Ben cuaght up with INME back stage in Manchester before their headline show at Moho Live to talk about their current best of album and tour and much more.

This tour is in support of you latest album Phoenix, which is a sort of Best Of… album, whose idea was it to release this?
Dave McPherson (Vocals/Guitar): It was our management initially, I don’t think we’d have come up with that idea this early into our career, but after four albums I suppose we have enough material, plus we wrote the three extra songs. The idea of doing all four albums across the eight nights then came up, so they kind of went nicely together. Since Greg joined in 2006 we kind of went off some of our material, we didn’t want to play it because it felt like we’d be faking it for the audience, we lost a bit of passion for it, but I think that good four or five year break has helped. We played Overgrown Eden last week and I think that was our favourite show we’ve ever played! It’s not just for the fans that are coming along, I think there’s a lot of nostalgia, especially with those first two albums, but it’s quite nostalgic for us as well. It’s a good opportunity, by the end of this tour we’ll be able to do any set list we want to do, we won’t just sit there and be like, “let’s just play the same ten songs again”, now we can do whatever we want. It feels like we’re travelling ten years backwards, it’s something different and it’s something good for the band.

With having such and extensive back catalogue, how did you go about picking the songs to feature on the record?
Dave: I think we immediately agreed on ten out of the fifteen tracks that are on there, we all knew that we wanted ‘Nova Armada’ on it and stuff like that, we all love that song. We all knew we wanted ‘All Terrain Vehicle’ on it because it’s something different. Obviously there are the songs ‘Underdose’, ‘Firefly’ and ‘Crushed Like Fruit’ that launched InMe into the public eye, but we didn’t want to put all the highest charting singles on, we left ‘Neptune’ off for personal reasons, it’s not our favourite. It’s not really a ‘Greatest Hits’, more of a ‘Best Of…’, as chosen by us whilst trying to keep in mind what people might want to hear as well. We wanted to put the three new songs on as opposed to most bands putting one throwaway track on as an incentive for fans to buy it, but I think putting the three new songs on was good, they’re better than most of the other songs on there!

Gary Marlow (Guitar): That’s pretty much been the fans perception as well, it’s a fairly general consensus from looking on Facebook and Myspace etc that the new songs are some of their favourite InMe songs, and for what are essentially bonus tracks, that’s pretty good.

Some people might see a ‘Best of…’ album as the beginning of the end for a band, is this the case with InMe?
Dave: No, not at all. I think we had a hard couple of years, just like a lot of bands do when the money’s not always there. But we’re stronger than some bands purely because this is what we love doing, some bands want the fame and the money, but we love banter with the audience, making music, rocking out and travelling in whatever form. It’s sometimes hard work, you don’t get enough sleep or whatever, but we have our ways to adapt and survive! It seems to me that things are going well, the industry is always changing and you never know what can happen, but for us, we’ve still got that fan base without being at the forefront of media, magazines and radio. Most bands would kill for that.

Each night of this tour you are playing a different album in its entirety, is there one in particular that you enjoy playing more than the others?
Greg McPherson (Bass/Vocals): We love them all for different reasons, we like Herald Moth the best because we had the most power over that record and we made it pretty much exactly how we wanted. It’s nice to play Overgrown Eden for different reasons, mainly for the nostalgia, there are some really good songs on there.

Gary: It’s really good to see people just loving it.

Dave: Yeah, people sing along and go mental, you get a lot of people saying that it reminds them of being fourteen and when they were at college, it’s nice for people to use us as a reference for stuff like that.

Gary: Yeah, people keep those memories for life.

Dave: It’s been more celebratory than a typical tour. People have been going nuts, having a good time and there’s not so much pressure on us as a band this time, we’ve got a good attitude, we’ve just been getting on stage with the intention of having a party! There’s no distance between us and the audience, just a bunch of people having fun. But we’ll see how it progresses, tonight is White Butterfly, which also holds a bit of nostalgia, and I’m sure we’ll enjoy the other two for different reasons.

Is there any one album that you don’t enjoy playing as much?
Gary: Initially I was never a massive fan of Overgrown Eden, but after playing that gig it’s possibly one of my favourite albums of all time now!

Dave: I think I probably would have said White Butterfly was my least favourite to play, but we’ve reinterpreted it with the modern InMe sound and I pretty much like it all now. That’s good for us as a band because we’d pretty much ceased playing anything off the first two albums, so it’s good to swallow your pride and go back to it all.

You’ve had several line-up changes over the years, was it easy to bring everyone together and learn the songs?
Dave: Yeah, it was pretty easy. We’ve been playing with Gaz for years, even before he joined InMe. We haven’t really had that many major changes; Gary’s an addition rather than a replacement. Ben only played six gigs and it didn’t work out. Joe was an amazing guy, but InMe was going to destroy itself if he remained in the band, so that was necessary. That was pretty much the same with Ben, it never would have worked out, that’s just the way it is. Now we all know what we want and nothing’s getting in the way of that, maybe some bands don’t have as many line-up changes, but maybe they should! Sometime resentments build up and the chemicals don’t work, it’s a very strong line-up at the moment, you never know what’s around the corner and what happens in people’s personal lives, but as a band we’re stronger than we’ve ever been.

The ‘Best Of…’ album features three new tracks, as you’ve mentioned, does this mean that we can expect more new material soon?
Dave: We’re working on some new material at the moment, just some demo’s at home on laptops and stuff. We’re not rushing it, but once we actually start practising them in a live environment there’s no reason why we shouldn’t start sneaking them into the set list. We will eventually play the songs off Phoenix but with learning all the albums we just haven’t had enough time. We wanted to learn every single B-Side off the albums, but we’ve all got lives outside of the band, so that was maybe a bit unrealistic!

Gary: Greg had to learn two albums worth of stuff, but I had to learn four! We have learnt the new songs, and if we played them they’d probably sound right, but we are our harshest critics and we want them to be amazing, so we might as well just wait until we have them absolutely bang on.

So how long have you had to learn all the songs for the shows then?
Dave: Well, we learnt one of the songs that we’re playing tonight on…Monday, so two days! That one was a bit tight! We just said that if it sounds good we’d do it, if it didn’t we wouldn’t, but it actually turned out well!

The band has been together for fourteen years now, as teenagers did you ever imagine you’d still be doing this after all these years?
Dave: Yeah, when I first joined the band, and we were terrible, but I did think that there was no way I’d ever do anything else with my life. I went to college and I started studying English, History and Politics and I was doing alright with it, but we were going and playing any shitty gigs we could. We then got the lucky hit and we signed with a label and it all went mental. I think as with most bands, it all dried up and there was a hard patch. I think many other bands would’ve given up, but we didn’t for some stupid reason! But now it seems to be working out, it’s such a merciless industry, but we’ve got the passion and we’ve got some really good fans out there who are willing to take it to the next level. We’re not just some middle of the road band where some people just come along and watch us for a couple of weeks and then go off.

Gary: Yeah, we have fans that travel down from Edinburgh to see us and stay in hotels just to come to the gig and then travel back up eleven hours on the bus the next day.

Greg: We even had people come from Sweden! We went to Germany and found our English fans there!

You do seem to have outlived a lot of British bands that have disbanded in the past few years, what do you think it is that gives InMe longevity?

Gary: Yeah, Oasis split up didn’t they!

Greg: I think we have more grit.

Dave: We just deal with it, if you have a problem, you might moan about it at the time but you get over it and you move on. Basically, not to sound like an Essex bastard, but if you’re hard you survive, if you’re a pussy you die! We are softies though, we do care about people and we’re nice, but we’re also tough. We’re not spoon fed by anyone, we’ve always made our own money and done things our own way, we make our own decisions in life, and this is our decision.

Finally, what’s next on the agenda for InMe?
Dave: We’re going to take a lot of time back and forth-ing demos for the fifth album, but in the meantime I’m doing a solo release through PledgeMusic (www.pledgemusic.com) in March, alongside a tour that starts on the 1st March and ends on the 31st March. I’m looking forward to that and it gives the guys some time to do whatever they want to do but we’ll also be focusing on just getting the album out. We’ll be doing some sporadic shows here and there but I think we want to do something big festival-wise next year, probably do some European stuff as well, maybe an autumn tour too. We’ll probably then record the album and have it ready by January 2012, but who knows? That’s what I’m thinking, but these plans never stick.

Gary: The more you do, the more you want to do.

Interview By Ben Connell