You Am I

"I remember someone sent me a link to an interview I did in like 1994," begins long-serving You Am I sticksman Rusty Hopkinson, "and I actually said that I didn't think we'd be hugely successful, but I did think we'd make a lot of albums and have a good career. I always thought we'd be the kind of band which was more in it for the long haul than being obsessed by commercial success, or something like that."

Perhaps his band has never been obsessed, but there has been commercial success along the way. By current count, three of its albums have reached number one on the mainstream Australian charts.

"Oh yeah,[ but] we never had a radio hit, for example. I mean, [it] certainly is a measure of commercial success. I don't know, it's not something that we are trying to achieve.

"I don't think we've been as big as people think we are. Amongst people who play in bands, it's that classic thing of... [We're] not superhuge, but I think at one point a lot of musicians and people who play in bands took on board what we did, which was to be pretty brash and raw, and not really give too much of a fuck, basically."

Don't get him wrong, though - music is most certainly something about which Hopkinson gives a proverbial rumpy-pumpy. Not only does he play drums a bit, he also runs his own record label, Illustrious Artists.

" I guess I make the best compilations," proclaims Hopkinson of his label's past releases. "I mean I like lots of stuff, and it's funny, some people will say, with It's Funny How We Don't Talk Anymore, it sounds like you've been listening to The Living End or something, and I say, 'No.' I was probably thinking of some obscure band from 1979 when playing the drums on that. But getting out records is something I like doing, being able to licence records from overseas or bring in some great records from labels, it's a cool thing that keeps me off the streets when I'm not playing the drums. And it allows me to get free records, which is cool."

All this talk of record labels is making me positively salivate at the chance to, yet again, extrapolate on the nuclear fallout from the merger between Sony and BMG, of which You Am I was a not-particularly-tragic casualty.

"The main thing that we've tried to make people understand is when BMG finally dropped us, it was two years later than I'd have liked. There was no enthusiasm toward our band. It's something record labels do a lot, if they don't really like what you do, they [still] don't want to let you go, [in case] someone else does like what you do and makes it work, and makes them look stupid. Which happens a lot.

"To our - not amazement - but pleasure, we discovered that people, before we'd even finished recording, were quite keen to be working with us. So that was a really nice feeling... And then it left us with probably one of the hardest decisions we've ever had to make, which was who to sign to. Because everybody there was really genuine and was really favourable toward us. It was a great feeling to be in a position to be in control of your own destiny a little bit. We own the record, we licence it to EMI, and if the partnership goes well, then we'll presumably do another one."

This is quite a difference from the gestation process for album number five, 2001's 'Dress Me Slowly'. "Making 'Dress Me Slowly' was a lot of fun, but the two years leading up to it weren't. We spent two years trying to please this guy in New York, who was basically a complete dork who didn't like music much, and thought the New Radicals [famous of course for their unitary smash hit, You Get What You Give] was this really amazing group. We had to make this guy like our music. And we sent off demos, and he just didn't get it, and they sent people to try and contemporise our sound... So by the time we sat down to make that record, it was so overcooked, and we didn't really know what the fuck was going on, or who we were supposed to be impressing."

None of that matters now, of course - for unlike the New Radicals, You Am I are still making records that appeal to, well, people. "It's good, yeah, [to] put 'musician' on the entry card... I used to do that when I on tour and on the dole, [but] only because it looks better than being unemployed."

Ben Revi

You Am I play at the Governor Hindmarsh on Fri 14 July. 'Convicys' is out now through EMI