For a long time after it came out, I was extremely unhappy with this album, but this was almost entirely unfair. There are a couple of less good tracks on there, and a lot of bad production, but there are also some of the best tracks that we've ever written.
In no particular order, my personal highlights of 2003-2005, and the aftermath thereof:
- The rainy autumn day when I wrote When October Comes. As the British weather hammered against the window and I pondered my future, this song came very quickly.
- Getting really emotional while recording the vocal for Not a Million Miles.
- Recording the as-yet-unreleased Golden Wheel at Simon's old house, with him strumming a guitar, and me playing synth arpeggios.
- Simon's first suggestion that Empires would be a good title. It was the name of an incomplete song, which was based around a quote from Winston Churchill. Somehow, in a world suddenly full of terrorism, imperialism, and wars that we didn't agree with, it seemed to be the perfect statement.
- Listening to the completed version of Wherever You Are Now, while walking through the forests near Berlin. This will always be a special memory for me, and if we ever make a video for this song, I know exactly what it will be.
- Working out the final tracklisting for the album, sitting very late at night in a Berlin youth hostel with a CD on shuffle.
- Devising the album artwork, which for the first time used relatively undoctored photos from our holidays. We could probably do better now, but they were an important step following the Photoshop swirls of the Zero era.
- Entering In Your Eyes into a BBC songwriting contest. Obviously it didn't win, but it was our first stab at trying to crack the outside world.
- Our first forays into the world of online music. Uploading Here We Stand onto an MP3 site, and it taking six months to get approved, possibly because I used the word "Iraqification" in the description?
- Lots of people, including Greek band Marsheaux telling us a couple of years later that they really liked Here We Stand.
