we couldn't possibly achieve on guitars.

GL: Or even want to either. But there is material from the '80s there. It's got to be [fresh], because it's got to be for now. It's got to be of some use to us. It's got to be fun for us to do. It's got to be something that excites us. Doing it with guitars and drums is also the simplest and most direct way for us to do it. As we're starting from scratch -- the same as we did in the '80's when we started working together again -- it's a very direct way. You're not encumbered by having to saddle yourself with a whole other technology. It means we're a very light unit at the moment.

When you got back together for The Ideal Copy, was that new sound a result of the separate directions that you'd taken on your own?
Colin Newman: I think that there's this perception in America that the '70's Wire sounds a certain way, and that the '80's Wire -- 'Oh yeah, they just got rid of all the guitars and they just used synthesizers' -- and it's completely and utterly untrue. Both The Ideal Copy and A Bell Is a Cup are actually stacked with guitars on virtually every track. Quite a lot of the tracks are actually played live as a band. I think it's more like using sound in a different way. The technology that was available in the '70's was a little too basic -- strands of what you could do. You could take the heavy metal approach or you could take the pop approach. The heavy metal approach was like getting guitars and tracking them up 99 times and just making squidgy noises or sounds, and the pop approach is the pop approach. The general ['70s'] soundscape was much more spare, more stark. Pink Flag was regarded as being horribly stark at the time that it was made. It wasn't a big ugly thing, but I think is regarded as much more mystical, kind of scary. By the time we got to doing The Ideal Copy…

GL: There was a…change, though, in The Ideal Copy, because we had been playing the material live, but we hadn't written some of it as well, [so] we had to [re]write that. It must have been nearly a month of trying that approach, and what happened was, Gareth Jones, who we were working with, took delivery of the Steinberg and software, and he said, 'I just got this. I've never worked with it. I don't really know how it works. Are you interested in trying it?' And we said, 'Of course.' So, for the first few [songs] we did, it took two days to program a bass. We worked around that, and we all went, 'That's it.' We threw everything else into the bin and proceeded to then make the album. Some things are played live, just not everything. It just opened up possibilities that we were really excited about. So it's just another example of 'have an open mind and change your mind.'

Any plans for in between dates, doing things here in the States?
GL: We're trying to use that time profitably, but shop. I've got a shopping list. We've just been recording things that we're playing at the moment with Steve Albini.

The set list with the arrangements you've been using onstage?
GL: Perhaps. Probably not the same arrangements, because the arrangements keep changing. Things change when we go into the studio, because of course you get to hear things more than once. Doing it live, it's just the way it is, and so far each night has been quite different.

Get on well with Steve?
GL: Absolutely. First class. Top man in the business. [Bruce and I] played [Big Black's] last show. We did "Heartbeat."

Your sonic treatments -- on "I Am the Fly," for instance, the buzzsaw guitar. How was that achieved?
CN: MXR flanger with an MXR distortion box. The flanger is on full regen[erate]. The flanger is the main [racked] version, which I don't think you can get anymore. I'm still using the same MXR distortion box.

GL: That was another example of Mike Thorne, who we were working with then. Mike was making regular trips over to New York, and when he came back he had these effects and he said, 'I think this is the kind of thing that you might find fun.' So we started playing around. "Fly" is a perfect example of the sound making the song. Once the sound is there, you just follow it.

I was listening to The Ideal Copy and felt like the Cold War had crept into this album. Is that part of your being in Berlin when it was recorded?
GL: A bit of the Cold War's there all the time, isn't it? It's wherever you are. It's within reach. What we were interested in at the time was what happens on the edge or the periphery of your vision. Sitting somewhere and thinking, 'Did I see that?' What happens through the door which is just slightly open? You get a snatch of something. It was a sort of anxiety.

How does the lyrical process come about?
GL: Genius. Whatever. I get it where I can. I think we write songs about basically anything. It can start from the TV, a book, a film, someone's attitude, someone's smile, someone's shoes. You hear that inner voice and that tells you what to write. Wake up in the morning -- you've had a dream -- write it down. Don't think about it, don't question it, do it. Bruce and I play something where it's kind of like consequences in a way, where I'd write something, Bruce would write another line, and we'd sit and drink and just like (makes twisting motion with hand) twist this around, and we'd go, 'Ha ha. Take a look at that. What do you think of that?'

Like a cut-up sort of thing?
GL: Everything is a cut-up, isn't it? Reality is a cut-up. There were times around The Ideal Copy when I was extremely excited by the idea of having more than one reality. It's quite funny -- recently we've had Short Cuts and Magnolia in terms of film things. That's what I thought it was like. I thought it was like writing film. Within the same piece you can have something going on in different realities, but related, because that's the way you do perceive. Big words always edit, and we edit hard. I'm very interested in language and words -- the weight of them, how you can twist them. Ambiguity we like a lot, so that the person who hears it can make their own distinction, their own story.