Some experience junkies break their legs jumping off cliffs while tied to bin bags. Some get scalped while train-surfing, soil themselves mid-bungee or get landed on by some psychotic twat in a gas mask. But when you're 13, bored and living on the wrong side of Bristol's tracks, your wake-up call comes in the corner of a local greasy spoon with an oxygen mask on your face and propane in the membrane.

"I was lucky to survive being a gas sniffer," says Sunna singer Jon Harris. "One day I had a bit of a flip-out and never went there again. I skived school and I was sniffing two cans of gas in the corner of a caff. Next thing I know, I'm rolling around on the floor in seizures."

Is that what your song O.D. is about?
"No, that was when I did 750 mushrooms," Jon chuckles. "The comedown was quite hard."

That Jon went on to play guitar on Massive Attack's "Mezzanine" and is yet to have had any limbs amputated is considered a biological miracle by the National Poisons Institute. He emerged with a record deal from ver Attack's Melankolic label and visions of an electro-rock band with the brain of Stephen Hawking, the intensity of Nine Inch Nails and the medicine cabinet of Shane MacGowan. Enter Sunna, a life-preserver flung to a British rock scene floundering under the US nu-metal tsunami.

"It's about time there was a new British rock thing," says guitarist Ian MacLaren. "It's about writing songs, it's not about f***ing wearing masks onstage."

Imagine Tricky had barged into the Screaming Trees' studio while they were working on their "Dust" masterpiece, held a shotgun to Mark Lanegan's temple and forced him to smoke psycho-skunk while reading every Crispian Mills interview ever. The result would have been Sunna's debut album, "One Minute Science": part hemorrhage-inducing industrial paranoia rock, part twanglesome desert balladry and part Hare Krishna recruitment pamphlet.

"I believe in reincarnation," says Jon. "If you don't achieve your life goal, then you just come back and start again, until you get on your correct path."
So when the world gets a bang on your debut single "Power Struggle" (like an army of robot Garbages eating New York) on the "Hollow Man" soundtrack, what celestial slivers of spiritual guidance will they receive?
"That's on a planetary scale of everybody," Jon explains. "If you can take the attitude of someone trying to be better than someone else, the competition between armies and teams, for some reason us humans have that need. It is that battle for energy because . . ."
Nurse! The anti-hippy restraints!
"Well, it's kinda flower power but with reason. But I'm not a hippy."
So what was it that made you realise you'd been on this earth before?

Jon meditates for almost a minute, before reaching a higher truth. "Ketamine," he says. Sunna: here to rescue rock from the aerosols.

Who's Who
Flatline (decks) - Ian: "A man of few words. He'll be quiet for about six hours, then he'll whisper something in my ear and I'll fall apart."
Richie Mills (drums) - Ian: "A larger than life, cliched American rock drummer."
Ian McClaren (guitars) - Jon: "Very aloof."
Jon Harris (vocals/guitars) - Ian: "Very demanding."
Shane Goodwin (bass) - Jon: "He's been sniffing around the ladies like a mangy old dog."

Mark Beumont

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