Tell me about your new live show…

The live show now is merging the past, present and future. We still play Lick songs but everything’s groovier, the whole show has more dimension, space, mystery but also this guttural force and I have trying to design a set. It’s a little bit like an algebra equation - I could start it in so many different ways because there’s such diverse music - there’s slow, haunting stuff, rip-you-head-off type of stuff so I’m kinda finding my way at the live shows. We’ve been on tour recently for about a month in the US opening for The Pretenders and Cat Power and we’ve gotten our feet wet. We have a tour coming up in UK and Europe starting October 20th (’09, it’s on the MySpace page, all the tour dates are up there). It’s a whole new show in the sense that the band is really eclectic and everything’s weirder and fun. You know it’s still rocking and so I can’t wait to see everybody and see how
they respond to the new music.

What about the first single off the album?

The single, if you wanna call it that, is called ‘Fantasy Bar.’ It’s literally about going out in New York (I hadn’t been out in a long time and my friends took me out) and it was like ‘let’s go to this bar, no, let’s go to this one’ and I felt the whole night was ridiculous, it was how people were chasing thus illusion for a perfect night, and my friend Chris Watson, who I wrote most of the record with (he’s in my band now), he was playing this riff in my kitchen and it was driving and so groovy I just start singing to it right away. It all came to me as a sinister take on searching for the perfect night. And I called it ‘Fantasy Bar’, my own little Fellini movie in a song.

I’m guessing the video will be a litle different…

The video for ‘Fantasy Bar’ is really a trip. It’s psychedelic and actually we had to re-credit because they have rules out here in the UK on how many cuts you can do ‘cos I guess the producer and director said ‘that was no good.’ They’re old videos, kind of psychedelic and strange and Bill the director who had done other major and strange videos. So I found him and we made this video.

This is all quite a change for you Juliette…

The new music is really visual and sort of the way I see music is in a visual way. I describe sounds like ‘I want it to sound like broken glass or a warm bath.’ I would say things like that to Omar and he would translate my ideas… That’s why it’s so radical and in fact the cover of the record is me holding a bull on a leash, and this vision came to me from an Omar guitar riff (from ‘Female Persecution’) and it’s so dark, it reminds me of a Salvador Dali painting this riff. And then you think of a bull - it was like a runaway train the visions I was having for what this means, like harnessing the power but really can’t, and the grace and danger of a bull and all these things like that has to be the cover of the record. Like the title, unknown territory, ‘TERRA INCOGNITO’, I want you to go there too…