Album Notes

You could be forgiven for thinking that any rock band with a spark of talent will, within 6 months of getting together, sign a 7-figure deal, record an album in Abbey Road and crash into the charts at number 8.

In real life, that's not how things are, not for most of us. "Us" being the zillions of bands who no-one has ever heard of. You know - the people who stick up photocopied posters in your local café, who you see struggling to get a Marshall amp into a 2-door Ford Fiesta at closing time, who are probably playing to no-one at all right now in some shithole near you. We're the peasants of rock'n'roll, sometimes glamourously referred to as "the underground", but you'd need to look very hard to find any glamour in what we do.

So when we make a record, its "making of" story is not the one you usually hear on the radio. Most of our recording for this album took place in an empty office space that we lined with fibreglass and sacking to absorb the sound. Every month we had to go to the landlord and say "We're leaving, we can't pay the rent anymore". Lucky for us no-one else wanted the place, so he'd always reduce it to something we could pay ... a negotiating technique we call Success Through Despair®. It came in handy again when the office place got sold and we needed cheap studio time - someday we're gonna write a book on it. We had to get John's parts done first because he had a baby on the way, so he spent weekends travelling back and forth from his home on the other side of the country to record. Stephen broke his hand just as we were due to record drums, and when it healed myself and Niamh (my wife) cooked him breakfast, lunch and dinner every day to make sure he wouldn't only eat Mars Bars and zone out at 3pm. Most of the equipment we used was borrowed, and we had to borrow it again and again to re-do stuff we had done wrong the first (or second, or third, or whatever-th) time. And eventually we had borrow money too so we could pay to get it all mixed and mastered.

And, oh yeah, it took almost two years to do. And by the time we even started work on it, we'd been together as a band for, well, more-or-less forever. Not that none of it was fun, but by Christ the rock'n'roll lifestyle in the real world is not for the faint-hearted, and there is no pot of gold at the end ... but this album was made not because we thought we'd enjoy making it - we just had an itch that had to be scratched.

This is the sound of a little group of people being themselves. We hope you like it.