"It's early days yet..."

proclaims Carl Marsh with a calm optimistic enthusiasm that hides his countless years in the music industry. As a founder member of the sorely-missed Shriekback, Carl has a back-catalogue of recorded material to be proud of. Despite never setting the singles chart on fire, Shriekback's anarchic blend of white-boy funk earned them a massive underground following, backed up by some truly theatrical live performances.

Carl left Shriekback at the end of 1985 after recording the Oil And Gold album.

"The band hadn't broken up by any means, but with myself and Barry Andrews both being singers and writers I thought it would be easier to go and start from scratch", Carl explains. "I wanted to take everything a stage further, so I did some demos with Lu Edmonds who had been playing guitar with Shriekback live, and who then went on to join Public Image. Eventually, after many more demos and talks with record companies, I got the deal with Polydor last year and went and made a record."

That record, the soon to be released Too Much Fun, continues the Shriekback tradition for innovation, without neglecting the need for hook-laden songs full of charm, wit and individuality. Carl's musical history is revealed without it ever totally dominating. While it could be seen as the logical follow-up to Oil And Gold, Too Much Fun equally never fails to come over as strictly a Carl Marsh solo album. The reasons for this are many, but primarily it is because the whole album was recorded before the Carl Marsh backing band was assembled.

"Shriekback was like four very individual people throwing stuff into a huge grinder" Carl recalls. "It's a big change to leave that and take responsibility for everything. The drummer won't come up with something for you to play on if there's no drummer, and that forces songwriting in certain ways. I was delirious with excitement at the prospect of not having to ask permission all the time from three other band members. On this album the band came in after I'd done the record because I didn't want to have to filter my own freedom through a band before even I had any idea what it was going to sound like."

Major record companies are notorious for expecting hit singles as a prelude to a money-spinning album. However the fact that Carl's solo album contains several tracks with singles chart potential is seen more as an accident than a deliberate perversion of the creative process.

"The person in Polydor who actually signed me was Graham Carpenter and he's a complete fan of the whole project", Carl reveals. "Because there wasn't a band to go and see, and I only took them very rough demos, they looked on it as a serious album thing that would grow and grow and grow. It's only been in the last few months when they listened to the finished record that they suddenly thought there were some hit singles on it and that it's all gone terribly wrong!

"We put out 'Here Comes The Crush' as the first single for several reasons. Whether I like it or not, initial interest in me is going to be based on my involvement with Shriekback, and I think that track carries on logically from where I left off. The first few things I put out now are going to be in that vein. Everyone these days finishes their records and then say they hate making singles for radio because they have to be 3.5 minutes long and very poppy, but then people always release the peppiest tracks from their album and edit them down to three minutes 29 seconds anyway. We decided to put out something which didn't sound like anything else on the radio — something which was huge, fairly aggressive and quite nasty, and see what happened to it."

One of the most notable Carl Marsh trademarks is his creative use of English prose, whether in his song lyrics or accompanying press releases. He specialises in the succinct one-liner which entirely sums up a certain feeling or emotion, but which at the same time seems completely effortless. These in turn lead on to musical ideas and vice versa.

"I keep notebooks of any good lines or anything that occurs to me, and that's always a good supply if you're writing and short of ideas", he explains. "Sometimes I'll get an idea for a complete song in one go, and I'll do the whole thing in half an hour. Other times, if I've got nothing in the fridge, so to speak, I'll sit down with a drum box and a guitar and make some grooves until I get inspired by something.

"The problem with my earlier writings was that they did tend to backfire occasionally. I thought a lot of Shriekback's stuff was hilarious, or at the very least deeply ironic. It was a bit arty and very funny, but people took one line out of context and called us pretentious bastards. Partly for that and partly the fact that it's a new record company and I want to see what they do if you let them off the leash, I've kept back from that for most of the stuff up to now. I dare say it'll creep back in because it's too much fun to leave alone."

Too much fun seems to be the theme of Carl's life at the moment, and he's obviously happy with the way things are progressing. He has few regrets about the past.

"I think, if I look back on my huge, sad and tawdry career so far, I probably knew that I wanted to "do" music when I was about 15 — that's when I got my first guitar", he explains with a smile. It's a smile that seems permanently etched onto the face of one of pop's true intellectuals. And as time goes on it's the sort of smile that's going to get progressively wider and wider.