Groove Armada: Country Boys.

On a bleak London day, Groove Armada's Tom Findlay is at home, in his studio, sorting out the final details of the Australian tour band line-up.

"We auditioned four drummers recently, which was a horrible experience - because they were all great. They were all top drummers," he says. "But you have to pick some how."

He's an unflappable and friendly character and happy to look back on a year that saw he and GA partner Andy Cato release the well-received Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub), their follow-up to the massively successful Vertigo, and also DJ at the top of the World Trade Centre prior to September 11.

"It was only a fortnight or so before the attacks," Findlay says. "I still find the whole thing utterly surreal. I lived in New York for two or three years when I was at college and again in my gap year between school and university. I haven't been back there since September 11 but the whole thing - the idea of the New York skyline without the twin towers – is extraordinary, bizarre. Being up there - it was my first time – was amazing. We were incredibly well looked after by the people who were running a club there and we just hope - but we don't know - that most of those guys weren't on the morning shift. That's what hits home most: there were nine or ten bar people and management that you've had even a basic level of interaction with - enough to make it feel quite real.”

He also got married last year, the couple spent a week on the coast near Mombassa, water skiing and diving and chilling, then another week on safari.

"That was just ridiculous – an amazing experience. Kenya is an extraordinary place - so beautiful yet socially it's totally unreconstructed, really tough. To be white and English there is quite weird because there's a certain level of discomfort. Part of the country is Britain's legacy and to be honest in several respects we haven't done that well by them. It's such a weird place – such extreme gaps in wealth - and dangerous: you can't really drive around Nairobi - it's a pretty mad place.”

Interestingly, Findlay doesn't think that such experiences find their way back into Groove Armada's muse.

"At some stage we'd like to write music that has poignancy in the lyrics but I can't say that we've done that so far. However, as far as Africa goes, a huge number of the rhythms that are informing dance music now are coming from African music. There are loads and loads of compilations of African music coming out. Where people used to use congas they're now using jembaes. You can hear that real sound of chugging straight ahead rhythms in the house music coming out of London. It's good."

The French, of course, got African music much earlier than their UK neighbours. The immigration rush from Africa in the 1980s filled Paris's subways with unemployed African musos who formed massive loose-limbed collectives that changed from day to day. The result was bands such as Les Negresses Vertes, who took those African influences and married them with traditional European sounds.

"That's it, man," Findlay says. "Funny that it took so long to get here, really, but it's definitely doing the rounds on the underground circuit here now."

Not that Groove Armada are remotely underground. A weighty contender in the dance music stakes they've made their way close to the very top and can pull such diverse and impressive talents as Richie Havens, Nile Rogers, Tim Hutton and Jeru Tha Damaja to Goodbye Country while the new single My Friend has been remixed by Richard Dorfmeister.

"I'm content with the record in the way that it's an important entity but it is very much part of a journey and that part (it represents) I'm happy with. We're both pretty young and we're both learning about what we do. Compared with our contemporaries we've still got a few years to go. What we tried to do with Goodbye Country was incorporate more live music in the sound compared with Vertigo which was more sample-based. As a result we had to learn a lot of new skills. Maybe, what we might have done is gone so heavy on the live music that we forget to program things in an interesting way like we did with Vertigo. Ultimately, in two or three albums time we'll have sound that mixes those two disciplines perfectly. We're just working on that. Some of the stuff on Goodbye Country sounds too simplistic but as a record I really like it.

"For the next record I think we both want to make something with more of an underground sound to it, not that's deliberately difficult but is a bit more groundbreaking and uniquely ours."