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Gomez
 "This is the second time on this record that we've toured Australia," announces Gomez vocalist/guitarist Ian Ball, "in fact, I would say we have probably done Australia around ten times all up! At least. People keep asking us to come back and then they go nuts at our shows, so we're like 'Fuck, this place is great, let's do it again'.
"It's that simple, really - the demands is there and the energy of the crowd is there. It really doesn't take much more than that to for you to want to do it. Obviously, if we turned up and everybody just fell asleep, we wouldn't bother," he laughs.
In some ways, one could even say that Australia is fast becoming the band's second home, especially when considering that Gomez are not really based anywhere at the moment, as Ball explains - "We are not even based in England anymore, we are just scattered all over the place - from LA to New York, Detroit, Brighton in the UK...I mean, we don't have a base anymore at all. Our touring bus is our ground zero."
Of course, once upon a time they used to be from Southport, England, a town which Ball describes as "the kind of place where everyone after they turn 18 years old leaves. There wasn't a music scene there, it simply didn't exist. It's only a small town so all the musicians in it ended up in our band," Ball chuckles.
"If you ask me, a scene usually requires a certain degree of live performance, it wasn't a place to play live, so we didn't play live - we just recorded. We only became a live band once the first album came out because then we obviously had to become a live band!"
Ball is also quick to point out that while the band originally came from Southport, they are in fact a product of a massive amount of US tours. As Ball recalls, "The 'States formed us more than anything, in terms of us growing up as a band. It's always been one of our favourite places to tour. San Francisco and New York - it's an absolute riot over there, LA is now rockin' as well, which is good. So usually we are big city guys, we just find those kinds of gigs more fun: when the stakes are higher and there are more people. But don't get me wrong, Australia also would definitely be very high upon our list," Ball assures me.
For those eager to find out just what Gomez have in store for their Adelaide fans, well, Ball gives us a hint or two... "It will probably be totally random. We have this thing when we write set lists, we get a massive list of pretty much every song we know, which is about 70 tracks, then we just pick them randomly from that list."
Ball laughs as he recalls a recent show, "God, the other night we accidentally played all of 'Liquid Skin' [1999] and we didn't even realise it! Somebody pointed it out to us after the show and we were like 'Oh shit, yeah I guess we did'. But for the Aussie fans we'll do the old classics, those still get wheeled out every once in a while."
Following the Australian tour, Ball informs me that there's not a hell of a lot on the cards for Gomez - just some well-deserved rest and perhaps a session or two in the studio, "Well, first of all we are going to take a breather and just try to relax.
"And then somewhere at some point this year we'll probably be starting the process all over again...but where that will be, when that will be and how it will happen, God only knows. It's just awfully difficult to write much on the road for us. When you get in the studio you're just doing whatever - whatever instruments are lying around, whatever song is lying around, that's what you end up working with.
"We write songs in every kind of way possible - any way you can imagine writing songs, that's all the ways that we do them. But we wait until we are together otherwise it would be songs on the road about the road, you know? There's only so much you can write about 'wheels are turning'..."
Gomez play at HQ on Fri 30 March
'How We Operate' is out now through Shock
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