“Clockwork Heaven” came out in 1995 and a year later I went to France to work for three years. I took guitars, the Fostex and the M1 with me, but in the end, I had no time for music-making at all. I did a lot of listening though as some stunning albums came out during that period. Like Radiohead’s OK Computer and XTC’s Apple Venus, both of which I listened to solidly for two months each. I bought a lot of CDs in France.
When it was time to move home in the summer of 1999, I began thinking seriously about writing new songs. Herbie and I were in regular contact and we wanted to start work on an album as soon as I got home. So, we both worked on ideas at opposite ends of Europe. The first song I wrote for the album that became “Love & Alcohol” was Rest & Relaxation. I wrote it in my head, on my lunch breaks, walking through the tiny village where I worked. When I had that mapped out and a lyric, I started on Ultra Violet, again at work, again only in my head. Preparing for the move home and with a year-old baby in the house made it tough to find the time to sit with a guitar in the cellar, so I didn’t bother with that.
I got home in August 1999 and within a couple of weeks Herbie and I met up, at his flat on Storgatan this time, to start in on the album. This time we used a PC, with the Cubase programme, which was a complete and total mystery and we understood very little of it to begin with. It was anyway a revelation to work in that digital environment, rather than with analogue tape recorders. We had some huge problems, however. We could spend a whole evening recording overdubs, just to have the programme crash and everything we’d done during the whole evening was lost. It took a long time to learn that we had a to save as we worked and the learning curve was steep, even if recording a guitar or other instrument was easy enough. Quite quickly we installed Cubase on my PC too, so that I could work at home in my studio in See.