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 used to play together in another hardcore band for a couple of years, but it doesn’t have that much to do with Regulations. When we started out we decided to start from scratch. Instead of walking in the same old steps we sat down and talked about how we would handle everything in advance, like labels, gigs and everything else. You could say we’re trying to make things that have gone wrong with old bands right at the first time instead.

Have you done a lot of shows?
We haven’t played that much yet, we haven’t done any real tours. This spring and summer we’re gonna try to change that and play some more down south. All together we’ve done about 20 to 30 shows maybe, 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 going to record in november. There’s going to be an LP coming out this spring hopefully. [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 release a couple of singles first until you’ve found your own sound. And it feels 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. Not unexpectedly by all kinds of American hardcore and punkrock from the end 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 hardcore scene, but it seems like that. It seems a lot of the garagerock crowd have discovered you and embraced you! Did you aim at getting a sound that was more garagey?
We all have our roots deep down in the punk- and hardcorescene. We’ve never thought about sounding very garagey. When we write our songs we throw out everything that’s the least actionrockin’. Of course we like the classic bands like the Stooges, MC5 and Radio Birdman, but they’re not really influences. Our music is basically just hard 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 Knugen Faller (Umeå) and Henry Fiat’s Open Sore (Stockholm). There’s a bunch of great bands from Copenhagen, among others Gorilla Angreb, No Hope For The Kids and Hjerte Stop. From the USA there’s also a few good bands, The Tyrades and Annihilation Time to name some. Of course there’s a few good bigger bands too, but those seem unnecessary to mention here. I think the big problem today is that no one puts any time or energy into their bands. Another problem that I see is that the members of the bands always have different goals and prioritize completely differently from each other. You do need a huge amount of commitment 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.