Black Lips reputation precedes them – their live show has cast them as a band of ill repute, who combine their love of Nuggets-era rock ‘n roll with a sense of debauchery that encompasses everything from vomiting on stage to urinating on their fellow bandmates for shits ‘n giggles.

Beautiful!

Who’d want it any other way, really? You can’t get much more rock ‘n roll than the wild man approach that the group oh-so-willingly take. But, of course, the band would have got nowhere without being able to write some cracking tunes – and as their new album Good Bad Not Evil more than admirably demonstrates, the band have a bevy of cracking tunes at their disposal.

One of the best things about the Black Lips is that there’s an innocence to their recording approach that means that they have to capture the magic – instead of working with shiny gadgets, the four members of the New Orleans group choose to lay the tracks down in classic style, straight to tape.

So what’s guitarist Cole Alexander doing messing around with a computer?

“I’m learning about them,” he says of the fandangle devices, “and everything that I’ve recorded [for avant-garde Los Angeles artist Ariel Pink] was recorded to tape and then I’m learning how to cut them and edit them [via the computer].”

Perhaps it’s something that the Black Lips will mess with in the future – although it’s hard to imagine the steadfastly resolute DIY group ever releasing a crystalline ProTools-recorded album. “I don’t think we’ll ever do that,” he says, “but we have done things with digital – our first album was recorded that way. We’re not opposed to doing it again, but we do like doing it the way we do it. I think that the aesthetic of it [recording to tape as opposed to recording to a digital set-up] is important, because anyone can make something with digital studio – I like being able to go into a rough studio and have one room as opposed to having one bass drum mic, one snare mic, and it not sound natural. I like it to have that ‘room’ sound where it sounds like a recording of people as opposed to something out-of-reality.”

Speaking of not taking part in reality, the Black Lips look set to become stars of the screen, with the band set to feature in a new indie film called Let It Be that charts the life of a fictitious 1980s DIY group called the *Renegades*…

“I don’t know about stars,” he avers, “but we’re definitely taking part in it. A lot of different things have started happening for us this year – our new record label found out about us through reading Rolling Stone, so it’s definitely been a strange year.”

Nevertheless it would seem that stranger things will happen if you give them enough time. The new label that he refers to have found the Black Lips have become part of the cool crowd since their much-vaunted and oft-reported performances at South By Southwest music conference / festival in 2007, signing to Vice Records, the über-hip label which is distributed by a major label in the United States.

“I think that Vice has done a really good job of getting us out there. A lot of people started to like us, and that’s what’s really the important thing.”

At the time they played SxSW, the Black Lips were dubbed ‘the hardest working band’ of the festival, playing multiple shows in the one day. At the time, the band had yet to sign with a new label after calling the wonderful Bomp! Records home for their first few albums, but they were looking to step it up. It appears to have worked – recently the group played live on national American television, performing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “That was great fun,” he said.

It seems that it’s something the band are going to have to get used to as their star continues to rise.

Black Lips’ Good Bad Not Evil is out now