Introduce yourselves.Regulations are Marcus – electric guitar, Otto – vocals, Jens – drums and Robban – electric bass. We live in Umeå.

How long have Regulations been together? I know you’ve played in bands before this, give us the lowdown.Regulations started playing at the end of -02. Some of us usedto play together in another hardcore band for a couple of years, but itdoesn’t have that much to do with Regulations. When we started out wedecided to start from scratch. Instead of walking in the same old stepswe sat down and talked about how we would handle everything in advance,like labels, gigs and everything else. You could say we’re trying tomake things that have gone wrong with old bands right at the first timeinstead.

Have you done a lot of shows?We haven’t played that much yet, we haven’t done anyreal tours. This spring and summer we’re gonna try to change that andplay some more down south. All together we’ve done about 20 to 30 showsmaybe, most in Umeå or futher up north. We’ve also played in Stockholm,Uppsala, Sandviken and Copenhagen.

Any new records coming up?We’re working on a bunch of songs right now that we’re goingto record in november. There’s going to be an LP coming out this springhopefully. [Which is confirmed by now, Havoc Records will release it].We’re feeling it’s time for that about now. It’s always good to releasea couple of singles first until you’ve found your own sound. And itfeels like we’re there now. I think the LP will be killer.

What bands have you been inspired by?We’ve been influenced by a slew of different bands. Notunexpectedly by all kinds of American hardcore and punkrock from theend of the 70’s and early 80’s, for example the Adolescents, the Germs, Black Flag, the Wipers, Flipper and the Bad Brains.

Don’t know for sure that you’re coming out of the hardcorescene, but it seems like that. It seems a lot of the garagerock crowdhave discovered you and embraced you! Did you aim at getting a soundthat was more garagey?We all have our roots deep down in the punk- andhardcorescene. We’ve never thought about sounding very garagey. When wewrite our songs we throw out everything that’s the least actionrockin’.Of course we like the classic bands like the Stooges, MC5 and RadioBirdman, but they’re not really influences. Our music is basically justhard rock & roll and that’s probably why the garagecrowd likes us.I have nothing against that, quite the opposite it just feels cool.

What current bands do you like?There’s not that many good bands around these days to be honest. Of the Swedish bands I can only think of KnugenFaller (Umeå) and Henry Fiat’s Open Sore (Stockholm). There’s a bunchof great bands from Copenhagen, among others Gorilla Angreb, No HopeFor The Kids and Hjerte Stop. From the USA there’s also a few goodbands, The Tyrades and Annihilation Time to name some. Of coursethere’s a few good bigger bands too, but those seem unnecessary tomention here. I think the big problem today is that no one puts anytime or energy into their bands. Another problem that I see is that themembers of the bands always have different goals and prioritizecompletely differently from each other. You do need a huge amount ofcommitment to play music.

What ’regulations’ do you want your listeners to live by?Fuck rules, we’re anarchists. Everyone should live by their own rules.