The A-side will be Walk Away, the band's fourth single and the most brittle, reflective moment from All Change, the confluence of feisty ingenuousness and '60s beatpop sensibilities that, hovering around the album chart's Number 10 mark since it's release last year, has sold with such steadiness that it's just gone gold. "We're breakin' in, man" grins Power with super-human charm. "Keep the doors locked. We'll be in your house soon!"
Lead guitarist Liam "Skin" Tyson interrupts his own flurry of deft folk-baroque pluckery with a thunderous fart. He's been here so often now (Cast have a residency at Entwistle's well-appointed home studio, where they rehearse, record extra tracks and plot further musical steps) that the plethora of dead things hardly bothers him, though like Power he's virtually vegan. "Once your bowels are clean of meat and fish, they might think about taking you back," he lectures weirdly, picking out a Gordon Lightfoot tune. Once a canoe instructor and rescued from that fate by one of those quirks of fate that seem to follow Cast around, Skin believes that the electric guitar pickup was invented in order to beam messages into space and is prepared to entertain the idea that he's recieving signals from gaseous extra-terestrials called The Council Of Nine.
Nearer the bar, Cast drummer Keith O'Neill, with two balloons stuffed up his T-shirt, fondles one of Keith Moon's old bass drums and bellows in a terrifyingly rich operatic tenor. "We brought him here to inseminate him with the spirit of Keith Moon," sighs Tyson, "and look what fuckin' happened."
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"There's a real vibe here, but it's not like we want to be The Who," bubbles a satisfied Power over dinner. "Just like we don't want to be The Beatles, Marley, beefheart, Mozart or Blind Willie McTell. But when it comes down to it, we're all drawing songs from the same place. The place all songs come from. The Source."
Today, The Source has been with them, and the near-psychaedelic result - now retitled Fulfil and powered by a swirling, lachrymose chorus - has alarmed even Cast. "It's darker, isn't it?" Power ponders. "Like an Eastern, spitting cobra sort of thing." It's also indicative of the band's current creative pitch. All Change, relates Power, was written in a matter of days at his girlfriend's student hovel on Birmingham's Hagley Road. With Cast mk II now a road-tempered powerhouse (Cast Mk I having recorded All Change Mk I right here, prior to it's scrapping.), songs, it seems, are arriving from the ether almost daily.
"All I'm saying is we're receptive to things," Power philosophises. "Vibrations, sounds, colours. This glass is vibrating. This table is vibrating. So are your specs, man! Y'know, we look at a garden and see beauty and inspiration and creativity and some people see a dog turd on the lawn."
Eyes a-glitter and shoulders gesticulating like a Scouse Woody Allen, the tiny Power is as prone to leap to his feet for a solo rendition of The Times They Are A-Changin' as he is to simply sit there and beam. As with his heroes Lenon and Townshend, the conk is prominent ("all songbirds have big beaks") and the search for those pesky mystic truths endless. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead ("it's like an annual - good to dip into") are namechecked, though guruhood isn't deemed the exclusive preserve of Eastern mystics.
"Bill Shankly, he was a guru. Whether they're playing football or baking cakes, there are people out there in all walks of life that know what it is. There are thousands of gurus out there, probably in your corner shop, maybe giving your car a parking ticket."
Yet terrestrial yogi are only the half of it. Recent guests at the Power abode have included, well, aliens ("I'd rather hear them in me head than bank managers or telephones.") - a topic accorded little dignity by the rest of Cast who cackle and squeal "NEEP! NEEP!" while Power simply shrugs and smiles, as if that were just another chapter in the life of Federal Agent Scally.
Back in Liverpool, before Lee Mavers dragged him aboard for the rocky, inspirational and untimately short-lived voyage that was The La's, we're not startled to learn that Power dabbled in LSD ("Once you've seen heaven and hell - and know they're there - you don't need it again."), whilst cultivating the steely self-belief that's kept Cast churning in their current hash-fuelled gear. Like the rest of the band he still lives there, where he attended Lennon's Quarry Bank school and ran with a mischievous crew that called themselves - for geographical rather than Fabular reasons - The Penny Lane Gang. Yet in other ways, he's an escapee.
"Music," he preaches, "is religion. It's form, la. Imagine the world without it. Ech-ech-ech-yammer-eeeyooow-czzzzzzch-bang-crash! Chaos! The world we used to liv in, in Liverpool, grown men fighting in pubs. Music can make you think what a dick'ead you've been and realises what all-arses are about you, and it can heal you and get you out of there."
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The weekend's travails are overseen by genial 50-year-old Bob Pridden, house engineer chez Entwistle and Who sound bloke since 1966, when he was "dumbstruck" by a deafening Heatwave performed from the revolving stage at the Streatham Locarna. When Lee Mavers asked pete Townshend to produce The La's LP, Townshend recommended Pridden, but warned him: "If I was you I wouldn't touch 'em. Do you remember what I was like when I was 22?"
Challenged by such unconvential requests as "Can you make the chorus sound more like a slippery eel, with a bit if red and blue." he's remained at Power's disposal. "Cast are special," he confirms.
British audiences will have another chance to experiance just how special Cast are in March, when another comprehensive British tour coincides with the release of Walk Away. It's Cast's moment, they reckon, a moment shared with Oasis (but not Blur), The Stone Roses, the post-verve Richard Ashcroft and Lee Mavers - wherever he may be. So the psychic scally beat-blues revival starts here, but where next? Caught poring over a manual of drum set rudiments, Keith O'Neill has a simple answer: "Just keep getting better."
"I'm hearing different rhythms, subtler changes," muses Power, "but I don't think we'll mature into a bunch of technical gobshites who know a D7 chord has to go with a fuckin' fuck fuck fuck. People think we're just scally potheads, but the whole next album's written (taps head) and it's already better.
"You've gotta believe in the magic," insists Power, "and to pass that on. All I want is to put these Cast records in me collection next to me Dylan and Beatles and The Who records, and think, Yeah, I'll have a spliff to that, la."
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~ Keith ~
~ Back To Mars ~
~ Yellow Pages ~
