A great hunger for truth, it is for sure the feeling of major evidence raising when listening to Lies Damned Lies' music or speaking with Charlie Irvine, one of the three members of the Scottish group. Their music requires a little bit more attention than the one we use to pay to the magma of anonymous sounds which give soundtrack to our lives. Yes, because Lies Damned Lies' songs belong to that world where every mask falls to leave the place to something deeper and, probably, more spiritual to which we are not able to give a name, but we feel absolutely necessary. "Our name is more a kind of quiet dig at the music business" says Charlie, "As for whether our music is a desperate search for truth, without wanting to sound too pretentious I think it probably is. In LDL we force ourselves to write about topics which are quite difficult and I think you tend to dig quite deep within yourself to do this. In doing so you find out quite a lot about yourself and the way you see the world".

So LDL's music is a sort of Chinese wall against misery of real world, but as it always happens the wall is not high enough to stop everyday news to reach our existence and to rape our innocence. In this case the only solution left is to cry against a cruel fate. "Lamentations was written as a response to the amount of terrible news which comes flying at us all the time. We hear about more disasters and tragedies than any other generation in history, more instantly, and for many of us there is no way to process all this information. So when we looked at the ancient book of Lamentations in the context of, say, the siege of Sarajevo, it seemed incredibly relevant. It’s someone reacting to terrible events in the history of Jerusalem (destruction of the temple, rape, exile, people eating rats and dogs, even women eating their children) by writing quite a formal lament. It seems to us that our culture needs ways to lament; that with our emphasis on progress, life and the future we can harm ourselves by leaving no room for mourning. I don’t think either the book or the album particularly blames God for all this - these are simply the facts, and you feel this stuff in your guts as much as think about it".

The most impressive track of the concept album is without any doubt "The Sea" where the group put in the prophet clothes claiming themselves for a catastrophe of epic dimensions as unique possible way to come out from the disease of modern life. "The Sea is an attempt to get inside the head of a prophet. Actually I think the original book of Lamentations does try to extract some hope for the future from the dreadful events of the present, but in some ways that seems a bit of a copout. There is a strand to the prophet’s thinking which says, "These things are so terrible that no-one should ever have seen them" The only way the prophet (who is also a survivor, much like the survivors of the concentration camps) can cope with this knowledge is to imagine himself swallowed up by the sea. Only something as vast and impersonal as the sea can cleanse away the terribleness of war and siege. Another strand which I have picked up from holocaust survivors is that of guilt - "Why should I still be alive when people better and worthier than me suffered and died?". So there’s an irrational and quite self-destructive streak to these people. But The Sea is also a call to people to look at themselves, and to react to it all, even angrily, so in a sense it’s got that challenging element, rather than being entirely hopeless".

Surely a message of so deep contents is of difficult understanding and sheerness for an audience anaesthetised from a popular music too lazy and distracted to make start to look inside themselves. "There is very little room for stuff like us in the way pop music is marketed. At the same time I still cling to this belief that lots of people yearn for something deeper from popular music: they just don’t know where to get it! Once folk stumble across something like LDL they are often very committed to what we do. And there has been a tremendous groundswell of interest in this country in music like that of Henri Gorecki and Arvo Part, who are dealing with deeper, more spiritual issues. I also think someone like Nick Cave follows his own path and has a great deal of integrity."

The atmosphere of lyrics and the score of music suspended on a magic equilibrium between melancholy and strength obviously reminds the only group able to shake our conscience with simple pop songs: the Blue Nile. Once I suggest this comparison Charlie starts: "This makes me chuckle a bit. Paul Buchanan is a pop star, even if he also a bit of a tortured artist! Actually the comparison is not all that just, because he is the singer and sole lyric writer in the Blue Nile, whereas LDL is much more of a collective. Steve is the singer, but the three of us very much write together, with probably as many of the lyrics coming from me as him. It’s fair to say that we are fans of the Blue Nile. I think they have been a big influence on us in the way that they use space and have that unhurried feel to their albums. Perhaps the biggest musical difference is that we are much more electric. Our four studio albums have been a big rock production (which we hated), a stripped down, ambient keyboard album, a live acoustic recording, and a more Talk Talk-ish "real" sounds production with guitar, bass and drums".It is curious how bands that use to produce albums of outstanding quality but hidden to the main part of people seem to feel a sort of confraternity among them. It is sure that Lamentations has probably more in common with the dark atmosphere of "the Laughing Stock" than with the radiance of Peace at Last.

The feeling that LDL belong to a world apart gets deeper when speaking about Glasgow and the well-known "Scottish spirit". "The grey streets of Glasgow are where my heart is, but probably not Steve’s. I’m not sure about Dot. We've lived in London, then in Bristol, where we all shared a house for 4 years, then in Ayrshire, before Dot and I returned to the city. Of course you can’t hide your Scottishness. I do believe there is a melodic sensibility, which the Scots have and you can hear it right across Scottish music. The most direct Scottish connection is that we spent a week on the island of Iona writing the songs for the Human Dress album. It is beautiful, remote and tiny island where the wind whips in from the Atlantic and you are surrounded by sea, and I think the space was quite inspiring. But then again Flying Kites was mostly written on a holiday in Brittany and Lamentations came about in our house in Ayrshire."

In Lamentations one of the few contacts with the golden world of business music is given by the presence of Ewan Vernal, ex-member of disintegrated Deacon Blue. "Ewan Vernal is an old friend actually. He used to play with a mutual friend‘s band, called "Rattling the cage", before he joined Deacon Blue. Now he lives quite close to the studio and he’s basically one of the best bass players in the country, so it was great to set him loose in our songs."

Popular music, new age, melancholy, happiness, LDL’s music swirls through the different genres avoiding any possible classification and leaving on the listener a feeling of something higher. "Every band in the world likes to flatter themselves that their music defies categories! I suppose I would call it "unhurried, ambient misery-pop with dashes of redemption". It’s certainly not soul or jazz. I’ve said already that Talk Talk have been a big influence, in terms of the way their recordings sound. I think there's also quite classical influence, particularly in some of the chordings that we use- Steve listens to nothing else, and Dot is very taken with the work of Arvo Part from Estonia. I’m more of guitar man myself- I grew up on the Stones, and I don’t think you can get beyond a good Keef riff."

In addition to the particular musical atmosphere Lamentations is obviously related to literature. There is a song inspired to a poem by Blake. "Well I guess we all read! The Blake poem was actually suggested to us by a friend, and the song is a setting for her wedding. I think Lamentations was very formed by our reading around other stuff-books on the Holocaust for example, or the work of Primo Levi, who is a wonderful Italian writer. I also had the opportunity recently to work on an attempt to do a modern setting of some of the psalms. Some of the people in the group were very inspiring and one guy in particular, a poet called Harry Smart, brought a great deal of literary discipline to what we did. The whole idea of ruthlessly editing and re-editing your work is quite hard for young songwriters, but I now see it as essential."

Lamentations can lead to the wrong conclusion that LDL are a group totally devoted to pessimism, thing that is not shared by Irvine. "We are optimist definitely, with strong pessimistic streaks! I think I’m quite naive about people and always expect the best of them. At the same time I can get very gloomy about the future of the world! I suppose it’s all big picture versus small picture stuff."

It is funny to ask Charlie if there is any possibility of see LDL in Italy as, for the moment, no one has been interested even in distributing their records in our country. "We have played a few gigs at the end of June- a couple in London and one in Glasgow. We’re doing one in Glasgow in October in the middle of the night. That’s it I’m afraid. Touring is a tricky logistical problem now that Dot and I have a little girl. She’s also called Charlie and she’s just turned three, so it’s hard to take her with us, but hard to leave her as well! Maybe one day."