Splendid: I want to go back to what you said about the circle, because there's a lyric in "The Set-Up" about "Now I live inside the circle." Is that what that's about? I know it's not your song.

Peter Prescott: It could be. I don't know. I've got to admit, I don't think we're ... we don't dig into each other's lyrics very much. We just hear the other guy sing something and go, "Okay, do you want me to sing something?" Oddly enough, we never think about the meanings of the other guys' songs.

Splendid: So what were the first few shows like when you played again together?

Peter Prescott: Amazing.

Splendid: It must be a really powerful experience, something that was that important to you, and you don't do it for a long time, and then all of a sudden you're doing it again...

Peter Prescott: For the most part, you know, we just figured that would be it, and everybody else figured that. So it amplified all the emotions. It became this intense thing. That, and the fact that we put everything we could into making it right. And that's what we've tried to do since. It was probably fear of embarrassment that kept us making it that intense experience. We only compare ourselves to ourselves, and we know when we do a bad job. We try to avoid it.

Splendid: How do you feel about how you're doing now? It seems to me that you're as good now as you've ever been. Do you guys feel that way too?

Peter Prescott: It's hard ... I don't know. I don't think we really think about how other people might judge us. We sort of judge it ourselves and do as well as we can. We know when shows aren't working as well. We don't always know when they don't sound as good. But yeah, I think we have a standard that we apply to ourselves. If you're going to rag on other people or bands or movies or whatever, then you sort of have to apply a tough standard to yourself, too.

Splendid: At what point did you all start writing songs again?

Peter Prescott: Recently?

Splendid: Yeah.

Peter Prescott: Right away. The second or third time we practiced, Roger said "We've got to throw some new things in here or it's going to be tired," and we all agreed. We started putting stuff together and it started to click. I was real happy that he pushed that aspect of it. Not with the idea that we would ever make a record -- just to write songs to keep it fresh.

Splendid: It seems like that's one of the differences between the good reunions and the bad reunions -- that the good ones involve new material. This Pixies reunion is basically a nostalgia show.

Peter Prescott: Well, give them a little time. You never know where stuff will lead. We did want to throw it in right from the get go. But I don't know, what I've heard about the Pixies is that it's pretty solid live. Have you seen them?

Splendid: No, and I don't think I'll get the chance because the shows are selling out so fast. Still, I have to say that I was a huge Pixies fan and I have all the records, but I didn't have any desire to go see them do the old songs again, because that was then and this is now. But I didn't feel that way about you guys. It just seems like there's something different, because you're writing new materials and you weren't around for that long...

Peter Prescott: I think we probably put more emphasis into making it a living breathing thing. But again, you never know what will come out of the Pixies reunion. They might do this for a few months, and a record might pop out of it. You never know. We didn't know.

Splendid: You've already touched on what you brought back to Mission of Burma from Volcano Suns and some of the other bands that you were in in the interim. Let's talk about that a little bit. You said that you're consciously trying to write Mission of Burma songs, but do you feel like they're shaped by the experiences you had before that?

Peter Prescott: Yeah. I think it would be... even though many people have commented that the record that we just put out sounds like we picked up just where we left off. And that's awesome. That's great that it sounds that way. But the truth is that there's 22 years of experience for all of us in between. I guess I wrote most of the material for the Volcano Suns, and again, the general slant to that was taking the Burma noise and making it a little more absurd and silly -- because Burma, I think we realized when we started playing again, how absolutely humorless we are. Not as people --- we're all fairly goofy as people -- but I think the music is almost just so straight-faced and grim sometimes. Not that we intend that, but that's the way it comes out. I'm probably the one who pushes the absurdity aspect, but I think over the years, there've been lots of things that sort of colored my attitude and colored the way I play. There's some truth to the idea that we did pick up where we left off. I guess we never finished. I guess we were never really done and just started from that spot.

Splendid: I really like "The Enthusiast" -- that's one of your songs. And it has that great chorus. It sounds like one of those "let's all get loaded" songs, but it's really not, because the lyric is "I'm high as a kite on a windless night," which wouldn't be very high, I imagine.

Peter Prescott: (laughs) Yeah, it would not. I have this...and this is all over the Volcano Suns. My general point of view is of a person who's been driven insane by society, but instead of reacting in a violent way, just sort of is smiling at it all. There's sort of a grim undertone, but you just have to laugh or you'll go nuts.

Splendid: Black humor.

Peter Prescott: Sometimes you either want to ... if it's between violence and just laughing at it, I'll choose laughing at it.

Splendid: Now, I know that all three of you wrote songs. How finished were they when you brought them into the band?

Peter Prescott: Mine were not so finished. I tended to bring them in in pretty skeletal shape, because I like to hear what they'll do to it. They tend to bring them in more finished. Especially Roger -- Roger has really arranged songs. They're almost like little symphonies. When you're sort of like a dumb-assed rock guy, it takes some concentration to follow what he's telling me. Mine, like I said, I like sort of a... I show them the melody and the riffs and of course I've got the rhythm, but I like to let them fill in the blanks more.

Splendid: Interesting. There's some really soft, ballad-like material on OnOffOn and it seems different from what I've heard of Mission of Burma. Was there any discussion about how far you could go with this stuff while still being the band that you were?

Peter Prescott: Well, I think we all understood that it had to sound like Mission of Burma for it to be a Mission of Burma record -- not just because we're in it. But I mean, we're not going to come back and use nothing but turntables and rhythm boxes. On the other hand, we didn't feel like, oh, we're not allowed to do something. When Clint brought in that song ("Prepared"), I just thought it was beautiful.

Splendid: It is beautiful.

Peter Prescott: I just thought it was so gorgeous. None of us do a lot of things that you would refer to as "beautiful", so the fact that he sort of pulled that in -- we were all really excited about it.

Splendid: I like the song. It just seemed really different.

Peter Prescott: It is. I would confess to that. It is not a place we went before.

Splendid: You must feel like "What the fuck? Why not do what we want? What do we have to lose at this point?"

Peter Prescott: Yeah, pretty much.

Splendid: How'd you pick the three older songs?

Peter Prescott: There were a bunch -- maybe seven or ten -- that one or the other of us thought were good songs that never got a great recording. And those were the ones that we were playing a lot -- "Playland", "Dirt" and "Hunt Again". We just felt really comfortable playing a lot and they had never got really good recorded versions before. So that's how they ended up there. And they also seemed to fit well with the ones we had written recently.

Splendid: Did you have to do much to them, or are they pretty much the way they were?

Peter Prescott: No. I don't think we changed anything.

Splendid: I wanted ask you about Max Ernst, because you have a "Max Ernst's Dream" on this record and also did a single in 1980 called "Max Ernst". I couldn't hear whether the songs were related musically -- are they? -- or are they just two songs about the same subject?

Peter Prescott: No. I think, Roger, a lot of the lyrics he writes come from his dreams. That's sort of a surrealist, Dadaist -- Max Ernst was a surrealist -- and I think with a lot of his paintings, he got the ideas in a similar way. So I think Roger has a special focus on that kind of -- not just the guy, not just the person, but the way he did stuff. I think Roger really relates to that. So that's why his name pops up in songs from time to time.

Splendid: You've talked about Wire being a factor in your decision to reunite.

Peter Prescott: It was a bit. I think that Wire is probably my favorite group of all time. And the fact that my favorite group of all time got together and I got to see them maybe four times shortly before and after we reformed...

Splendid: Right, because it was a Wire concert where you were all on stage together for the first time?

Peter Prescott: Yep. Every time, I thought, They're so brave. They're so unconscious about just forging ahead." I just thought the records they put out were astonishing. They sounded so...current. Not trading on nostalgia. And now the floodgates are open. Everybody's reuniting now.

Splendid: Yeah, I think The Cure is reuniting now, and that just seems wrong.

Peter Prescott: Yeah, lots of stuff. I don't feel good or bad about that; I don't feel one way or the other. But I like the idea that, you know, you could be 45. You could be 50 and you could actually connect with your art really well, instead of just trading on what you did 20 years before.

Splendid: You know, I'm older than a lot of people who write about rock, and I read things about how you can't really understand rock and roll unless you're 18 and thinking about lust and anxiety and aggression, and I just don't buy it. If you listen to it, it's still pretty meaningful, whatever age you are.

Peter Prescott: Potentially. I don't see why it's a given that you have to suck when you get older.

Splendid: Yeah, I don't either. I think that if you're a band that's totally based on sex and lust, I don't know if you could do that in your fifties and sixties and be credible, but if there's any sort of thought or intelligence going into it...

Peter Prescott: That has something to do with it. But the ones that have gone on the longest still trade on sex...the Stones. And they are, to me, the ultimate reason why you shouldn't do that.

Splendid: Yeah, but I just saw this DVD of Iggy Pop playing in Detroit, and he's amazing. He's still doing what you would do as a teenager -- ideally, though a lot of people couldn't do it then, either. When I see Mick Jagger, it makes me sick, but I don't have that feeling about Iggy Pop.

Peter Prescott: Yeah, I saw the Stooges in Los Angeles, and I was just floored.

Splendid: Yeah, you guys were on the boat, right? (At the November 2003 All Tomorrow's Parties held on the Queen Mary in Los Angeles)

Peter Prescott: Yeah, they didn't play on the boat...but there were some bands on the boat. But yeah, the Stooges were outside. We played outside. But there wasn't a second when I thought, "You know, this is an old man embarrassing himself." Not for a second. But then again, I'm an old guy, so what am I going to say? It comes down to having standards. I don't care if a band is a bunch of 22-year-old people or if they're 42-year-old people. I care how effective it is.

Splendid: It sounds like you were sort of the instigator in this reunion, since it was your concert, that Peer Group show, where you finally got the three of you together on the stage again.

Peter Prescott: Not on purpose. It kind of fell into place. I suppose I was, a bit. But I didn't... I had no thought, when we happened to be on stage then, I had no idea that we would ever play again.

Splendid: But you also worked with Bob Weston in the Volcano Suns, right?

Peter Prescott: Yeah.

Splendid: So you must have brought him in as well.

Peter Prescott: I did. I suggested him. But at the same time, he was recording a record for Clint, and I think he had played in one of Roger's bands -- trumpet or something. And there was a tour that Volcano Suns and Roger did in Europe in the 1980s, so everybody knew him really well. He's just one of my best friends, one of the sweetest guys I've ever met.

Splendid: Is it hard to sort of reverse engineer what Martin Swope was doing on the old records and recreate that?

Peter Prescott: Not for Bob...not so much. I supposed mainly you have to be interested enough in learning how to do it, and Bob was. So considering that, it didn't take him too long to figure out how to do it.

Splendid: Can you explain in layman's terms what he does?

Peter Prescott: He's back at the board, so he's doing sound for the band while we're playing live.

Splendid: So he's taking the sound that you make and manipulating it or other sounds?

Peter Prescott: Well, he's got an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder, so what he'll do is toward the beginning of the song, he records an instrument or a voice, and then about halfway through the song, he takes what he recorded and he'll either put it backwards or make a loop or whatever he wants to do, and then he sends it back in as a new sound. The idea -- essentially Martin's idea -- was that he wasn't just pressing a button and playing a tape at the back of the group. He was taking an instrument that was in that song and before the song was over sending it out again, so it's like a living thing, rather than just a tape.

Splendid: So was it different every time?

Peter Prescott: It would be a little bit different, yeah. It's almost impossible to make it the same. But once you figure out what you're doing, it's easy enough to make it close. And after a while with Bob, we said, "You don't have to imitate what Martin did any more. If you want to do something else, go ahead."

Splendid: You know, the thing is that it seems like everyone likes Mission of Burma now, and all the cool people are fighting over who loved you most and first and all that. It was wasn't always that way, was it? There were always some cities and some people who never got what you do.

Peter Prescott: Yeah. I'm trying to think of another reasonable comparison. There's no reason that everyone would like it, even now. You've heard Tortoise. You've heard the Butthole Surfers. Everybody doesn't like those groups. It's just not going to happen. You could say that about thousands and thousands of bands.

Splendid: But there are short periods where everyone likes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the Strokes, and there's no reason why that would happen either.

Peter Prescott: Well, yeah, there are little moments when that happens. But in reality, if you like music and your friends like music, it only seems like everybody likes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If you go out to the suburbs of Massachusetts and you play it on your front porch, your neighbors are probably not going to like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- you know what I'm saying? Believe me, we're really glad that anyone at all cares right now, but you have to look at it that way. There's only an illusion that something is this huge because half the universe doesn't ever hear it.

Splendid: I talked to Clint a few months ago, and I used the phrase "massively influential" and he just objected all over the place. He said that he couldn't really see a lot of bands that were influenced by Mission of Burma. How do you feel about that? Do you see the influence?

Peter Prescott: I hear people say it all the time. I don't really hear it.

Splendid: People say things like Hüsker Dü and the Replacements... and I kind of hear a little bit of you guys in Fugazi.

Peter Prescott: But those groups started at the same time. I don't think they were influenced by us. I think they probably liked us; we liked them, too. Whereas with the Pixies or Sonic Youth, I hear groups that sound like them. I don't know whether that's good or bad, but I actually hear their musical influence in other groups. Especially Sonic Youth. But yeah, maybe there are. I don't know. I don't really hear it. I sort of agree with Clint on that.

Splendid: Final question: now that you're back, is this an ongoing thing? Do you have any plans for the future beyond the tour you're doing?

Peter Prescott: No. (Laughs) Not really. I think we're just going to follow it and see where it goes. That's what we've been doing over the past two years, and it seems to have worked pretty well.