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My Missing Days

After "A Different Lifetime" I really did not know what we were going to do next.

In 2002 we did a residency at The Borderline in London where we played most of our songs ending with a night where we played the fans' favourites as voted via the website. This went well. It felt like the "end of part one" for the band - I had no songs or ideas for albums up my sleeve, and I found this quite exciting, having spent years making the first two albums a reality. We were in debt too - I had taken out a hefty loan to finance "A Different Lifetime", a loan that my father eventually paid off for me when he learned that he had cancer. So thank you Dad for helping finance something that I love.

For the first time since the band started I had a blank page. The songs for "My Missing Days" were all written in one batch. After "A Different Lifetime" I was aiming to avoid a grand concept, wanted the album to be a real band album without strings etc, and most of all we decided we would make the album cheaply. Since the band began, Ronan had been an advocate of home recording rather than paying to use a studio, but I had doubted that we would get the results we were looking for for the first two albums. By 2003 though, home recording technology had advanced so much that you could clearly get great results quickly and easily yourself. Additionally Andy Lewis was in the band and was doing lots of laptop recording, and Rhodri had also done some great stuff with his own band The Free French. So it seemed a good idea to give half the songs to Andy and half to Rhodri to produce. This meant that we could record anywhere, ie didn't have to pay for studio time, and it made it all very affordable.

As I was writing songs, a loose concept did begin to emerge, of somebody who's life is about to change, is in crisis. I also had the idea that this would be told backwards. The narrative in reverse was probably a direct consequence of watching movies like "Irreversible" and "Momento". Hence the story starts at the end with "A Happy Ending" and ends at the beginning with "The Start Of It All".

The strange thing is that I was not writing these songs with any kind of agenda or intention, and we made the album, and then my own life proceeded to follow the story in the album. That may be coincidence, or it may be that it is what I was subconsciously heading towards while I was writing - I do not know.

I like "My Missing Days". I do not think it has the stature of the first two albums, but I love a lot of the songs and the production and the energy and the real band feel it has. On a personal level, I am dissatisfied with the writing on "Enough For Me", "Time Is Now" and "Left Alone Among The Living"- to me they each sound like I am trying to be someone else rather than writing naturally (The Beatles, The Strokes and Spearmint respectively). I am very happy with the rest of the songs though, including "My Missing Days 2" which is tucked away at the end as an extra track.

I love the artwork. James and I talked about making it bright and Pop, and also as it was very much a band album, about somehow incorporating the five of us into the sleeve. He then came up with the idea of drawing us as a cartoon - it worked a treat and we used the image a lot for posters and the website. We later found the poster in a club in Germany; somebody had drawn little Hitler moustaches on us all. We loved that (especially our driver Jeff). I think Jim still has that poster.

Jim also took some photos of me in my local cafe, The London Cafe at Turnpike Lane, which was featured in one of the songs on the album. We took Samanthi along and she plays the waitress in the photos, as in the song "My Missing Days 2", where she sings the part. We had met Samanthi during the "A Week Away" tour when she interviewed us for Student Radio. She later appeared in the video for "We're Going Out". and we invited her to sing on three songs for this album.

We put the album out as a digipack and it certainly felt like a new phase for the band. It got very little attention commercially, but at least our expectations were low and we had made it cheaply. In fact this album probably made a profit! I have a fondness for it, especially "The Book", the instrumental title track and "I Didn't Buy You Flowers". James has always loved "Perhaps You were Sleeping" - for him that evokes being on tour in Japan, and separated from your loved one.