The Big Pink are a kind of noise band that mess around with distortion and fuzz, but include quiet, soft lyrics and blow-burning guitar riffs. When you're called The Big Pink sometimes you can get people misunderstanding your angle. Luckily, to prevent any confusion, The Big Pink embrace tastefully hardcore gay pornography on their single covers. This fascination is however, merely aesthetic, they tell me - they're not gay, they're just BFFs and joke about having sex with girls together. Don't Panic met up with them promoting their new single 'Too Young To Love' to get them drunk and see if that 'In Vino Veritas' shit is actually true or not.

Hey guys, your sound’s been described as ‘a tender adventure in distortion’, which sounds really cute. Do you consider yourselves cute?

Robbie: Oh man, is that from the press release? No? Well, it works in a way because it’s definitely tender – the stuff we did before, more noise stuff when we first started - was full-on, it was brutal. But we’re definitely gonna put that on our Myspace. Someone called us ‘pink noise’ the other day - that was pretty cool. Like not white noise, but pink noise.

Well if you Google ‘The Big Pink’ on image search, you just get loads of porn.

Milo: Do you? Well that’s exactly what we wanted.

How do I get that t- shirt that’s on your website? Did you give it to someone in the Klaxons? Because he gave it to his missus (who happens to be Lovefoxxx). Usually when guys let girls wear their t-shirts, they hate them. Or, on the flipside, girls usually want the best t-shirts from your whole collection.

Milo: Well we’ve got this box of t-shirts sitting at home but we’re always too embarrassed to set up merch stalls, I don’t think it would work at the Old Blue Last, either – we’d just get robbed. You can have one, theyre done by Akiko, but they’re Fruit of the Loom though, I hope you’re cool with that…

That’s OK, I’m getting a little tired of American Apparel, anyway.

Robbie: No, this is definitely made in a sweatshop.

Milo, has you affiliation with Merok Records affected what style you take on or avoid?

Milo: No - when we really started doing this, years ago – it was before Merok. We actually started a label back then, eight years ago when we first met, called HR, which was a really horrible noise label. Then we started a label called Oh! Puss records – and we didn’t release anything on that. So yeah, I mean labels come and go – it doesn’t affect me in any way.

Robbie, is it cool to talk about Lily Allen? Did she eat all your food while she was staying with you?

Robbie: She kept on stealing all the cookies.

So what do you guys like to listen to when you’re not making sweet music with Lily?

Milo: Apart from Lily Allen? I haven’t heard her album, actually.

What, so you hung out with her and you didn’t listen to her music? Jesus.

Robbie: I listen to a LOT of different music…

Milo, to Robbie: You have the same CD in your car every time, man. Otis Redding. Basically we rip off loads of soul bass-lines in our music. Actually, we rip off loads of soul melodies, too.

So why are you doing a launch night for Undercurrent magazine this month?

We have no idea, we just got asked to do it. I’ve never read it.

Well there’s a magazine called Undercurrent - it’s pitched at ‘The Serious scuba diver’.

Milo/Robbie: hahaha, are you serious? Now I’m really looking forward to it. I don’t even like snorkelling, I keep getting salt down the tube and stuff. My ears always really hurt.

Robbie: I’m terrified of sharks - we went to Scotland, to detox and take a break and make some music… We went to a little cottage in the middle of nowhere eight miles down this dirt track , and we were fishing for our food every day. One day we saw this fucking shark, maybe from a few feet away. It was a basking shark and was like, four metres long. It was just swimming really slowly with its mouth open eating up the plankton. I almost cried, I thought we were fucked.

So what’s the next step?

We got a single coming out at the end of the month, then we’re gonna finish the record - we have to finish it this year and release it next year.

Your artwork is pretty um, gay actually.

Yeah, this guy Dennis Cooper from the New York, he’s a poet from the early 80s - that whole No-Wave scene that was going on there – this dude has done all our artwork so far. There’s this book we’ve been reading called Up Is Up, but So Is Down that documents that world. We used to read it and rip stuff off from it, his pictures included: then I went on his website and wrote him an email asking if we could use it. He really liked our music and so he agreed. He’s really gay and his website is basically a scrapbook of young boys tied up and stuff. Our ‘Too Young To Love’ single is basically this guy eating out another guy’s asshole while the other guy fucks a third guy in the ass.

Do you have a lot of gay fans?

We’re looking for some at the moment.

I heard they’re the best.

Check out The Big Pink at www.myspace.com/musicfromthebigpink