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Alistair: It’s called ‘Burn Your Flag With Pride’ and it’s got 14 songs on it… one for every wilderness year since the last proper Real PD album, Nostalgia. Writing began in the Autumn of 2004 for this new record and it has songwriting contributions from me, Mark and Adrian as well as Richard who is our fantastically talented new guitarist. We’ve swelled to become a 6-piece – in addition to Richard, Steve and Claire have joined us in our Flag-Burning. Steve is on non-playing bass (that’s a Culture Club/ 80’s pop marketing reference for those old and sad enough to get it), and Steve’s also on ‘Hair’ and ‘History’. ‘Hair’ because the rest of us are ageing and thinning on top and we need to hide behind sexy youngsters with flowing manes… ‘History’ because he’s a very knowledgeable pop historian who can chip in with absorbingly superfluous titbits about Jon Bon Jovi’s dad at the right moments. Claire is on Vocals, Glamour and Incandescent Intelligence. And we are also highly honoured to have Sean back with us too, playing guitar on 2 tracks.

Alistair: We were conscious of being an 80s band on the cusp of reforming and were fairly horrified at the rather tacky way some of the proper 80s pop stars had hamfistedly handled their comebacks. Mark decided we should have a motto for the album and that it should be ‘Dignity and Excellence.’ I thought that sounded rather like a Jane Austen title, clearly about two allegorical sisters who embodied these virtues really. They were a bit more glammed-up when they finally made it to the song, and they’ve also got something of the ‘muse’ about them – you have to be around when Dignity and Excellence are around, if you miss them, you’ve missed them. Baby.

Mark:In the 80s I began holding a long-cherished dream that one day we would make electro-disco music with screeching feedback guitars that you could dance to in the style of the Human League girls. 20 years later I bandied a few words about and with little effort on my part it came true. There is no moral we can learn from this.

Alistair: This is us being militantly anti-sadcore. Pop should be about energy and youth and not Coldplay type whingeing… in my humble.

Mark: Though I'd prefer not to have to listen to his music, it's not that I have anything personal against James Blunt or his audience. But why do they have to all go out and buy his wares over the same period of 5 weeks? If anyone can suggest a form of Direct Action that will improve the charts that doesn't involve having to make your own album or running PopJustice then please contact us. Sometimes I think the world would be a happier place if Jeff Buckley had actually died before he made that album.

Alistair: This one is inspired by the avant-garde electronic composer Delia Derbyshire, who was initially turned down by all manner of record companies because they didn’t think it was appropriate to have a woman in control of making and producing her own music. Eventually she got in the position where she had complete artistic freedom, and she used it to make the most otherworldy-sounding, off-the-leash stuff. I wanted to emphasise in the lyrics here how sensual her music was, that it was kind of a vindication of all she’d been through and an expression of who she was a person and a woman. Because I’m writing about an avant-garde artist, it didn’t seem appropriate to have to tie the lyric down to conventions of grammar and language, so it’s kind of freeform and abstract in places. It was fun writing like this and even more fun observing how the lyric reads like Manic Street Preachers if you write a song this way… Singing wise this is the closest to a Thom Yorke moment I have ever got.

Mark: I suggested we write a song about Delia Derbyshire. Then I didn't do anything about it and is if by magic it appeared. A pattern begins emerge here as I cast myself in the role of executive producer.

Mark: This was always designed as an instrumental which in the great art-rock tradition would kick off an album and be gone in 90 seconds before you realised it wasn't a proper song; an introduction to a then imaginary even more frantic track. During programming a discussion erupted over the use of quantising. This is the process where a synthesizer 'tidies up' a loop of a motif that's been played live so it's perfectly in time with the beat. I accept it's a good idea for basslines but it's ridiculous how long it takes to create a riff that just goes 'diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle' etc. 'Oh, that'll do' apparently wouldn't do. Furthermore, surely quantising takes out the last remaining human element in electronic music. Anyway, an alternate title for 'BYFWP' of equal attitude was born: 'Quantise This!'

Alistair: This song features the most welcome return of Sean on guitar, last heard on the 1988 album The D Factor. And he's a human enough element, nah?

Alistair: Self-explanatory song this one; the concept being a party with a theme of pairs of mostly famous people whom I’ve always got mixed up with each other. Richard wrote the guitar riffs which fit very snugly and funkily around the beats. This is a throwback to the breakbeats of the Nostalgia album in a way… but hopefully with a bit of a meatier sound…

Adrian: This was fun, because I think we all contributed a couple of lyrics to the last bit. My favourites are “Patrick Moore meet Faith No More” and “Kiss me Oliver Hardy”.

Mark: I wanted 'Finny Haddock' to be mistaken for 'Fanny Craddock' but maybe I shouldn't be drawing attention to the adlibs. It was hard to resist going 'Wooo-wooo!' in the background.

Alistair: I’ve always been a big fan of Tony Hatch, the 60’s songwriter and bandleader who penned many a hit for Petula Clark and even had time to do the themes for Emmerdale, Crossroads and Neighbours, and so this song was done in imitation of his style. Well, the first five minutes of it anyway! The piano rhythms here are like those you hear on ‘I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love.’ Others have assumed that Mandeville Road is an imaginary place, a la Itchycoo Park, but it exists in my hometown of Southport. It’s something of a curio because it has only the one house on it: apparently the Road was a planned development that was halted because of the outbreak of the First World War, and then never recommenced. This song imagines a world where wars never happen and where the whole of Mandeville Road was built. It is populated with well-balanced, happy, educated, community-minded, tolerant human beings who live peacefully side-by-side. There’s always a place for naïve idealism on a Real PD album, particularly in an era such as ours of unnecessary wars and bloodshed…

Mark: Singing the hushed backing vocals in the mid-section was the most moving Real PD moment for me since the first run-through of 'Stop Me Dreaming' in 1987. It reminded me of 'Sing Something Simple' that used to be on before the Top 40 Sundays when Radio 1 shared the FM transmission with Radio 2 before it became any cop at all. Unfortunately not all of it fitted and some bits had to be faded out! It would be cool to say the Outro was recorded in the chill-out room at the Hacienda in 1989 but it would also be lying.

Alistair: This is my favourite at the mo… it’s a classic summery, jaunty Adrian tune with a bittersweet lyric. It’s ironic that we set out thinking we were going to make a very steely, icy Fischerspooner kind of album but ended up with warm, lush 60s things like this on it instead! The song is a different take on unrequited love, perhaps a bit more stoical than the usual. I mean it’s hardly Sasha Distel, who sang ‘please say you’re in love with this guy,/ if not I’ll just die.’ That sort of thing strikes me as emotionally unhealthy and not terribly realistic… I mean, the world is chock-full of relationships where one person loves the other more than they are loved back. Pop songs are conventionally idealistic and impossibly romantic and this is just a portrait of one of those off-balance type love affairs. It original lyric was ‘your love is lopsided’ but we were worried it sounded too much like it was referring to nasty deformities in the undies department so it was changed.

Mark: This is surely the catchiest, poppiest track on the album and a surprise late contender as a potential single. It's also probably the most traditionally Real PD sounding; it wouldn't be hard to imagine a lower-fi version being a highlight on 'The D Factor.'

Adrian: Alistair commissioned me to write a really catchy tune for the new album, and the chorus melody popped into my head one day while I was pottering around the flat. I sang it into my camera phone and wrote the verse and middle eight around that. It didn’t take very long for us to record the basic structure of the song, partly because it’s not very complicated and partly Alistair’s keyboard can do key changes without you having to reprogram everything. I really like Alistair’s lyrics.

Mark: I started writing 2 sets of lyrics for this, the first from the point of view of a very busy lady who didn't have time to fall in love and the other from a person who is desperately trying to impress a potential paramour by getting into their hobbies and fails but has a good time anyway. Definitely not Me kind of songs but time waits for no (slow) man and it was finished before I'd put pen to paper.

Alistair: Adrian had been to see The Producers, the musical based around the spoof Springtime for Hitler song. Around the same time he’d been to the Ukraine to the Eurovision Song Contest. As so often happens in dreams, these two events had got mixed up in his subconscious and he ended up dreaming that Hitler somehow was resurrected and returned to power and decided to ban the Eurovision. He told Mark and me about this, but we strongly disagreed with him: we felt that, far from banning Eurovision, Hitler would want to host it himself, a la the Olympics, in Berlin, and that he would get Leni Riefenstahl to film it in icy black and white, accentuating all the ‘body fascism’ that goes into a show like that nowadays – it’s all about dancers and the way they look, and any notions of the songs themselves being centre-stage have long-since gone out of the window. It’s a political song this one, blackly comical in places. And with a lyric so multi-layered it could justifiably be described as ‘deeply confused’. As for whether Leni really was a ‘tall, Teutonic Lady’ we have no idea, but it just sounded good…

Adrian: This is the first tune I wrote for the new album, so I literally had to wipe the dust off my Korg M1 keyboard, which I hadn’t used in a decade. I was interested by some of the complex and haunting harmonies used in some contemporary pop songs such as “In Your Eyes” by Kylie, so this was a kind of starting point. The haunting harmonies helped in the end to emphasise the darker side of the lyric. And, yes, it does have a feel of Gloria Gaynor too. Quite a collaborative song, with Alistair and Mark sharing the lyric-writing, which was indeed based on a dream I had.

Mark: Normally there is nothing more tedious than other people's dreams and normally Adrian is no exception to this. Obviously this song is surreal but there's a lot going on and hopefully none of it is incomprehensible. We even did research! But I can't guarantee accuracy because I used the internet... The music is definitely different - a sort of pre-Euro Disco sound. It's actually very subtle - as an instrumental it was almost impossible to make head or tail or the structure without Adrian's help.

Alistair: The main bit (in Deutschlish) means ‘The birds make their nests from my leftovers’. It’s kind of a philosophical rumination on how we are encouraged to tread a line between being too frugal and too excessive and wasteful in the way we live our lives. We get messages about binge drinking and overeating and also about living in an environmentally-friendly way; and at the same time we're very much encouraged to eat, drink and be merry. So this song explores that tension, hahaha! The bit in the middle has Richard doing his best Pink Floyd and some experiments with questions on cue-cards and answers recorded alone in a confessional. The Floyd did it on ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ with their roadies. We have no roadies so we used band members instead, but no one knew exactly what their question would be until they entered the confessional, so I think the answers sound sincere and spontaneous. I guess this is one to file under ‘arty’. It would be an unlikely choice as a single, let’s put it like that.

Adrian: We all had to go into a Big Brother diary room and answer embarrassing questions for this.

Mark: I think a German lady was supposed to drop in to say to deliver the monologue at the start - doubtless there'd be a picture of her here brandishing a match in front of a blue flame if she had turned up. The text message she sent to apologise for the no-show looked fine in print but sounded utterly filthy when relayed in robot-voice by the land line. Something to do with hoping we all had a good session together.

Adrian: We listened to Mark’s original track over lunch, but had to turn it off after a few minutes for fear it would cause loss of appetite or even mental instability amongst newer band members.

Mark: Only the title and the 3 notes survive from the original idea but then again the original idea comprised little else. This is about the Politics of Disgust; something evil is lurking in the garden and it's probably coming from within.

Alistair: This certainly puts the ‘jungle’ back into drum’n’bass pop, if you see what I mean. It’s a bit bonkers and I’m fond of it.

Adrian: This is the first track we recorded so it was really good to be working together again after so long. It’s also probably the most truly collaborative song that Alistair, Mark and I have ever written. Mark got the idea for the title during a visit to the toilet.

Alistair: This is really the one song which stuck to the original musical idea for the album, which was to fashion a blasted, spartan, electroclash-y kind of sonic landscape picked out with coruscating guitars. The music we wrote from scratch during the session, the only one we did that way on this album. The lyrics are Mark’s. It was fun to sing them because it meant getting into somebody else’s head for a bit…

Mark: The lyrics come largely culled from overheard conversation and observed things. Hopefully the contradictions this brought about make it more interesting than straightforward feistiness or submissive neediness of proper pop hits. The only lyric that went AWOL was the potentially legendary 'I know why men like you have issues/I know why men use man-sized tissues'. In fairness this was written before Charlotte Church announced the title of her forthcoming album but I rather suspect that Alistair had 'issues' with being required to sing it!

Alistair: It’s hip now to emulate certain 80s bands, as I’m sure the Bravery and the Killers would happily concur. We in the Real PD enjoy thinking the unthinkable, so we decided that we would try to emulate the one 80s band that no one else will touch. Tonight Matthew, and for one night only, we are Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

Mark: If Richard thrilled us to the bone with the one-take guitar on 'D & E' then this is really Sean's time to shine. Alistair looked fab with the ripped, red fishnets on his face too. I wanted to sing 'The only one who could ever freak me' as in 'freak me out' but Alistair has listened to too many Missy Elliott albums and it was vetoed.

Adrian: Nice to see Sean and a bit of his hair again for the first time in 17 (?) years.

Alistair: Now that is definitely a case of a conspicuously shiny pot calling a still pleasantly downy kettle black...

Alistair: A feel-good groove as a bit of a palette cleanser after some quite angsty tracks. There are many ways to sing 'Huh!' but as any student of pop knows, no one does them better than Morten Harket. This is in direct imitation of his windswept, muscular Nordic grunts.

Mark: This was a late replacement for 'Trees Change Colour' which nobody thought felt quite right. Hopefully it will emerge at some point, possibly with Claire on lead vocal. The first half of 'Huh!...' sounds to me like Alistair's attempt provide an instrumental backing for something like 'Goal of The Month'. Fittingly I love to listen to this when I wake up - it really gets me going in the morning.

Alistair: A classic Adrian-penned ballad. A lot of songs about friends are a bit icky and I wanted to write a lyric that was a bit more balanced and more deferential than that – they’re penning you in, and letting you win, they sort of help and sort of hinder. Which is not to say that the song doesn’t end on a sentimental note. One of the most important lines here is ‘You like to think that you made it your life’s work/ to prove that water is thicker than blood.’ I think for people of my generation, building and maintaining a network of friends became incredibly important as family bonds became perhaps looser than they’d been before. It’s quite a major theme in people’s lives now, friendship, I think.

Adrian: This latest ballad continues a tradition of Alistair-Adrian ballads that began with “With or Without You” (written BEFORE the U2 namesake song) on “And there was wine”. We typically used to record our ballads using a real piano. This one’s synthesised but recorded in real time. I pleaded with Alistair not to turn down the tinkly bits after I went home. And I don’t think he did. Much. I like his cynical lyric which really stands out against my soppy sweet tune.

Mark: I really wanted to play harmonica on one track, because I always used to now and again and it is very easy to play even if you haven't picked one up in 15 years. Didn't care what type of song - if it clashed on an industrial-electro stomper then all the better. But it did have to be in C major (or A minor) as harmonicas come in scales and this was apparently the only song for my instrument. The harmonica on this track is just me playing along practicing for the first time unaware I am being recorded with bits where I stop and say stuff like, 'Oh, that worked really well - I'll try and do that again' cut out except at the very end by when I've been told what is going on and am desperately trying to finish on the right note at the same time as the piano. Harmonicas go out of tune very quickly apparently and this one is 20 years old but can anybody really tell? I'd like to imagine Stevie Wonder has a big pile of them discarded behind his favourite armchair.

'Burn Your Flag With Pride' is out now and available to buy! For the lowdown on previous PD works, click here