Below is an email interview with Archie Shuttler. All interviews are published unedited.

It might seem to be a bag of contradictions – alternately flippant and sincere, angry and joyful, brash and gentle, surreal and direct. There’s more than one side to my personality,like there is to everyone’s, and I think my music reflects that. There’s a strong sense of personality in my music, for better or for worse. What holds it all together is the charming shittiness of the way I play it – whatever the genre or mood of the song I can guarantee everything I’ve recorded so far is charmingly shitty.

That’s not really for me to say. It depends whether you mean the song itself or the produced version. As of yet I don’t have any songs that are successful in terms of sounding on record exactly the way I want them too, except the ones that are meant to be rough like Define Me or Unpatriotic. I have different aims with different songs, so they’re successful in different ways – A Variety of Cheeses is merely meant to make people laugh and it does so it’s successful. Terrorist Regime and Carling My Darling are meant to make people laugh and think – they’re successful only if they achieve both aims. You tell me!

Can’t single it down to one…there’s been different influences at different stages of my life and it’s the mix that’s important, not any one of them in isolation. I’ve recently become painfully aware that most of the influences on my music have been white males with guitars so I’m making an effort to search out artists from other backgrounds that affect me as naturally as the songwriters who’ve influenced me up til now.

They are useful as long as you see other musicians on the internet as the real people they are, and not just thumbnails on a screen. It’s far more rewarding to have genuine contact with twenty people on a basis of mutual admiration and respect than to add twenty thousand people who don’t care about you or your music like you don’t care about theirs. I’d say these internet networking sites are vital if you want to be independant and cut out the middle men, but they’re not the be all and end all – don’t forget about live music and meeting people at venues and festivals.

I’m nearing the end of finishing my first properly produced album – Fuck Capitalism – which I finally have the ability and resources to do properly after 6 years. Things are also kicking off with a band I’ve started with MojoPixy called Commie Faggots. We’ve been hitting the London Open Mic scene quite heavily and through that have been asked to play several gigs and support Terminal Decline on the hardcore/punk circuit which will be quite amusing as we’re entirely acoustic.