This interview was played on WCFM 91.9 in Williamstown, Massachusetts and appeared in the newspaper The Williams Record also out of Williamstown, MA.

The interviewer is John Phillips (JLP), who hosts an Industrial Metal show on WCFM called Zapruder TV.

**Click the blue text to download an MP3 of that part of the interview.**

I phoned Shane from a run down phone booth near NYU and he cordially invited me to his apartment nearby to talk for awhile. Shane is the lead singer for Uranium 235, an underground rock band from New York City. I picked up their CD in France in July '98 as they were touring Germany. They hooked me as soon as I listened to them and became a regular on my radio show as soon as I got to Williams. When I heard that they were willing to give radio interviews, I jumped on the chance and used a visit to the Stock Exchange with my Winter Study Class as an excuse to get down to New York. Funny thing is, for the longest time I thought they were German. So I walked to a rather innocuous looking apartment block through what seemed like a blizzard and forged inside. The door is open. Shane and Matt (lead guitar) grin at me. I plunge through.

JLP: So why Uranium 235?
Shane: Well, people have made symbols out of what they think it means. Uranium 235 is a stable element and when it collides with neutrons it gives off a powerful explosion. People associated us with that. When we come together on stage, we hit the stage really hard from the minute we get on to the minute we get off. So we use their definition. The real one of course is that we read and that it was an important part of WWII.

JLP: How long have you guys been together?
Shane: we hooked up together in a studio in Brooklyn, the end of 94… Me and Matt are the core of the band…
Matt: we had to search for some people too…through newspapers…
Shane: it's hard you know, I feel that this is the ongoing problem with this band… We're not obviously heavy and we're not obviously all keyboard.., we're kind of in the middle. So finding management and record companies or anything else is really hard because you kind of dance the line. People need to put a label on it so even with finding the musicians it took us awhile… you know, people want to play either real hard or all on keyboards… It's hard to sell… [new clip] Diversity, for us, is just as important as anything else because we live full live and we try to project that in music. And we understand that it's hard for people to put a commitment into it when it's not fully anything like what they've heard before…
Matt: It seems like people have forgotten, back in the olden days there were bands that were really diverse, then at one point in time, it seemed to stop.

JLP: How so?
Matt: It's just the way the record companies try to put bands together. They want to keep the sound of success going, recreate the sound of that last hit with a new band, so there's a stagnation.

JLP: Like with MTV?
Shane: That's one thing we'll never be is an MTV band. By choice, but also because it'll just never happen. We want to stay as underground as possible as long as we can do it… There's no problem with writing something that has appeal, that's the whole reason we like music. We all can't be Faust… keep it pure…

JLP: So is it true that you have to sell your soul to make a record?
Shane: Well, in certain respects yeah, you have to put any loved one in your life on hold basically forever, any plans for a future on hold until you know if this thing is going to work out.

JLP: So why do you do it?
Shane: It's fun. Still is. [new clip] You know our bass player (Jimmy), the first show we had he said "I had fun tonight"… like we took him out on a date or something… It's hard though, two guys in the band are really on the skids. They barely have any money, even to eat. It used to be like that for all of us. As a matter of fact the year we went out, we played something like three hundred dates in a year. We played like every single day, we lived in the van, the van was breaking down all the time. Me and Matt used to fix the van every other day. We never had any place to stay, we used to eat potato chip sandwiches. We had it really bad. Two of the guys never really recovered from those days. They're living hand to mouth every day… hard core…

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