Rowland S. Howard

Why has it been so long between albums? It's been a decade since Teenage Snuff Film. It's purely practical reasons. Nobody really offered me enough money to make a record that I was interested in making and I'm not the type of person that goes out there and networks and does all that stuff. I sort of wait for people to come to me, and the offers I got would only allow me to make records that I wasn't interested in making: the amount of time in the studio would have been negligible. It just wouldn't have been something that I wanted to do.

What governed your choices regarding the songs to put on the album? What governed them? Well, they were the songs that I had. I mean there were certain things that I set out to do and I knew I wanted it to be a fairly diverse record but I think the two cover versions [Talk Talk's ‘Life's What You Make It' and Townes van Zandt's ‘Nothin'') sit in really well and it's just a fairly diverse mix of songs.
 
[First single] '(I Know A Girl Called) Johnny' sounds like an attempt at a Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra duet, as per 'Some Velvet Morning' or something. Right.

You're not often thought of as being particularly Australian but then there's the line in "Johnny" where the protagonist is "pashing with the devil at the bus stop". "Pash" is such an archetypically Australian word. Yeah, well, that's why I like it. There's always been a sort of dry humour going through my songs. One of the ideas behind that song was to write something that was extremely teenage and that's such a teenage word

It's a very specifically Australian, suburban teenage word. Oh yeah. It's a very descriptive word.

Speaking of the humour, it kind of walks a knife edge in the title track where it sounds that at any minute you're either going to drop into complete bitter sarcasm or furious anger. Yeah. There are a couple of songs on the record – that one and 'The Golden Age of Bloodshed' – in which I was trying to write something that was a lot more to do with the outside world, as opposed to being about my inner world, which is what I usually write about. I guess even for me, in my incredibly unpoliticised state, things are sort of thrust in your face to such a degree that it's really quite appalling. I mean, "Pop Crimes" means a lot of things and one of them is just literally "popular crimes". It's like with governments: the greatest crimes in the world are the ones that nobody is ever taken to task for. Andrew P Street

Pop Crimes is out now through Liberator.