Hello,

We spent Monday rehearsing for our performance of William (mimed!) on Popworld which we film tomorrow but isn’t due to be shown on Sunday 3rd April and our pieces for Channel 4's Friday Night Project, which we are recording on thursday (!) - as well as playing William we had to come up with eight instrumental peices, six 6 seconds long and two 12 seconds long.

Apparently most bands just play bits of the song they are promoting but instead we decided to do a sort of album (and b side) sampler which will include bits of This Is For The Poor, King Prawn, Lackey, Southern Glow, Boy is A Girl, Willliam, Almanac and Stan Bowles. This show is due to be aired this Friday (18th) so set those videos...

We've just got back from Wales and it 's been very productive. It was in a very beautiful but very remote valley - three small buildings a few miles away were the only other signs of human life - the weather stayed cold but dry and sunny for the whole week and you could see for miles if you took a five minute walk up the hill (also the only place you could get a mobile signal).

The studio was very nice though it seemed to have a strange effect on us, it's owned by Dave Anderson, the original bassist in Hawkwind - and we had the pleasure of recording acoustic versions of Psychovision, William and Stan Bowles with him in the production seat! Cries of "The Others' go prog?" are less misleading than you’d think as, while we did resist the temptation to cover “Silver Machine”, the ideas we were having sound so removed to our current sound it ‘s more like third album material than second - maybe we'll just skip the second album and move straight onto the third… ho hum.

We left Wales early on Thursday to arrive in London at 4pm ready to soundcheck for the Camden Crawl (which we did manage to do for about 3 minutes) and then me and Dom went to do an interview for MTV – no idea what the prog was or when it will be aired I’m afraid – t’was exceedingly short too. The gig itself was pretty good – lots of people there who had never seen us before, lots of people outside who couldn’t get in – and while the show was chaos it was probably a pretty good introduction to our live experience. After the gig I went down the road to the Canarfen Castle to see Gravenhurst (who are now one of my new favourite bands), saw The Wedding Present at Lock 17 for a while (I love David Gedge’s last band Cinerama, but had never heard TWP) but found them a bit disappointing and so wandered down to The Electric Ballroom to catch the last half of The Buzzcocks. Then it was on the 1am train to Brighton and off to bed!

To all those that have asked, the Rabbit is doing very well and now, fully toliet trained, is enjoying the run of the whole flat! She’s called Margo btw…

Forthcoming live dates are confirmed as follows:

April:

05 - Reading - Fez
06 - Manchester - Uni Academy 3
07 - Newcastle -Northumbria Uni
08 - Northampton - Roadhouse
09 - Birmingham - Academy 2
10 - Sheffield - University Foundry

May:

14th - Glasgow - Arches (Poptones Night)
20th - London - Garage (Bud Rising)

A special edition of the album is released in Japan on 28th March…

Cheers

Johnny
xx