I grilled-cum-interviewed the sculptors-cum-filmmakers in their Chester-le-Street warehouse-cum-studio, ‘Apostle F’. Entering the vast space, I encounter some enormously intimidating pieces; a glowing goat’s head screwed in to a light fitting, a massive sculpture of a graphically ovulating wasp, the word ‘discharge’ written in semen on a mirror and, most notably, an enormously large painting of an electric carving knife. The piece, 50ft tall, hangs precariously from the wall on fraying twine. The pair inform me of the working title: Death-by-Numbers.

What is it you aim to achieve with your work?

Dollond: ‘A visual holocaust. Emptiness. Nausea.’
Aitchison: ‘Proto-Nietzschean decay. Fear. Apathy.’

Right. And this piece here, Death-by-Numbers. What’s the influence behind that?

Dollond: ‘We wanted to make the scariest and most dangerous painting ever.’
Aitchison: ‘And we thought that a really big painting would be scary…’
Dollond: ‘But then Aitchison suggested that we hang the painting precariously to increase the amount of danger.’
Aitchison: 'I just had a brainflash - huge unstable paintings! It was amazing. And then Dollond had a stroke of genius, didn't you?.'
Dollond: ‘Yeah, out of nowhere. I just thought what if it was a painting of a monster or a weapon? Surely that’d be the most scary painting ever.'
Aitchison: ‘And lo, it is as told. I couldn’t even look at it when I was painting it. I was too afraid.’

You famously declared that ‘the heartbeat of modern art is fading’ and that you would ‘fit art with a pacemaker and feed it morphine’. Were your attempts successful?

Dollond: (regretfully) ‘Well, in the end, we had to do mouth-to-mouth.’
Aitchison: ‘And we really enjoyed it.’
Dollond: ‘But unfortunately, art died.’
Aitchison: ‘But I carried on giving it mouth to mouth, with tongues, just to feel what it was like.’

But if art is now dead, what is it that we see in this studio?

Dollond: ‘The animated corpse of art. Jim Henson’s puppet graveyard of modernity. A dead ghost.’

Are you afraid that there are limits to ‘fear-art’? Or do you think that's all we have left in this jumbled, mixed-up flim-flam jamboree of a world?

Dollond: ‘Yes and No…’
Aitchison: (to Dollond) ‘And maybe?’
Dollond: ‘Maybe…(pauses) Y’know, there’s no limits to fear. The Greeks had it right. They had such a thing as a phobophobe – someone who is literally afraid of fear - a fearophobe, if you like. And logically by the same extension, you could be a phobophobephobe if you feared fearing fear.’
Dollond: ‘And if you fear fearing fear-fearing?’
Aitchison: ‘A phobophobophobophobe. See, it goes on forever. Fear is endless.’
Dollond: ‘And what if you are afraid of people who are phobophobophobophobes? Does that make you a phobophobophobophobophobe? Or literally, ‘one who fears those who fear fearing fear-fearing.'
Aitchison: ‘It does. I used it in Scrabble last week. 192 points’

But surely, by that logic, there are also philophiles? Those who, as you might say, love loving. And those who love those who love loving: philophilophiles? Isn’t it just a matter of glass half full?

Dollond: (suddenly depressed) ‘The glass isn’t full or empty. It’s dead. Smashed to be more precise. We videotaped its demise in a Newcastle pub. It’s over.’
Aitchison: ‘Love is dead. I’m a philophobe.’

Didn’t you address fear-fearing with your public information intervention-piece in Flanwydd Ty in West Wales? I seem to remember there was a public panic over your new terms – ‘phobophobes’ and the like.

Dollond: ‘Well, you know Mirror readers, they’re not the sharpest spanners in the wheel…’
Aitchison:  ‘They went off and attacked people they thought were paedophilophilophile’s, but who were actually paedophilophilophobes.'
Dollond: ‘Sad. But funny too.’
Aitchison: ‘Yeah, it was kind of funny to watch the hooligans get confused as they stopped mid-beating to figure out who they should attack next. You could see the look of terror on their face, which soon turned to resigned acceptance as they realized that by their logic they had to attack their own families for loving those who feared fearing child molestation.'
Dollond: ‘They were like an army of rabid dogs chewing their own stupid tails.’
Aitchison: ‘And choking on them. Just shows what a climate of fear we have in the country at the moment.’