Their new album, '64 - '95, is a world apart from the lauded Lost Horizons, but, Lemon Jelly's Fred Deakin tells Jim Carroll, it's just a sample of things to come

When Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen started working on their new album, they had a very simple plan. No matter what happened and no matter who twisted their arms, they would not make another Lost Horizons. "It's important for us, like every act, to progress," Deakin says. "From a business point of view, it would have been a smart move just to do the same things again, but that wouldn't have been very creative."

For all the success and applause which came with several hundred thousand sales of Lost Horizons, that 2002 album also brought some unwelcome distractions. One of these was the "C" word. Every time Deakin hears his band mentioned in the same breath as chill-out, he probably winces a little.

Problem is, thanks to the lovely swathes of laidback sounds and slow-motion grooves which Lost Horizons contained, Lemon Jelly became tarred with that brush. Which may be why Deakin is keen to issue a warning to those rushing to their local CD retailer to replace Lost Horizons with '64 - '95, the new Lemon Jelly album.

"A lot of people will probably be looking for another Lost Horizons, but we're encouraging them to check it out on listening posts first to make sure they know what they are getting," he says.

To enforce this point, there's a sticker attached to every CD: "This is our new album, it's not like our old album".

This, though, is something of a fib. For all its new threads and directions, '64 - '95 is not drastically removed from where Lost Horizons last deposited its audience. There are still groovy sounds. There are still japes. There's still that very Jelly sense of humour. You could play this at your next dinner party and no-one would take offence.

Mention of that "D" word does not result in Deakin slamming down the phone.

"It's a valid charge," he admits. "But if that's all that happened to our music, we would be a bit upset. We make the records and people can do with them what they want. It would be nice to think that people pay attention to it, though, and just don't use it as background music when they're eating."

This album, he hopes, will upset the dinner table. "We certainly didn't want to produce a dinner-party album, which is why we have Come Down On Me as the opening track, so people got the message that we were going somewhere else. Sure, there are some relaxed tracks on the album, but we wanted to turn the page."

To do this, they went back to the very start of the chapter. "We had a lot of fun making the Soft Rock seven-inch bootleg and we thought it would be fun to make an entire album like that, using samples on every track. So we set out to make a whole album where we were getting our hands dirty with sampling." Every track features a sample from a different year from 1964 to 1995. Along the way, Deakin and Franglen tip their hats to metalheads Masters of Reality (Come Down On Me), soft-rockers Gallagher & Lyle (Stay With You), euphoric house producers Atlantic Ocean (Don't Stop Now) and some other unlikely Jelly cohorts.

Deakin calls it their "homage" to sampling. "Our first album had a lot of samples on it. Then Lost Horizons had no samples on it at all, because we thought at the time that sampling was wrong and it was cheating and evil and bad, so why not make an album completely free of samples? "But you can do a lot of creative things with samples and a lot of people just don't bother. On this album, our hands are in the cookie jar and are grabbing around. The samples are not from our favourite tracks or anything like that. They're just random glimpses into the words and music that we've been rummaging through most of our lives. Some of the tracks are heavily indebted to samples and some just use a light sprinkling."

While there were few problems acquiring permission to use the samples, the pair encountered many frustrations when it came to making the samples fit.

"We went through hundreds of tracks looking for the right ones and trying to make the damned things work," remembers Deakin. "We picked about 50 and went to work with them. When we stood back and looked at what we had done, we realised that a lot of tracks were great just because of the sample and not because of anything we had done. The tracks on the album represent the samples we think we've done something creative and justifiable with, rather than just looped them up and exploited them under a new name."

As with every previous Lemon Jelly release, the attention to detail doesn't end when they leave the recording studio. The packaging and design on '64 - '95 ­ plus the additional DVD release, which features a video for every track on the album - benefits from a precision that few other acts apply in similar measure to their work. While Deakin's other job at the Airside design agency has a large part to play in this, he believes their design ethic also acts as something of an additional band member.

"Neither of us have very strong personalities and we're not singers. We're not natural frontmen and neither of us is Mick Jagger, so the visuals and the packaging and the artwork have to play that role to give the music the personality that we lack. So much of popular music is about aesthetics. It was never wholly about the music, right from when Elvis got up on a stage and wiggled his hips. You can't divorce the music from the aesthetics."

While they're not alone in this regard - Deakin mentions Stereolab and Super Furry Animals as groups who also pay attention to every single aspect of what they do - they are better placed than most. "We're in a unique position because we have this spread of skills, from sound to design, and we can pursue that. It's very rare that you have a DVD where the visuals were created by the artists themselves, but it seemed like a very natural and exciting thing to do."

For Deakin, such multi-tasking feeds an addiction he has no intention of giving up. "We're quite happy to be different. Neither of us ever expected to be in this position, it was a dream rather than a lifelong ambition. Now that we're here, we don't want to miss the opportunity to do something that might be interesting and innovative."

64 - '95 is out now on XL. Lemon Jelly play The Savoy, Cork, on February 25th,The Ambassador, Dublin, on February 26th and Mandela Hall, Belfast, on February 27th.