Dinosaur Jr: We're still not friends

Grunge pioneers Dinosaur Jr may have come back from the brink of extinction but there's still no end in sight for the longest hissy-fit in indie rock.

Guitar legend J Mascis broke up his squabbling power-trio just as their ear-bleeding brand of slacker rock was taking over the world - handing the poisoned chalice of success to Nirvana.

And for the next 15 years J and bassist Lou Barlow continued to bitch about each other in a more-or-less roundabout way both in print and on record.

But if the reunion two years ago was unlikely, its result - two new albums that stand alongside the best of their career - was even more unexpected.

Turns out this is something of a blessing and curse: off the back of this new success the band is now working through a three-month tour criss-crossing Europe, the US & Canada which stops off in London on September 25 (full dates here). And anyone thinking the critical acclaim and waves of rekindled adoration would have healed those old wounds can think again.

"No, we're not friends," J laughs. "I mean, we were never really friends that hung out. We didn't go to each other's house at Christmas.

"There are still things that wind us up about each other.. nothing specific, just general things. I mean.. we are able to communicate a little better now, but we communicate musically."

As for life on the road, Mascis - now married with a toddler back home in Amherst, Massachusetts - said: "I get up, do the sound check, do the show, sleep.. maybe walk around the town. Having a family definitely makes it different."

One of Barlow's most cutting taunts followed the worldwide success of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit back in 1992. The story goes he called up his former bandmate and said simply: "That could have been you.."

Mascis disagrees: "Well, what happened happened. I don't think we would have been that band, Nirvana.. Y'know, we dealt with each other as long as we possibly could and we just couldn't do it anymore."

Anyone looking for clues of a thaw in the relations could point to the song Friends on latest album Farm. "I need a hand, I need hand," J pleads over a bouncy guitar riff. Quite a departure for the guy who once made his bassist scream "Why Don't You Like Me" over cataclysmic feedback until his throat bled.

But nothing's that simple.

Mascis: "Oh, I mean.. none of the lyrics are about the band really. A lot of the stuff is kinda like third person, someone talking to me, y'know, like from other people's perspective.

"No-one ever really considers the lyrics in my songs. I guess it depends line to line. A lot of times it's in the third person. The songs aren't necessarily one continuous thought. It can be lot of different things on one song that are not necesarrily fully connected."

Farm, released earlier this summer, became the band's highest charting album entering the Billboard at 29. One cute irony for the veterans of heavy guitar rock is that early versions were recalled because of a production fault making it too loud.

Mascis said: "Well, you know there's loud & too loud. It's like, with a lot of digital music now, the sound's terrible, but what are you gonna do.. it's the world we live in."

"But yeah, I was surprised at the chart position. It's so weird how there's so little records being sold that somehow we can top the chart now... Farm sold 14,000 albums in the first week and that's enough to get in the top 40 now. In the past you would have to sell 200,000 albums."

Mascis remains typically undecided about any future plans: they signed a multi-record deal with indie label Jagjaguar last year but it's unclear whether the trio can hold things together for another record.

He said: "We'll probably take some time off, then... I dunno. We'll have some other things in the works, but we're not looking too far ahead.

"For now we're just trying to survive this tour."

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