Oh, how I tried. After dear friends agreed to lend me their MiniDisc recorder, I couldn't get the damn thing to work. So, Alex and I just decided to yammer for a while, and with Alex's gracious permission, I thus present an exercise in weakly paraphrasing his and my musings over tea as his infant daughter burbled in the background.

Deep Dark United is a name that has been spoken around these parts with an unusual reverence in the last coupla years. Starting over three years ago, praise for the band's unpredictable, dynamic interpretations of Alex's extraordinary songs became effusive and widespread in local press [if not in violently self-hating Now], among veteran and green musicians - in all the social circles intersecting somewhere in this publication and beyond. Everybody knows about them, talks about them... they're important.

I somehow knew this as fact, but it largely escapes Alex himself - or more to the point, it ends up being irrelevant.

"None of those people seem to come see us anymore, really," I'm 100 per cent sure he said. From his perspective it's a crystallization of the talk-is-cheap aphorism. Yes, word of mouth can do wonders, but it don't add up to much if the venue's empty.

In addition, since the legend of the band was etched into the stone tablets of our collective indie rock psyche, the lineup has changed more than once, the approach to performance has changed wildly, and pretty much every song 200 people crammed in Ted's used to cheer for has been shed for the new.

I asked Alex if there was any truth to the notion I've heard that he was deliberately pushing his audience away; that his music had become a sort of introverted therapy and that everyone else could jump off a cliff in traffic while fucking themselves.

"Oh, I hate that," I am almost positive he scoffed, "that actually hurts my feelings! Of course I want people to like the music... I'm just going to do my own thing when we play."

To say nothing of the fact that Deep Dark United [not just "DDU" if that's all right with U] is very much a collective operation; it is most certainly not the tortured whines of some control freak "legend" who has believed his own hype for so long he's Thom Yorke or whatever. Veteran collaborators Brodie West and Tania Gill have noodled, thumped and squeaked with Alex for years; Ryan Driver and Nick Fraser, more recent folds in the quilt, complete the current picture.

"You know what the difference is with this band?" I swear he asked me, "I love going to see them all play in other bands. I totally get off on it." After only theoretically countable personnel changes, Alex seems to have found folks who can play his songs in the many ways that make him most happy.

What Alex has learned to do with this band is remarkable: he lets his songs go. The band takes care of the flourishes and returns to the themes, and it can be wildly different every time - it's a clunky, inefficient, yet utterly charming old machine that runs on instinct.

"Yeah, that's it - I trust them," I am utterly convinced he told me, "and the songs are still songs... I just don't think you need four people going BUNH! BUNH! BUNH! at the same time for a melody or a message to get across. I'm the backbone - the guitar is the rhythm, and I sing, and that's enough for the song to shine through. I guess I just don't care much about specifically arranging songs anymore."

He asks a lot of his audience. There should be more music like that around, though, and certainly more audiences willing and able to put in the time to appreciate the processes at work. Put in the time, yo, enough with the hushed awe. In the case of Deep Dark United, it's eminently worth it.