Sergeant Wilco

Anyone who thought Wilco had shot their load with the sprawling, humungous double album, Being There, in 1997 will be glad to learn that its follow-up, Summerteeth, finds the Chicago-based band on the creative Viagra.

Making an absolute nonsense of that music industry dictum that albums should have a clear focus and coherence that gives the listener an unequivocal sense of what the band are about, Summerteeth is all over the place. It could teach the Heinz corporation a thing or two about variety: it has more colours than a packet of M&Ms and more mood-swings in its 60 minutes than your average Liverpool supporter experiences in a wretched, trophy-free season.

And yet it's quite probably a minor masterpiece. At the risk of sounding like a daytime radio jock, Wilco's new record covers so much ground that it really does bring you the best of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s: you know the roll call already — Beatles, Beach Boys, Byrds, Big Star, Bananarama . . . (arf!). But has this deviation from the more linear alt-country route of their previous work been welcomed or shunned in Wilco's home patch?

"There's a bit of a feeling from people that seems to say, 'what the hell do these guys think they're doing trying to do this stuff?'", mimics Jay Bennett, Wilco's gold-fingered multi-instrumentalist, down a phone-line from their camp in Chicago. "The press outside of the United States tends to be a little more . . . educated, with a deeper sense of history about it, as opposed to not caring about anything that hasn't happened in the past two years. If you have a sense of history, this music makes perfect sense. So if all you know is our last record, then maybe it doesn't."

Summerteeth was recorded on the hoof, during the hard slog of a protracted tour, using various recording studios in various cities over a fairly lengthy span of time. Did this help create the diversity in its styles and tone?

"Absolutely, it helped things develop," asserts Bennett. "Not so much because of the different studios but just the fact that we would record, take a break, record, take a break . . . It was during those periods of reflection that we started to understand what direction this album was going in."

A study of the sleeve credits reveals the scale of Bennett's input into this album. He is proficient on a staggering number of instruments. On "My Darling", for instance, he plays acoustic, baritone, e-bow and electric guitars, slide bass, piano, keyboards, tambourine, claps and does backing vocals, while on "A Shot In The Arm", he wrestles with lap steel, synthesizers and drums.

Given the phenomenal work-rate Bennett keeps up in Wilco, it's even more astonishing to hear of his extra-curricular musical activities. He lists off about half a dozen artists whose records he has either produced or played on in the last year alone, including Alison Moorer, Freedy Johnston, and Tommy Keane, to name but three. Then, of course, there was that award-winning collaboration with Billy Bragg on Mermaid Avenue, last year's album of Woody Guthrie lyrics set to music by Bragg, Bennett and co., and which was recorded in dear, drizzly Dublin.

At Billy Bragg's recent Vicar St. gig, the Barking bard mentioned that Wilco spent their time off from recording duties driving around looking at castles.

"Well, is there anything else to do?" laughs Bennett, only, I suspect, half-joking. "It was a case of either getting stuck in traffic jams in the rain or drive around and look at castles in the rain! That's the only thing I don't like about Ireland: the weather. Everything else is beautiful.

"Here, even during the winter, it's sunny during the day. It might be, like, below zero and snowing but it's sunny! I think you become psychologically dependent on a little bit of sunshine. In Ireland, I think it was sunny about half a day in the whole month we were there."

Given that Woody Guthrie's own recordings were so musically sparse, was it a conscious decision on Wilco's part to spruce it up and bring it into the 1990s?

"It's never as premeditated as people give us credit for: either keeping it sparse or layering it," replies Bennett. "It's just a matter of doing what's right. And it's also a decision to make things fit into the album context, which we were very conscious of. If enough things naturally drift in one direction, then the rest of the record's gonna drift in that direction."

Billy Bragg made the point that if Guthrie was around now, his records wouldn't just feature him and his acoustic guitar but that he'd be soaking up all the modern-day musical idioms.

"All those he would have been musically capable of, yeah. This notion that you've got to be true to somebody who made music 30 or 40 years ago, that you've got to stay true to the only things that were available in that time period is crazy. It's like refusing to translate the Bible into a modern language."

Now there's a thought.

Summerteeth is out now on Reprise/Warners. Mermaid Avenue is available on Elektra/Warners.