7 QUESTIONS; Athlete singer Joel Pott reveals why the English indie band are desperate for a return to Scotland.

Byline: AVRIL CADDEN

Your tour has quite a few dates in Scotland, what's good about coming here? My uncle was a ski instructor on Cairngorm and I skied there from about the age of seven.

My grandparents lived up Speyside and my uncles still do. They are always telling me I have to play Inverness. So I'll get a chance to see them when I'm there.

It's beautiful where they live, right in the heart of the forest near Loch Garten.

You're on a new label for your album Black Swan? We are with Fiction and were on Parlophone before.

When they released our last record, they froze the budget and we said we wanted to get off the label.

They went: "Yeah, okay." We then got on with making a record and had started writing songs. Our currency is about making a really good album.

As soon as we got a couple of songs we hooked up with a great producer, Tom Rothrock, who also had a couple of songs and wanted to work with us.

We started talking to a few labels and everyone said the songs were brilliant and now we're on Fiction, so it's worked out.

How does the album sound? We've always been a really good live band but I don't think we'd ever really captured that on record.

So when I started talking to Tom the producer, I said I wanted to be able to play the songs on an acoustic guitar so people would just stand or sit there and think that's just a brilliant song.

I asked him not to dress it up, so it sounds as if we are playing on stage. I really feel we have captured that.

What's the inspiration behind the songs? There's a song called Human Touch about those moments where normal everyday stuff seems to transcend human activity. Say when you have a kid - which I've experienced - and there just seems to be something supernatural and magical about it. It's those moments of spark when you feel on top of the world.

Was this a personal record for you to write? The songs are much more personal than on our last one. The song Black Swan is about my late grandpa and his journey from this life to the next.

Your single Wires was about your daughter Myla, are there more songs for her? She's six now. The song Magical Mistakes is about her. She's a little dancer and it was just inspired by seeing her dance. She's a good big sister to my two other kids.

That is definitely it, though.

I've got a boy called Ethan who is three and a little girl called Esmae, who was born last December.

It's been a while since your last album and tour - what have you been doing? I've been doing a bit of DIY carpentry. It's good brain space when you are working on a record for hours and hours. You build a cupboard or something and it takes your mind off it. It is kind of therapeutic.

AVRIL CADDEN

CAPTION(S):

ON YOUR MARKS ... Athlete's Carey Willetts, Steve Roberts, Joel Pott and Tim Wanstall