‘I began to think if it was the thing about me being gay in the press,’ Simon muses. ’I don’t know. I can’t see why that album didn’t sell as much. It sold 500,000 copies which today is amazing but ‘Moseley Shoals,’ sold 1.3 million and I don’t know why the sales dipped. There are so many intangibles but for me it was as good as anything we had done. That period was probably the most self confident I’ve ever been in my life. We were pop stars for eighteen months. We were the third biggest selling band in the country and it was because of Oasis opening up the way for bands like us.’

In 1998, the band undertook a five-week arena tour of the UK, (one of the biggest selling events of the year) and again ended their tour with a show in Edinburgh on New Year’s Eve, in front of thousands and thousands of people. 1999 saw the band start work on their fourth album, One From The Modern. It would prove to be the most laborious time spent in a studio. The sessions dragged on, the songs subjected to the most meticulous approach by the long time production team of Brendan Lynch and Max Heyes.

‘Another thing, Steve Cradock points out, ‘is that for the first two albums we had all the tunes. We had about thirty to forty songs at that time. For this album we had to come up with twelve tunes and it was the first time we had worked like that. Personally, I think the stand out tracks are songs such as, ‘Emily Chambers,’ or ‘Step By Step,’ but that album took much longer than it should have done.’

As the sessions dragged on, inevitably, the band’s attention wandered and focussed more on their ‘recreational’ activities than their musical duties. ‘Let’s just say making music was not our chief priority at that time,’ says Simon. The first glimpse of their efforts came with the release of ‘Profit In Peace,’ an anti war song that debuted at #13 in the charts. Their next single, ‘So Low’ was appropriately tilted. It only reached #34. ‘July,’ Channel Four picked up a song the band resurrected ‘from the dead,’ and never particularly liked for the TV series of Guy Ritchie’s “Lock Stock and Barrel”. As a single, it reached #31 in the charts.

‘The songs were much more folksy,’ Steve Cradock says, ‘and we recorded the album up in Wales. The recordings sessions went really quickly which is why you get that band feel to a lot of the songs but the mixing sessions went on forever.’ Although the singles from the album fared badly, the album did go in at #13. Again, the band toured, whilst MCA finally got their own way and released a Greatest Hits album later on that year. They then handed the boys their P 45’s. >>