Q&A

Toy frontman Tom Dougall: “For us it was just a bit of fun…”

What were the recording sessions like for this?

It didn’t really take too long, or an awful lot of thought. It didn’t take more than a day for each song, and that includes the mixing too. We just had one mic, a couple of synthesisers, one guitar amp, a couple of guitars. For us it was just a bit of fun, but people seem to really like it – you can agonise over something for months and months, but it doesn’t always have the same impact as something done this way.

Your take on Nico’s “Sixty Forty” is a highlight – why did you go for that track?

I was reading this really good Nico book, The Life And Lies Of An Icon by Richard Witts, recently, so I was quite immersed in her world. I guess that song’s from a lesser-known Nico album, but I’ve always fancied having a go at it. We’re really big fans of all these artists we’ve covered, they’re some of our favourites, so it was nice to pay homage to them.

“Cousin Jane” is pretty striking – are you big Troggs fans?

The Troggs are maybe the most underrated British band of the ’60s. They had a few hits, but they’ve got so many good album tracks and B-sides, some surprisingly weird psych songs, with quite a subtlety to what they’re doing. That song’s always stood out as it’s so weird.

Will your next album be taking any lessons from Songs Of Consumption?

A lot of the new stuff is shaping up to be more electronic, and a lot of us have been trying to push it that way for a while. You can hear it peeking through on the last album, but on our next one it’s going to be one of the main things that mark it out from what we’ve done before.