Surely it wasn’t all ex-pats and ‘Authentic Aussie Pubs’ in London, though - there must have been an upside? “It was great – it was cold, and the beer was warm, and the Poms were whingeing”, he laughs, “they try to give you Fosters beer. It’s the same as in America, [US accent] oh you guys, you really like your Farsters. No! No one drinks it except for you idiots overseas! Seriously, though, it was cool. We had a good time, and the shows were good. It was excellent.”

During their UK sojourn, Grinspoon were pleased to see that the singles from the New Detention album had performed well in the Triple J Hottest 100, with Chemical Heart coming in at #2. “We were pissed off that we weren’t number one. We thought our record companies should have ripped it a bit harder”, Hansen struggles to remain deadpan, then crumbles. “No, we were stoked – it was really cool to do so well in it. We were in England when we found out, and were a bit blasé about it. It didn’t relate to us over there, but had we been in Australia when it was announced, we would have been down the pub and drunk for three days. And the thing is, we were beaten by QOTSA, so we didn’t really mind”, he concedes. “They’re a great band, and that song has two bass breakdowns in it, so it’s fine by me”.

While the performance of the singles was gratifying, is the Hottest 100 still a relevant gauge of listener habits, or just one step away from Hot Hitz? Hansen is in two minds about the issue: “I don’t know. I’ve got a feeling that – without putting a pooh-pooh on it – there’s a lot of rigging going on”, he says, “But I also I think it is relatively authentic, in that the QOTSA song [No One Knows] was really popular. I guess what Triple J plays a lot will get a lot of votes. But for us, this year we’ll go with the line that it’s totally authentic and the kids love us!”.

The mellow, string-driven ballad Chemical Heart certainly kicked down hitherto closed doors in terms of critical and commercial success, and pushed all the right ‘maturity’ buttons in the music press. Did the band feel that it was a turning point? “People were saying we were this one-riff band - and we definitely know how to use five notes in lots of different ways - but I reckon we’ve always had a bit of that ‘different’ stuff in us; it’s just that we never released it as a single, so people tend to ignore that side”. So is the cliché true, do people take you more seriously once you’ve done the power ballad, a la Kiss’ God Gave Rock & Roll To You?
“Once you’ve put the strings in the mix? Yeah, it’s like you’re credible, you’re an artist now – working with classical musicians. I don’t know though, you’ve just got to do what you want to do. And maybe for us, we’ve never had strings in any of our songs – but fuck, everyone else has, it’s not that unusual”.

Hansen thinks that fans will best respond to gradual transformation of sound, rather than a sudden switch in direction: “It’s good if people can accept that we’ve changed a little bit, because then that means with the next record we can change a bit more and do what we want; it opens doors for us musically. If you just keep doing the same records it shuts those doors, and then when you do want to change, people really freak out”.

Grinspoon have found that maintaining the balance between their own artistic urges and what the fans want has not been as hard as they first thought. “Well, what we’ve found it that actually changing does keep the fans happy. They’ve gotten into Chemical Heart more than any other song [we’ve released], and that is supposedly this really different sound. I think people sell the fans short a lot, in saying that they just want to hear the same thing, whereas I think the fans actually want you to change and stay interesting. Otherwise they’ll get bored with you”.

Power ballads aside, the band have recently recorded a cover of the INXS hit, Don’t Change, for the film Danny Deckchair. “It’s such a great stadium rock song, and we were doing Livid and thought we’d finish with that, it was made for it. Then, the guy who was producing the film wanted to use it. So we recorded it for that, and then we thought we’d put it on as a bonus track on the album. But when we got all the other songs, we though, we don’t want to have everyone pissed off at us that they’d already bought the album and would then have to buy it again, so we though we’d put it out as an EP”.

So with the change in direction, and the US and UK audiences clamouring for Antipodean rock & roll, does this mean that Grinspoon will throw some of their old grunge-rock babies out with the bathwater? Do they still play DCx3 live? “Nah, it’s too controversial. It just sounds funny now, saying ‘dead cat’ in the chorus”, he pauses, before concluding, “We’ve matured anyway – we’ve got strings now.”