Find samples if you want to live

Cassetteboy are childhood friends Michael Bollen and Steve Warlin. Until now they have remained anonymous, fearing lawsuits for massive copyright infringement. With their third album, they have somewhat unwisely decided to publicly admit their crimes.

Carry on Breathing tells the story of life itself, from birth to death, through the medium of bits of Eastenders, nicked northern soul loops and knob gags.

Michael: We’re following the traditional rock and roll career path. We accidentally made a classic debut album, before we knew what we were doing (The Parker Tapes, 2002), then we sold out and went ‹pop› (Dead Horse, 2005), and now we’re back with a slightly bloated concept album.

Steve: Carry on Breathing covers all the big themes: money, love, death and, er, Croydon Council.

Michael: This album is our most ambitious work to date. We’ve collected so much more material than we ever have done before, weeks and weeks of TV and radio.

Steve: Bit Torrent and youtube have opened up whole new worlds of raw material for us. But of course we’d never infringe any copyright.

Michael: No, never. This is definitely our best album though. It’s hard to know how we’ll top it. In fact we’ll probably just split up after this one.

Steve: We say that after every album.

Michael: Yeah. Carry on Breathing is good though. I don’t think anyone will have heard anything quite like it before.

Steve: Unless they’ve heard our other albums.

Michael: If there’s any justice in the world, we’ll win the Mercury Music Prize.

Steve: We’re not going to win the Mercury Music Prize.

Michael: I know.

Carry on Breathing is released on the same day as Michael’s debut novel, Earth Inc. (Picnic Publishing). Stephen Merchant (The Office) has described Earth Inc. as «reminiscent of Douglas Adams…the funniest work of fiction since The Bible.» You can read extracts here: (web address)

Michael: Earth Inc. is silly, satirical and a bit scatological, a combination that will be familiar to fans of Cassetteboy. The main difference between doing Cassetteboy and writing a novel is that, when you are writing a book, if you want to use the word ‹tangerine›, you just write it down. You don’t have to wait until you happen to record someone on Watchdog saying ‹tangerine› clearly and in the right tone of voice.

In honor of their new album, Cassetteboy will perform live at the nachtsalon at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam on Thursday 29 May.

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