IE : You and your significant other , Helen , are still together , right ? What ’ s kept you two together for all these years ? NA : Eight . It ’ s a contract ! ( chuckles ) No , it ’ s not . It ’ s obviously love , which is quite an important thing , isn ’ t it ? And patience . And

launderette , and it ’ s a launderette not a long way from where I live , quite an old-fashionedlooking launderette , and Helen took the picture of that because she is a painter , but she uses quite a lot of photographic images , as well , that she manipulates . So I don ’ t think she ’ ll be doing a painting from that image , but anyway , she took that . And if I go back to “ Sad Day ,” in fact , it ’ s scratched into the runoff on “ Happy Families ” — if anybody cared to look at it — it says “ Sad Day — for Helen ” on the runoff , etched in there by the person who cut the lacquer .

IE : Remember ? That used to be a ‘ thing ’ a few decades ago — secret messages engraved into your vinyl album . I think a famous Eagles one said , “ He who hesitates is lunch .” NA : Yeah ! So that ’ s on there if anybody cares to

Blancmange , circa 1983

Helen ’ s a painter , and she ’ s had a massive influence on many , many things that I have done , and she also tells me when something is done , quite often , when I ’ m not sure it is . She tells me to go and have a walk or go out on the bike , or to go and have a game of football , or to walk down to the pub for a pint instead of faffing around with it any longer . And we ’ ve collaborated on things , and in fact , on the new album , there ’ s a photograph on the album of a

look . And if not a collaborative piece of work , then a massive , massive influence on most of the work that I ’ ve done .

IE . When you and Stephen first started , so the story goes , you didn ’ t have enough money for fancy synthesizers . So you made your own instruments instead ? What were they like ? NA : We used tape loops . So we had access to a reel-to-reel , so we made tape loops and recorded

off those with a microphone into a cassette machine . And then we ’ d record cassette to cassette our ideas , and some of the instruments that we used were , I made an amplifier when I was at school , and as soon as you plugged it in , it was on distort , so it made some quite interesting sounds that weren ’ t exactly guitar-like . And Stephen had a cheap organ , where some of they keys used to give up the ghost quite often . And we borrowed a Wynn Copycat off a friend , and then we got a couple of Milosz Echo units that we put our paraphernalia

through — we used little things , anything that was sitting around the house , really , so some quite interesting things came out of the kitchen to be used — pots and pans , and Tupperware was a favorite . Tupperware for drums was quite a good one . And when we borrowed a reel-to-reel machine , we ’ d record some of our backing tracks at half-speed , so we could possibly play them because we weren ’ t considering ourselves to be musicians , and if we did things at half-speed , we actually had a chance at playing them back at normal speed . So I ’ m