Hello everyone,

How are you all?...good I hope. Thought I'd drop you a line to let you know what we've been up to and more importantly what we're about to start. Today is Tuesday the 21st November 2006 and tomorrow we're all off to Ireland for a month to record the bulk of our second record.

We finished touring The Back Room in Istanbul of all places on the 3rd September. My last moments on stage, of what from start to finish was a 20 month tour, were spent on my back. On the last note of Fingers I slipped clean over, on the beer I threw around earlier on in the show (so no one to blame but myself). I picked my sorry arse up from the stage and in my embarrassed confusion threw my guitar into the surprisingly rapturous Turkish audience. I'm an idiot but it's all fun and games I suppose, and a memorable end of the tour for me at least. The rest of the band just shook their heads in disapproval.

Since then we've been doing a lot of writing, a fair bit of relaxing, some of us have been trying to find new places to live and we've seen a load of shows and even reared our heads djing a couple of times. If any of you came to Brixton or more recently Bristol and enjoyed what Ed or Russ spun then nice one, me and Chris tend to just mince about at these things, maybe offer a polite suggestion into their ears but mainly let them get on with it. Bristol the other night was particularly enjoyable; starting with The Boss (Born in the USA!) into Cold War Kids, followed by the new Bloc Party single (slapped hands! Naughty!...it's very very good) from there on other highlights included NWA, The Twang and Kate Bush.

As some of you know, the week before the show in Turkey we recorded the two new songs we had managed to write (or re-write in the case of TWOTW) whilst on the road. Bones and The Weight Of The World both sound great, they're not totally finished yet but I'd be very surprised if they don't make the cut when we're picking the record next year. More importantly that week made us realise that we could work with Garret Lee, it's so important we move forward and don't just make The Back Room part 2. I think we all realised that week that Garret was the man to help us.

So this week we head off to Ireland with around 12 new songs and a host of other ideas floating around. I can't explain in words how excited we all are about the new songs; they're without doubt the best songs we've ever written. To get your imagination / juices flowing here are some of the titles being thrown around at this point in time:

Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors
The Racing Rats
An End Has A Start
When Anger Shows
Push Your Head Towards The Air
A Thousand Pieces
An Eye For An Eye

The album won't be finished before Christmas but the break will give us chance to see our families, eat mince pies, get drunk and say hi to Santa, then maybe some more writing before we start recording again in the new year.

That's it from me for now, just saying hello really and letting you know what we're up to. Whilst typing this I've been listening to the new Joanna Newsom record, Ys, it's incredible and you can blame any spelling or grammar mistakes on her!

Bye for now,

Take care and be good,

Tom xxxx