Glasgow's not a media center. When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.

[But even with two Englishmen in the band, McCarthy and Hardy, they remain loyal to Glasgow.] We definitely see ourselves as a Glasgow band above anything else, ... It's not a massive place, but one of the great and inspiring things about Glasgow is you have all these characters who did things and they did them their own way, and they're still there and they kind of like say: 'You know, if we did it this way, you can probably do it as well.'

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

It doesn't feel that good when you're ahead the whole way.