"I think probably we were really miserable buggers for the first year in the UK. We had premonitions that the whole record company thing was going to fall apart at some point, even though we were in a good position to really sprint away with it. We were in a sort of dream position in terms of lots of bands - to be on a major label, in a new country, to be doing interviews with big newspapers in England about your little life - that’s pretty amazing. 

As it happened, we weren’t very healthy as a group, we weren’t communicating very well. We were very pessimistic about the whole thing, about how it was all going to turn out. I wasn’t writing very much, and the stuff I was writing was quite miserable. Some of the best stuff on ‘Envy of Angels’ is that very-late-at-night, full-of-fear-for-the-future sort of writing, and some of it works, because you should write about what you are feeling and that’s what I was feeling at that time."
 
 

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