“This is what I do, it’s pretty much the only thing I’m any good at. Everything else I’m good at is really, really bad for you…. don’t write that… no you can if you want, fuck it”. Welcome to the world of Dave McCabe, and his Ramifications.

McCabe is impossible to pin down, and in loads of ways indefinable. For a decade he was the frontman and main songwriter in seminal Liverpool psych-pop legends The Zutons. Garnering both critical and perhaps surprising commercial success along the way, including penning one of the biggest songs of the millennium so far (“Valerie”, a hit both for The Zutons and also for Mark Ronson with Amy Winehouse’s ubiquitous cover version). In 2010, after 3 multi-platinum albums and ten years touring the world together, the band split.

“It was the biggest hangover I’ve ever had, worst and longest comedown of my life” says McCabe, “Being in a band was just what I did, you get some people together and make tunes, that’s just what goes on. Then when the Zutons started to get out there everything changed and suddenly it’s like you’re on one of them walkways in an airport that you can’t get off of, and you’re just going in that direction and there’s not much you can do about it. That’s how it seems anyway, there’s loads of people suddenly involved and it becomes this big thing and that’s what you are - do you know what I mean?”

With a string of fantastic songs and an incendiary live show, The Zutons went from playing to their mates in the Zanzibar to selling hundreds of thousands of records, huge festival slots and becoming unlikely, if not exactly enthusiastic, pop stars.

“You never really think about all that stuff, what’s going to happen if your songs get out there, it just happens and that’s mad enough but then on top of that you’re in a relationship with 4 other people. So that’s like being married 4 times over, and look at how many marriages last very long - I mean, me ma and dad are still together and it’s a bit like anyone who’s still with their other half at that point they’re like the Rolling Stones or something aren’t they?

After the Zutons split Dave didn’t know what he was going to do, he thought maybe he’d just start another band, write some songs, do some gigs. But at the same time he knew he wanted to try something different.

“I wanted to do something that wasn’t a guitar record. There’s loads of music I’ve always been into, things like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Human League, more electronic stuff that was totally different to what we’d been doing in the Zutons. I wanted to do my own version of a Grand Theft Auto soundtrack basically.”

“It was like I was starting again really, I was learning new instruments, learning how to write for myself again outside of the band headspace. But it took me a while to work out exactly how to bring it to life.”

At this point McCabe was spending his time obsessing over DC Comics and Philip K Dick’s science fiction writings and started to pull together a story in his mind. He naturally wanted to get it out the way he knew best, he wanted to make a record that told the story and resonated the way that books and comics were doing with him.

“I started writing a bunch of songs that all worked around this theme, this story. It’s about a fella who falls in love with a robot, but after a while he realizes that he actually needs some real human contact. Its scary man, you look at the way technology is going then you look at the way humanity is going and it’s like technology is going to start edging ahead of us and be more advanced than we are as humans.”

It’s always been focused on that - the humanizing of technology. You look at how little we interact now on a normal level, we just do everything through our phones, we’re so reliant on gadgets and stuff you wonder where it ends. The story has gone back and forth a bit, it’s probably taken 2 years but I’ve got it now.”

The resulting album, entitled “Church of Miami”, was recorded at Ape studios on The Wirral throughout the second half of 2014. Produced by Viktor Voltage and Mr Chop, putting to good use their enviable array of analogue and digital toys that you can hear throughout the record, the album is scheduled for release in May of this year.

And it’s one heck of an album. The urgent Giorgio Moroder-esque synth disco stylings on album opener and title track “Church of Miami” sets the palette for an album that in typical McCabe style draws from a hundred disparate sources but remains underpinned by top-notch songwriting. As always, McCabe’s knack for a pop hook runs throughout - so when you look at a song like “Fake Emotion” which sounds like some strange brew of Prince, the Beastie Boys and Flock of Seagulls you would expect that to be terrifying, but with its soaring chorus and squelching synth hooks it just works. Shadows of other exploratory pop bands like Gorillaz and Beck are there too but it’s an album full of surprises - none more so than the beautiful “You’re Only A Fake”, as close to a straight organic ‘ballad’ as you’ll find on this record, resplendent in it’s unexpectedly unique normality.

“After this I definitely want to be more prolific” McCabe confesses, “I do want to do more albums, more stories, but at the same time I like the idea of just throwing stuff out there. Get something down, put it out and move on.”

“It’s like a big yo-yo - things go back and forward, loads of mad angles and ideas, it can go wherever it goes. But I want it to keep going and stay at it, there’s loads of tunes in me and now I’ve got this done its like we can go out there and put it about a bit, you know what I mean?”

Like I said at the beginning, it’s incredibly hard to define Dave McCabe or pin him down - and that’s the beauty of the man. You literally have no idea what’s coming next, but when the songs are this good - isn’t that a great thing?