JS - I like all of them actually. I don't have a favourite as I go into it. It's funny when you think about playing songs on stage because some are difficult mechanically, but others are difficult technically.

Some songs for instance that I have on albums have lots of different modes and use six different arrangements, but when it comes to playing them live I have to think about how I'm going to make it work. So there's conflict between what I play on albums and what I can play live physically.

TAC - Speaking of playing live, there's the curse of Crushing Day...(something always goes wrong every time Joe tries to play it live)

JS - I've actually solved the curse! I played one week to promote the anniversary of Surfing with the Alien 20th Anniversary. We did New York, Hyde Street Studios and I realised that when I wrote it, I wrote it sitting down hunched over my guitar, so when I came to playing it live, I got someone to bring out a chair for me to sit down in when it came to the solo, which was a humbling experience!

TAC - Where do you get the inspiration for some of your song titles? That new album title – that's a mouthful!

JS - Well, I did that because I couldn't pick one song on the album which I think represented the album as a whole. For example when I wrote Supercolossal, I had in mind a title to start with and the rest of the songs just developed around that. The same thing with Flying in a Blue Dream, but with this album, I found it very hard to come up with one song that defined the album.

TAC - There's usually one song on each album that's a title track.

JS - Actually, with Surfing with Alien, that wasn't its original title. It was originally going to be called Lords of Karma, but I had a negative reaction from, actually a British journalist, who thought that all guitarists have this infatuation with India.

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