Doctor and the Medics

One of the lead things that we definitely need to cover today is your forthcoming album, The Optimal Mystic, and we've already had a taster of that, The Rocking Forever and Ever.

Tell us about that album, because it's been about three decades since the last one,

hasn't it? Yeah, the last actual album we did was in 1996.

It was called Instant Heaven.

And afterwards, people actually hear it, and it actually had got a good press review a couple of years ago.

Someone said, this is an undiscovered gem.

But at the time, we were not the friend of the press.

Nobody wanted to report on us, so we did the album.

And we kind of thought, what should we do to promote it? So I thought, well, image has always been a big thing.

So we stripped it down.

So Steve and I, it was only really Steve and I who did the album, just went, did a photo shoot naked with guitars and things holding in place.

And funnily enough, I put it next to the Francis Rossi and Rick Parfit.

They did a naked shot and they're almost identical, except ours is about 15 years earlier.

And then I said to Steve, we should put out a press release or something.

And he said, pardon my French, he said, you may as well tell them that our arses have exploded.

So I got, in those days, faxes.

I got a bit of Doctor and the Medics headed paper.

To the enemy, sounds them all.

Doctor and the Medics would like to announce that our arses have exploded.

We sent the CD for a review, never even got a review, never got a listen, but the last thing that the mainstream music papers printed about Doctor and the Medics was the NME, who were glad to report that Doctor and the Medics' arses have exploded.

That was our last actual bit of press, and it's my favourite Medics album to date, Instant Heaven, so if people want to check it out, please do.

I think there's a couple of surprise tracks on there that people might sort of think, oh, actually, Yeah,

that's one of the interesting aspects of the pop or rock industry is that it goes in cycles.

So if you're just hitting the wrong zeitgeist, and I guess in 1996, it was all Oasis, Pulp and perhaps Too Unlimited or whatever, that you could have probably did produce your greatest work.

And if the press and the media don't want to know you, you're not necessarily going to get that message across.