Britpop survivors Echobelly still want to do great things at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea

‘I don't wanna compromise,’ sang Echobelly on their top 20 1995 single Great Things.

Released at the height of Britpop, it welded a clear statement of intent and optimism to a catchy chorus, reflecting the unbounded possibilities of the future.

Twenty-six years down the line Sonya Madan and Glenn Johansson, the heart of Echobelly, may be older and wiser, but they are still looking for those ‘great things’.

The London-based duo met in 1992 and pulled together the band – top 10 albums Everyone's Got One and On followed, yielding hits like I Can’t Imagine The World Without Me and King of The Kerb.

Although the band faltered and ultimately split in a period described in their official band biog as including ‘death, drugs, theft and high court injunctions’, Glenn and Sonya’s enduring partnership didn’t come apart.

Even when Echobelly was on hold they continued to write and perform together as the acoustic project Calm of Zero.

But since 2015 they have been back under their original name and aiming to pick up where they left off pre-pandemic. They are currently on a UK tour which hits Portsmouth later this month.

With both on a call, The Guide naturally asks how they’ve been?

‘Hibernating like everyone else’, says Glenn drolly, ‘drinking too much – trying to write some songs.

‘We have done some bits and pieces, actually we released two albums on vinyl that we'd never done before, so that took up some time to compile those.’

Those rereleases are of their 2001 album People Are Expensive and its 2004 follow-up Gravity Pulls – both originally put out on their own Fry Up label.

How do they look back on those post-major label years now?

‘It's a push/pull thing,’ says Sonya. ‘When you write something you're just in the moment and sometimes music can be very much about a moment in time in your life, and fans say the same thing as well.

‘If you're into music, it's very often the soundtrack of your life. Even if you don't mean them to, as a writer, albums always have an element of autobiography in them, so it's interesting to look back.

‘I don't usually listen to our music, so when you're forced to you, you kind of mentally go back to other periods in your life. It's an interesting experience in that way.’

The band’s most recent album of new material was 2017’s Anarchy and Alchemy – their first since Gravity Pulls.

It was put together with help from a successful online crowdfunding campaign on the since defunct Pledgemusic platform.

How is work going on the new album?

‘If we were in a situation where we were with a label and we were 100 per cent free, we could release an album every year,’ says Sonya.

‘It's not the writing that's the difficult part, it's that we don't have the machinery behind us.

‘You haven't got the funding, you haven’t got the management, you haven't got the lawyers, you haven't got a record label, you haven't got publishers – all those pieces are missing.

‘So it's like climbing a mountain on your own – and people don't seem to understand that, they’re just like: “So, why haven't you released an album?”

‘It's not that we don't want to!’

How about the rest of the band?

‘I'm going to be candid, I