Sitting in the sun smoking. It hasn't taken Taste Xperience long to get into the pop star way of life, at least not for one of them.

To be fair it was only Russell I was chatting to, and the Southend trance act that signed a major deal with Manifesto Records only the other month have been working rather hard at getting new material together. Russell must have been on a tea break.

"There is never enough time in a day to do what we want to do - we have been finishing off tracks, and doing re-mixes. It takes time - everything takes a month from beginning to end."

It's not as if this is anything new to Taste Xperience though. The band have been around years, and they even have their own following in America - a relic from the last time they were big over there.

Nigel Palmer, Richard Cornish and Russell Barker have got a few stories about that, about being dragged in to judge fashion shows in south America, letting off fire extinguishers in lifts, that sort of everyday thing in the music biz.

Now it looks like the trio are about to embark on yet another Taste Xperience adventure which they will reminisce over large tumblers of Jack Daniels in a few years' time.

This adventure is unavoidable - it's been laid out for them like a yellow brick road. Touring and PAs across the country as they get their name out to the general public. They don't need to get it out to anyone else because most DJs have already worn out their original copy of their debut Manifesto release Summersault - it's been around that long.

"Manifesto are talking about getting us out to Ibiza and doing a couple of key gigs," says Russell.

"The new release has a Tall Paul remix, and if you remember Beachball by Nalin and Kane, that was out for ages before it went into the charts on a Tall Paul remix and reached the top ten."

Both Taste Xperience and Manifesto have big hopes for Summersault - it has been on a number of compilations while on the smaller Barracuda label, but that would only have served to wet appetites.

With the different mixes in the pipeline this lot are looking at an anthem on a par with Cafe Del Mar. So it's no surprise they've done an acoustic heavy Cafe Del Mar mix, which "Jose has already got a copy of." That would be Jose Padilla, presumably.

Other than embarking on their next big adventure the band have been busy in their Southend studio, recording a lot of material for an album: "It's funny really. We had a lot of trouble with vocalists in the past, so we thought we would just do instrumental stuff, and now they are asking us to put vocals on things."

Never satisfied these record labels. But somehow you know Taste Xperience will deliver, and then some.

Xperience the taste - one vocalist short of a great future but only for now. The boys from Taste Xperience are set to break into the big time again

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.