Well that was an intense and intensive weekend down in Sussex somewhere (my sub-Humber geography is terrible) at the superb Yellow Fish studios. Imagine an engineer, a load of very swanky music kit, a pro producer with a CV as long as your arm and the assortment of personalities that is The Filthy Spectacula (plus two band widows), trapped in a converted farm in the middle of a wood up an unlit track where no-one would hear you scream even if you weren’t in a soundproofed room, for two days, making scary music at pressure-cooker heat. The blood and black sprinkles cupcakes were the least of it.

Ross Landau, who got twice as much out of us in the time as we had any right to achieve and succeeding in showing us what producers are for (I think all of us had only worked with engineers before and it’s a totally different concept), deserves a much better memorial to his weekend’s work than this but I have to put his description of the third track (featuring a lot of acoustic instrumentation, prominent fiddle and lyrics about alcohol-induced insanity) down somewhere for posterity:

Oliver! meets Jacques Brel meets Ian Drury – you should send it to Later and Tim Burton

Watch this space; meanwhile the brand is taking wings ahead of the band. Our merch plans are epic. What do you mean we haven’t played any gigs yet?