by Rhia Calvert

How have the first few dates of the tour gone so far?
Really good. The first date in Manchester was a little bit chaotic because the sound on stage sucked, but yesterday was awesome and tonight was too.

What's your favourite city to play in the UK?
I have three favourite cities, London, Manchester and Nottingham. We've played the basement here in Rock City twice and last time we were here I went up to the main hall and wanted to play in there! But we arrived here today and got told we've sold about 800 tickets and there's going to be more sold on the door so we were quite satisfied. It's a co-headline tour but we choose to play before The 69 Eyes, its the best place to play because the audience is not too drunk, they can sing along and understand what we're about.

What's life like being on tour in Hardcore Superstar?
Chaotic! It's really good actually because I hate being in the studio. The 'Split Your Lip' album was good to record though because we only did about five days in the studio and that's enough for me. I love the stage.

Have you got any crazy tour stories you can share?
There's so many! It's hard to answer that question because you forget a lot of them and then you can be sitting at home watching the TV and remember one. We've got Crashdiet on tour with us though and they're pretty crazy.

Can you tell us a bit about your latest album, 'Split your lip?'
We recorded everything live in about five days. The whole album is about the lyrics and mainly about people we've met, like take 'Here Comes That Sick Bitch.' The funny thing about that song is that it's like a ballad but it's not a ballad if you listen to the lyrics, it's very rough and it's about sometimes meeting annoying girls who are a little bit too much. Every lyric we write is mainly about people we've met on tour and things that have happened to us.

Has it been good for you to play new material on this tour?
Yeah really good. We play about five or six new songs. When we come to write a set list for the tour we want to play new songs but we also have to play the older songs because people also want to hear those. I would love to play the whole new album but that wouldn't work.

What are your favourite songs to play live?
'Bag On Your Head' and 'Split Your Lip' but we didn't play either of those tonight! We only have an hour set whereas in Sweden we play for longer and we can fit in both the new and old material.

Are the UK crowds very different from other European crowds?
Well Nottingham is easily the best crowd so far! When I went up on stage today in the main hall it was very different from playing in the basement, there was a lot more people. We've been around fourteen years now and I think it's better to keep growing a little bit, we keep getting bigger every record we release.

What have you got lined up for the rest of the year?
We're playing festivals across Europe, nothing in the UK though I'm afraid to say. But we played Download Festival two years ago and played the second biggest stage which was awesome but we couldn't fit it in to play this year, hopefully next year we will as it's a really good festival!