Double Trouble

"It's a big moment for us, in that we had the tenacity to just keep recording so many songs that we had too many for one album and thought, 'Fuck it – life's too short!' and went for the double album,” Pete O'Doherty, one half of brothers-based combo Dog Trumpet, admits of their new album, Medicated Spirits.

A quick thumbnail sketch for those readers coming into the Dog Trumpet story late: O'Doherty plus his bro', who's known to the world as Reg Mombassa, first found fame as the kiwi members of Mental As Anything, releasing their debut Dog Trumpet album, Two Heads One Brain, way back in 1990. The new album was written and recorded over three years. “Which for us is reasonably quick,” says O'Doherty. “We usually take anywhere from three to four or five years to finally have enough [songs] to make some sort of cohesive album, but I think over the last couple of albums we're getting better at actually fitting an album together so that it feels all cohesive, rather than, 'We've written a whole lot of songs and that's what we'll put out'.”

Bookended by Elizabethan and Aqualine, both instrumentals, Medicated Spirits, which is also coming out as a double vinyl album, certainly covers a lot of turf both stylistically and lyrically, although Dog Trumpet pretty much stick within the 'quirky upbeat through sad, hang-dog pop templates' their contributions to the Mentals catalogue established. “There's always going to be a range of different things that crop up with the way we write,” O'Doherty offers. “I mean we both write different sort of songs, but then, as brothers – and we've been working together so long – we know how to meld them together and get a kind of a sound that seems to repeat itself in different forms.

“Opening the album with an instrumental for some reason just sort of sets up a certain flavour, which we then dip in and out of through the album. I'm not sure what it is but, you know, that melodic kind of thing with little hints of psychedelia there – all the stuff that we like to do anyway.

“Lots of the songs deal with lots of our usual things, you know, our nervous paranoia about the state of the world, the future, lots of stuff about time… I mean, [track two] Speed Of Light is very directly about the march of time: the racing, galloping urgency of time and how you've got to get on with it... And other songs deal with things like that – What Falls Away and Mean Time! There's another one with time even in the title. [It's] all about how mean old time works against you so you have to work hard to work against it – and I know who wins!”