So that kind of stuck with us for a while, but we weren't complaining. We had a huge success in America." The English press hated the fact that we'd gone on to America without their blessing. So we ended up having to go back with like, "Hey, look at us, we've made a ton of sales. became bigger and bigger and bigger for us, and in England, it kind of shriveled away because that initial way of marketing has never quite connected. So we had to play catch up with ourselves as to how to become a live act because it started to accelerate. It was many outlets for it, and then MTV backing it up – everything was done to become more visual. Meanwhile, we were having crossover hits in the pop world so we had many strings to our output. Then " Deeper and Deeper" came along and then "Driven Out," and that kept us very much alive in rock radio. We had alternative radio, then you had rock radio that started playing the crap out of "Red Skies," and "Stand or Fall." They didn't touch "One Thing Leads to Another" or " Saved by Zero," but they kept playing the heavier stuff. Then when we came to the U.S., they had a completely different feel. He didn't quite see the shelf or the connect between alternative music and classic rock, or the instrumentation that would appeal to a wider market.
Luckily, the guy who signed us in England was smart enough to see that we had something different, but he wasn't savvy enough to see how to market it alongside this sort of New Romantic. But what really happened was MCA England were – you know, it was a different record company to MCA America. During that 10-year period, you could see the record company waking up to if they throw enough money at this stuff, things will happen. You know, the budget for our first video ended up being the lunch bill for the last video. Then MTV blossomed, and then we had some – I can remember, we were fighting with the record company to try and get a 5,000-pound budget to make a video. So suddenly, "Stand or Fall," " Lost Planes," and "Red Skies" from that album were doing well there. The first thing I remember was that we had Shuttered Room out and there was – alternative radio was starting to blossom in the East Coast, early college radio. How much of a period was there where you thought that perhaps the chance of success was doomed? I read a 1983 interview from Melody Maker and a quote from Adam Woods where he noted that MCA hadn’t really figured out how to market the band. Watch the Video for 'One Thing Leads to Another' So between those two songs, it covers an emotional battle to some kind of redemption, I think.
Then you just need to fulfill yourself with just the now. There's a relief after the breakdown, which is when you've been cold and then suddenly you're out there casting spells again, literally, and trying to remember to forget the past because it can really screw up your moment if you're constantly carrying around the pain of the past. Then right after that, the magic of the rebuild and the reforming starts to – the identity is looking for a new way, a new way of being. There was a kind of vulnerability of the breakdown aspect and the cold nature of honesty when you get to a point in a relationship where it's like, there's no way out but with pure, sharp, painful honesty. They were written, literally, in the same week and so there was a yearning. How connected were those songs from the beginning? I love the way “Cold” and “Spell” segue together on this album. You have to sort of listen a lot, being in a band, and that's maybe why we’ve survived so long – because we're good listeners. As the lyricist who tries to capture what we're about as a band, I end up coming up with these enigmatic themes, because we have quite diverse thinking in the band – which is good, but you have to hold everyone's views in one view, and not make your own be too adamant and caustic to win an argument. a group of guys that when we have conversations together, we're pretty spirited when we talk. So no matter what you lay out there, you can always get to home through the tea leaves. There's a kind of a weird prophetic, "Ah, the cards are speaking to me," you know? There's a, "Oh, this means that." I think the relevance of that is connecting to the universal truths. And, it's like there's a weird thing that no matter what group of songs you come out with, or running order, it always seems to tell you the tale of now. So the pandemic gave us kind of a still period to play with running orders and which songs would work better than others. We were kind of well underway before the pandemic, but the final selection of songs – we had quite a lot more songs than we thought would end up on the record.
How much was this new album in process prior to the pandemic?
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