No secret weapons for the Mogwai boys, just the classic chalk/cheese combinations: single coils vs. humbuckers; Fender amp vs. Marshall. "I used my old Tele - the one with the extra Seymour Duncan in the middle andthe on/off switch. - all through the album," confirms Stuart. "I've also got a new Tele which has three pickups as standard - erm, is that a Nashville Tele? - and a Les Pa ul, which is great, but it overdrives all the time. You can't get much dynamics out of it, so I tend to be careful which pedals I use and just keep it for songs that are the same volume pretty much all the way through. Dominic's just got a new Music Man Sabre bass... and I've got one of those Danelectros. I really like it! It needs some better machineheads but it sounds really good. It's a disgusting colour, though - salmon pink. I think that's why it was so cheap - no one wanted it. But for a cheap guitar, it's tremendous."

Braithwaite uses two amps at the same time: a Fender Twin for top and a Marshall bass head through a 2x12" cab for bottom. " I'd love a Boogie... but I can't afford one," he mourns. "Besides, it'd probably break. We tend to blow a lot of amps. On tour we need repairs every couple of days.

"My main pedals are an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man delay, an Ibanez digital delay, a Coloursound tremolo and a Jim Dunlop wah wah... which I've only just started using. I'm not much one for that corny stuff, I just tend to tread on it to find a nice new frequency. I'd a actually really like to get one of those wahs you can turn on without having to press it right down - like with a switch as well as the rocker pedal. Oh, and I use a Danelectro Fab Tone fuzzbox - which is the loudest pedal I've ever heard.

"It's all pretty simple, really. No guitar synths- I'm morally opposed to them, though you can't deny how handy they are. And no pseudo-acoustic sounds! On the (Manics) tour, James Bradfield had a guitar set up with one of those and it really fooled me. I had to ask him what it was 'cos I was thinking, 'bloody hell, you could well be miming there, mate.'"