In a desolate desert landscape, winged Victa mowers hover around a decaying Hills Hoist, the last bastion of civilisation before you reach Uluru, far in the distance. The boys from TISM are back, and if the Roger Dean-esque Yes-stylings of the cover of their latest album ‘De Rigeurmortis’ are to be believed, they’ve gone a little prog-rock. Hype put the question to TISM frontmen Ron Hitler Barassi and Humphrey B. Flaubert — have you been listening to too many Osibisa albums?

‘The Roger Dean album cover came about because Festival Mushroom Records bowdlerised our original concept which was a triple album,’ Barassi explains. ‘Do you know that young people these days don’t even know about triple albums? They don’t understand what it was like opening Yes songs with the huge gatefold cover opening to reveal the El Greco-like vista that was Roger Dean’s work.’

‘Our album was in fact a triple album called Finger album — a dedication to the great Finger bands of rock,’ Flaubert elaborates. ‘Badfinger, Snakefinger and Powderfinger. The album was tentatively titled “Give Your Mates A Sniff. TISM: The Finger Album”, however FMR decided not to go with that.

‘In fact, what you get in ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is merely the ghostly remains of that great masterwork.’

Ghostly remains or not, ‘De Rigeurmortis’, TISM’s first album in three years, is as loaded as ever with their trademark savage wit, angry rants and cheesy beats. From the anti-dance music tirades of ‘Come Back DJ, Your Record is Scratched’ and ‘Fat Boy Slim Dusty’ to the more general tirades of ‘If You’re Not Famous at Fourteen, You’re Finished’ and ‘Thou Shalt Not Britney Spear’, TISM fans have more than enough to satisfy them until the band get pissed off enough for another release. But the real standout is saved for the bonus disc of the connoisseur’s edition — a disc devoted solely to the sprawling 40-minute rock opera e2Pot Screama’.

‘Were you aware that Britney’s actually got a novel out?’ Flaubert asks. ‘It’s co-written with her mum. I’ve always felt that when you get to the stage of being able to write a novel, you’ve transcended the sort of one-dimensional rubbish that they’re peddling.

‘This is why I feel that Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately put out a pop album,’ Barassi suggests. ‘For too long, Cormac McCarthy has been satisfied with merely being the most innovative and deeply serious novelist working in the American literary scene. That can’t satisfy him for very long and I think Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately rush out there and record a pop album with his mumnMrs McCarthynto really try and beat Britney at her own game.’

TISM’s last album, 1998’s ewww.tism.wanker.com’, met with infamy through its lead single, a track which even Triple J would not play: ‘I Might Be A Cunt, But I’m Not A Fucking Cunt’. The C word sent such powerful shockwaves through the country that they even received an irate letter from Bruce Ruxton. But that was back in their days on Shock Records, and their new label have something of a different outlook, the boys claim:

‘We’ve really toned it down because we are aware that Festival Mushroom are funding a number of right-wing military juntas in South America,’ Flaubert says. ‘The sort of damage they could do to our kneecaps if we encountered the ire of the conservative right in this country cannot be overestimated.’

Humphrey B. Flaubert wonders how people could possibly be interested in questions about their music, or themselves.

‘It isn’t beer and skittles what we do, in fact it’s very unglamorous,’ he points out. ‘What we wanted was to get attention from good-looking girls. That really hasn’t eventuated, so everything after that is a disappointment. Being in a rock band would be great, but unfortunately we’re not in one!’

For a band so unashamedly non-rock, TISM take great pride in the production quality of their recordings. For ‘De Rigeurmortis’, they drew on the legendary production talents of Paul McKercher and Phillip McKellar to knock the album into shape.

‘Oh yes, they’re very rock,’ Flaubert says. ‘They were rock people but we had to communicate with them through an interpreter. Neither of us understood each other’s language.’

‘They’re not very nice men,’ Barassi points out. ‘Phil and Paul take themselves very seriously — we had to explain to them that if they didn’t drop their pretty boy rock and roll attitude straight away and get down slumming it with the dorky guys from TISM, they’d be out that door.

‘As they made their way towards their door, we begged them to come back.’

Serendipity arranges it so that ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is released just as bullshit is circulating at its 3 year-high on the electoral cycle — as perfect a time as any for TISM’s spleen to be vented.

‘There was a little while there when we were a bit afraid the fires were burning out,’ Barassi says, ebut all you have to do is hear the voice of Phillip Ruddock and you think yep, the hatred is as strong as ever. That sort of pompous, disaffected, soulless inability to empathise with anyone else and to persecute people less well off for your own base self-interest, I think that’s what it’s all about.

‘If Phillip Ruddock ran a record company, we’d join.’