It was an incredibly mean record deal and once we’d paid the lawyers there was just enough to buy a new bass. A recording contract is a hefty, confusing document. In the past, as one of the many formalities of business law, all contracts had to be written in Latin. It’s quite hard to say what language they’re written in now. There’s still quite a lot of Latin in there. There wasn’t a single paragraph that made sense to any of us, apart from the bit about if the drummer performed in pyjamas he was in breach. They put that in for a joke. We didn’t mind him wearing pyjamas, but we agreed to it because we understood it. We had to go to the lawyer’s three evenings in a row to have it all explained to us. It was very dull. The lawyer said it was the worst fucking deal he’d ever seen. He swore quite a lot. They do that, lawyers. We thought we were going to be catapulted into a new stratosphere and live happily ever after since we were about to become professional recording artists, and that we wouldn’t have to worry about anything.
