Let's look back at 1987 and how the Housemartins fitted into it. Fortunately we've been joined by the group to aid us in this view. Shall we say hello to the readers, boys? Tell us a little about your instrumental selves — in your own words, now.

First, there's Paul Heaton. "Hippos can lick your skin off with their tongues," he tells us. Paul sings, plays harmonica, co-writes the songs, and, with the others, self-manages the band. "I'm also quite involved in making rash decisions and shouting at people. I use Lee Oskar and Pro Harp harmonicas, and an Ibanez Artist semi going through a Peavey amp. Anyone know which mike I use? No? Oh well, it's a black one."

"Stan's quite involved in money," Paul says of Stan Cullimore, rhythm guitar player, partial singer, and his co-writer. Stan does not retaliate. "I use a Sessionette 75, and a Rickenbacker 420 — we had a bit of an accident on the last night of the tour and that guitar got smashed, but I've got a new one. I also use a Strat as an occasional second guitar."

Norman Cook is the bass player, and seems quite sensible really. He admits to using a Fender Precision and a Trace Elliot 4x10 combo. "Me and Dave are quite good at sitting around and watching telly," Norman points out, referring to new boy Dave Hemingway, non-sponsored drummist with the Housemartins. "I use a battered Premier Royale kit," Dave tells us, "and I'm open to offers if anyone wants to sponsor me. And Zildjian cymbals."

So here we are in Yellow 2 studio, Stock-port. We have cups of tea. We have Abbey Crunch biscuits. We have the Housemartins. And we have their diary. Open sesame.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY

The band rest after their hit, 'Caravan Of Love'. Stan was on holiday 'quite a lot'; Dave was still in a local club band called the Rooftops; Norman was in bed with his mistress (woops) for most of the month; and Paul remembers it as "a restful month really, no gigs. 'Caravan' was still in the charts, so we were still seeing ourselves on telly, watching that back over and over again."

Ex-drummer Hugh gave his notice in. New drummer Dave smiles. "Thursday the 5th of February was the day they rang me up." A couple of meetings later, and Dave had joined the group.

Paul: "We'd told the record company we needed two months to write songs, deliberately, so we could have January off. So we actually started writing in February, and scrambled the songs together in a couple of weeks." Paul frowns: "The Sun launched its attacks on us around then, too... just the usual shit, we're gay, we sleep with guinea pigs, we've each got a wooden leg, we've all left the band..."

Paul found he had a stockpile of new lyrics, and Stan had got some guitar sequences buzzing in the brain. "Every day Stan would come round to my house with his guitar and we'd work it all out," Paul says. "That's how we've always worked, it was always my bedroom or his bedroom; this time we were writing in the lounge cos we wanted a sort of roomier feel."

Their method is fairly conventional. Paul fits his lyrics to a melody that he remembers in his head, to which Stan comes up with some basic chords. "We try to match the lyrics and chords: we usually manage to do that for a verse, and then hum each other a bridge; we work out the structure between us. Then we play it through a few times, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and if it's a very boring melody we try to stick a middle eight in it to make it a bit more interesting. I suppose we all work on the arrangement of the song then — we usually give Norman a tape and he works bass lines out to it, brings them back and we say what we like."

MARCH/APRIL

Rehearsing songs during March. Recorded four tracks for single, 13th-24th March, Yellow 2. 'Five Get Over Excited' was chosen as the single by a panel of friends and business contacts, each of whom had three votes. 'Five' won by a long way.

"That's a bit of a regret, actually," says Paul. "We recorded it in a bit of a hurry," adds Norman. "It wasn't a disaster — it got to number 11 — we just felt it was a bit of a low point in recording and production, and other people didn't pick up on what the song was about." Paul says it was proof of desperation in the ranks. "We just wanted to get something out... we weren't sure about the band any more, we wanted to get back in the studio — and the charts — as quickly as possible. That sounds a bit funny, but that's how it was."

April, to Fairview, a 24-track studio, for demos — the band knew they'd have to record fast, that there'd be no time to 'play in' the songs on tour, so they whacked down 18 tracks in two days (plus a day to mix), and found the exercise helped them organise arrangements for the 'proper' versions more readily.

"So what was the question again?" asks Stan, immersed in the interview with their producer John Williams in last month's Making Music. "What was the question, do our songs all sound the same? Of course they don't! How dare you say that! I know lots of chords — six. I learned six chords when I started playing and I still use them. That's all you need: one major, one minor, one major seventh, one ninth, one minor seventh, and, er, another one. We do use some different chords, there's a song on the album called 'Johannesburg' and that's got some new chords in it. I couldn't tell you what they are. Maybe the bloke from It Bites could tell you — I saw your interview with him, he was a horrendous bore, he knew lots about guitars and how to play them. Awful."

Basslines, Norm? "It depends on the chords, sometimes there's not a lot you can do. But I try to get a counter-melody going or something. A lot of the time that puts Paul off. I get told to simplify a lot, but that's fine with me. There have been a few occasions where it's got ludicrous — you know we did those two versions of 'Think for A Minute'? The single version I actually played two notes on the whole song! That stretched simplicity to its limit, I think."

Stan: "I think the truth of the matter is that of the two of us, Norman is much more the egotistical guitarist with flares and a Flying V. I tend to write like boring farmyard material, but Norman... well, he plays free jazz, you know? Seriously, in a lot of bands it's the other way round, the bass plays the root notes and the guitar does the more flowery stuff, whereas I play the boring chords and he fills it out."

"That's because you can't play the flowery stuff, Stan," suggests Paul. He thinks a sec. "You can't rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time."

MAY

Short tour called 'No Sleep Till Kilmarnock': seven low-key dates, not advertised nationally. "This was to get Dave warmed up," says Norman. May 7th was Dave's first official gig with the Housemartins. "Going from playing to 50 people to a thousand is a bit of a jump. The first gig? Well, I s'pose I'm lucky cos the kit is like a shield, isn't it? You can hide behind it, and I think that's what I did, got my head down — I still do that, every gig, I still hide. I played probably better that night than I did later on in the tour, it was one of the better nights for me. It was quite a gentle easing-in because it hadn't been publicised so there were only about 350 people in a 1000-seater hall. By the summer I was playing to crowds of 50,000!"

How do the others deal with nerves, with no kit to hide behind? "I just shit meself," Norman explains, graphically. "I sometimes feel very, very sick before I go on. I was also thrown into the deep end when I joined, I joined in a bit of a hurry. I played a few gigs to like a hundred, 200 people, but then my fourth gig was at the Hammersmith Odeon and I'd only been playing bass for about two weeks. It must be the record for the worst musician, in terms of experience, ever going on-stage at the Hammersmith Odeon. Not a problem really — I just didn't feel at all well."

Paul? "I usually try to make a choice comment to relax meself straight away. The Andre Previn one went down like a bomb. We'd never played anywhere bigger than 10,000, and we walked on stage in Belgium to 60,000, and I just said, 'There's an important message. Mr Andre Previn's left his violin case at reception.' That was it. They just looked at me, and I looked at them. Who gives a shit?

"I also felt nervous when I had to sing 'Caravan Of Love' without any accompaniment," Paul continues. "I was thinking, well, this is the most popular song we've ever sung, if I get the words wrong it would be the crappiest thing I could do, and that was just playing on my mind all the time, and I became nervous cos of that. But we have a policy, if someone does something wrong in a song, we come over to them at the end and it's, 'Norman, what were you thinking?' We make something of it. I think it's better that way, the crowd can laugh at it."

"Gigs are definitely the hardest work I do in the band," says Dave, "a lot of it's fast drumming, hard work. I'm always conscious if I'm playing something like say 'Happy Hour', which Hugh recorded, I'm nervous about playing them, whereas the ones I've recorded I feel more relaxed with. Like an old friend."

JUNE/JULY

Into Yellow 2 in June to record the album. Norman: "At the time we went in we weren't too proud of 'Five'. We knew we wanted to take more time and effort over the new tracks. Especially the arrangements, we thought about them a lot more."

Paul reflects on the album now: "We didn't spend enough time on the vocal sounds. I thought I was gonna be chuffed with it, but eventually it was the vocals which let it down. It was a matter of time — I think we should be taking more time nowadays. Me and Stan have been producing a Liverpool group called The Farm recently; we spend more time on other people's work than we do on our own, and that's got to change."

In July they went to Italy and Belgium for two festivals: "very good" they agree. Back to blighty in the second half of July; Paul and Stan mix the album.

"Did you know all my vocals are sampled?" asks Paul. "I sample the voice from the bloke who sings in the Game Ambersons. Have you heard them?"

No, actually. Norman explains: "It's a band who sent in a demo tape to our office, and when you listen to it you think it's us. Most people we've played it to go oh yeah, you're doing one of your old songs."

"Even me mum and dad thought it was me," says Paul. "When they came up at the weekend I played it to them, and they're going yeah, so what? So eventually I said, it's not me. What! Even they were amazed."

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER

"Top Of The Pops is more of a buzz than some TV shows," says Norman, remembering one for 'Me And The Farmer' in August. "Mind you, it is one of the longest for hanging around — you start at 10 in the morning, do run-throughs, there's an hour and a half off, it's a long day, but there's time for a few lagers in the bar. We went on and the playback was disastrously quiet, we couldn't hear it, we started going out of time, the audience were clapping out of time, everyone was straining to hear the original song, and it was a live one, too, so we couldn't tape it again."

They had two weeks off for holidays in August. Paul: "I went to Spain, Norman went to Wales, Dave to Majorca, and Stan went to Devon. So there you are: two abroad; two at home. Two of us are living with married women; two aren't. Two have been engaged; two haven't." Long argument ensues about who's been engaged; apparently Alison just thought she was. We can be certain, however, that the Housemartins started rehearsing in Hull during September for their British tour, which began September 19th.

How's the book, Stan? "Oh, er, it's all these short little horror stories about all these people who died and now they're ghosts."

Of course. Ever come across a studio ghost, Stan? "There's supposed to be one in Townhouse 3, it used to be a church, but we've never come across it."

"We were in the Strongroom studio once," says Norman, "and we heard this really eerie, whining noise. But it turned out to be one of Stan's backing vocals."

We all laugh a lot, as you can imagine. And then Paul says: "I think the ghost of Norman's talent came in once, but there wasn't much noise. A sort of farting noise, really." We laugh some more.

OCT/NOV/DEC

British Tour (Glasgow, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Brixton, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Nottingham, Bridlington, Dublin, Belfast) ended 5th October.

It went well. Something must have gone wrong, surely? "I started the wrong song," admits Dave. "It was dark and I couldn't see the set list, it was early on in the tour so I didn't know the set. I just started the first chord: but straight away the rest of the band stopped and pointed me out to the crowd, saying what a tit I was."

"I lost me voice — it wasn't very embarrassing," says Stan. He thinks. "Oh yeah, I was sharing a room with one of the crew and I went back and he had a, er, friend with him in the room. It turned out the friend was a bloke." General agreement here that Stan is a lying bastard and is having us on.

Worst moment, Paul? "Singing 'The World's On Fire' out of tune every night. I was just picking up the wrong key — but I was consistent. Every night was out of tune."

"I fell off the back of the stage one night," remembers Norman. "They'd built these steps down the back of the stage and as we walked out the back it was pitch black on the steps. I was so full of exuberance and excitement at just finishing the gig I trundled out through the door and straight down the stairs, twisted my ankle really badly. Very embarrassing — particularly having to hop around the stage the next night."

They were in the studio for six weeks during October and November: doing B-sides, some outside production work (eg The Farm), and a song for 'some film'. "That was an experiment to work with producer John Porter," says Stan, "so we booked ourselves more time than we needed, and I've reached the end of my sanity in a studio, as you can see." I can. He is at present riding a chair around the studio.

To Europe (Germany and Spain) for a week and a half later in November; TV appearances are planned for November/December. "I enjoy miming on TV," says Dave, "it's easy and you can't make mistakes." And that's about it. "Depending on how knackered we are, we might write a song or two before Christmas," says Paul. Good luck for '88.