It's not just an American dream, it's a worldwide dream: pick up the guitar, learn a few chords, and achieve success as the frontman of a slammin' rock combo. The Candyskins did all that, signing with Geffen Records and releasing two successful albums in the U.S. while at the same time making no impact in their native Britain. But once Geffen turned sour, they fought an eight-month legal battle to release them from their contract and free them to record new music.

All label battles behind them, the Candyskins have signed with Velvel Records in the U.S., they've built up a new and strong U.K. fan base, and their third U.S. album, Death of a Minor TV Celebrity, is in its third month of release. The first single from that record, "Feed It," can also be heard on the soundtrack to the Adam Sandler smash hit The Waterboy. PCC editor Matt Springer caught up with Candyskins lead singer and songwriter Nick Cope last November in England, psyched to restart the band's upward swing, just before the launch of the band's first U.S. tour in years.

Let's start by talking about the time between your leaving Geffen and signing with Velvel. What did you guys do?

We spent about eight months getting off Geffen, because they had committed to a third album and they didn't want to do anything about it. They had committed legally to it, so we had our manager and a lawyer involved, to basically get the money out of them. We sat around, twiddling our thumbs. We wrote songs, but we couldn't rehearse them--we couldn't record or tour or anything. It was a disaster, really. Prior to that, we were doing a lot of demos and sending stuff off to Geffen, but they weren't even bothering to listen to it, because they weren't going to do the next album.

So you were kinda trapped.

Definitely. There was an end to it, but the end to it was that we got off Geffen, and that was that. We had a few songs just hanging around, and we got a new manager and started gigging around. We signed to a bigger independent, Ultimate Records, and we put a few singles out and started getting some play on the radio. We had never done that properly over here [England]; we had never built a fan base by putting singles out on a regular basis and trying to get people to notice what we're doing. It was always just MCA through Geffen [in England], and they didn't really care. They weren't interested.

I understand you'd had some success with Geffen over in America, but you mention that you'd never really had success in England. How do you think it's different to gain success in Britain as opposed to America? Is it a different process involved, or is it pretty much the same?

I don't know. We've never really hit the serious big-time. It's always a hell of a lot of work and a lot of luck. Where the money comes into it, I don't really know, because you can record a great single but it's still got to get to all the radio stations. You've got to pay people to go in there and play your records. You have to be involved in some sort of organization to get it, which I think is a shame because it's hard for a band that's up-and-coming to develop, since everything's got to do with the radio, which is a bit worrying.

It's hard to get new stuff out there, really.

Yeah. Even if it's not going to sell bucketloads, I think people should listen to it. They shouldn't have to lay awake in bed waiting for the middle of the night to hear an alternative show and listen to new stuff. You've got to make it more accessible than that.

Which country do you prefer playing in: Britain or America? Who has the better audiences?

I'm not sure, because it's been a long time since we've played live in America. I'm intrigued to play in America again, to see what kind of a crowd we get from people who know us for the first two albums and people who've just heard "Feed It" on the radio. We'll see how it goes, really. In England, it's been really good. It does depend on the area, like in London they're a bit standoffish. In certain places up north, they're hard to please. It changes.

Where did you guys record the new album?

We went up to Lincoln, out in the middle of nowhere. There's like one pub, and basically nothing around there. It's an old chapel that's been converted into a studio. It's out in these flatlands. The power goes out there quite often, and we actually lost part of a track from the power going out. It's like the highlight of the week would be the pub trip, when we went down to the pub. It was quite amusing.

Sounds like a sleepy town.

Well, it's different. There's only about thirty people who live there.

So you guys must have been the life of the town when you were there.

I think they had a few more lively people than us.

What do you think is different about the new album and about the band, since it's been such a long time since you've recorded? How do you think that's affected the band?

I think we've gone through a number of stages. On our first album, we were just sorta writing enough songs to fill up the album. For the second album, we wrote all the songs really quickly so that we could get out there again. Our third album was neither here nor there; it was never released in America. On this fourth album, I feel like because of what happened with Geffen, it is somewhat like starting over again, because we were sorta chasing our tails and trying to please people other than ourselves. This time, we just wrote the songs and if we all liked them, we'd just go in and record them. We produced the album ourselves; we just went in and got it done.

Do you guys find it difficult to share production duties?

Oh, yeah. You argue all the time. A lot of it was being naieve about knowing exactly what we were supposed to be doing. We were always like, "That sounds right, doesn't it?" There was always that question mark involved. You just go in and you've got the hours and you get it done. We were spending fourteen-hour days; it was very hectic. You had to be there all the time, for the mixing or whatever.

So it was more intense than having someone else do it.

It is. It is really, really hard work. But there was a band in the studio next to us, Ultrasound, and they came in when we were doing the mixing. They really liked it. That was a turning point, just having another set of people from outside hear it. We nearly got to the point where we were dragging people up from the pub and asking, "What do you reckon?"

I noticed in listening to the album that there are a lot of very catchy choruses that are a lot of fun to sing along with. Is that a conscious songwriting decision on your part?

It's just trying to make music that you think is right, in a way. Sometimes you will chase something forever and ever, and you'll have a great verse and you need to find a great chorus to go with it. It's not a conscious thing; I think it's just inherent in what we do. We do sorta go for making the classic pop song. I don't know if we ever do it, but I do think there's a thin line we walk between poppy and fun and getting very cheesy. You walk a thin line sometimes.

What about "Feed It"? I've read that it's about the Heaven's Gate mass cult suicide.

We had all the chords of that song with one run-through of it; it just sorta wrote itself. Then I was watching the news and I saw a documentary on the Heaven's Gate cult, and I thought that somehow tied in with the obsessive nature, this thing of not knowing what it is until you've lost it. The one thing that kept coming up was that these people who committed mass suicide must have been brainwashed into doing it, but if you're brainwashed, you believe in what's happening. They were getting dressed in their gowns and going to kill themselves because they weren't going to kill themselves, they were going up into the tail of the comet. Who knows, they could be right. You never know. I don't think so, but who knows?