You’ve been travelling?
Tim: Yep, we’ve been in Austria, Norway and Greece this week, so I’m kinda confused.
Tell me about your experiences here in the past. Has it always been a winner?
Tim: Yeah. We had one of our best gigs here when it was at the other site in Glasgow in 1995. It was a great year, in the tent was Supergrass, Bluetones, Elastica - it was that Brit Pop summer. We had an amazing gig because “Girl From Mars” had just come out. That’s five years ago now - which is awfully scary.
Tell me about the set, do you change it at all for this kind of gig?
Tim: Yeah, we’ve been doing loads of festivals recently so we’ve kind of got this really good hour honed down - all the singles, basically a greatest hits kind of thing with lots of new album tracks thrown in. It’s going down a storm.
In the past at “T in the Park” there has been little bits of rivalry backstage, but this year seems to be the year of love with everybody getting on. Tell me about your rock star chums?
Tim: I only met Coldplay on Wednesday and we were getting on like a house on fire in Norway. I ended up going swimming at 4am in a fjord with Chris Martin and he had ‘I Love Ash’ written across his chest, and I got stung by a jelly fish across both my feet.
Is there anyone on the bill you’d like to see?
Tim: Grandaddy, who are on before us, but I’m doing things like this and I don’t think I’ll get to see them. There’s some stuff on the smaller stages that look quite interesting. Snow Patrol are on, I’d like to see them.
There’s a distinct lack of nu-metal and Americana here, it’s largely British and Irish - is that something to celebrate?
Tim: Yeah, I guess it is the opposite of Reading which is all the big American groups. It’s nice, but it makes it a bit boring at times as well though. It’s nice not having all these big American crews with their egos hanging around.
What is happening after this, is it touring touring touring?
Tim: I think we’ve done about 15 out of 40 festivals, so we are just going for that. Then we are going to Japan, South East Asia, and then doing an extensive Europe tour in the winter, and some big UK shows at Christmas. There’s even talk about doing a show on New Year’s Eve in Sydney or something.
You are headlining the Evening Session stage at Reading, tell me about that?
Tim: Reading is just going to kick off. Last time we played that tent it was amazing - that was 1995 as well. It’s going to be a huge congregation of all our fans.