We were invited to play the X Factor in Italy after the success of The Weight Of Your Love. I think our initial reaction to the request was probably a flat no. But after some gentle coaxing and the realization that opportunities to play in front of a very big mainstream audience rarely come around, we agreed. I remember the day being extremely peculiar, TV is always a pretty weird and uncomfortable experience. You tend to be Shepherded around to different people, makeup, audio, showrunners, etc. It all becomes quite disorienting especially when you don’t speak the language. Suddenly we found ourselves thrust under the studio spotlights in front of millions of people at home pretending to have a great time and rock out to a Ton Of Love. Tom was the only one performing live the rest of us had to mime on rented versions of our instruments. Miming is incredibly hard to pull off convincingly. Nothing makes you feel like more of a twat or a fraud than pretending to do what you can do. Mika was one of the judges on the show he came and shook our hands. We got very drunk at the hotel after. The best thing about being in a band is you get to do this stupid stuff together and as long as you can make it fun you can get through anything. After X-Factor we started hearing Ton Of Love in bars and restaurants all over Italy, the gigs in Italy started to become bigger.

Going into making the fourth album it reached a point with us and Chris where his frames of reference didn’t tally with our desire to experiment. We had some new songs, and we did some studio sessions with Flood and with Chris, but after a year we were getting nowhere. It got so frustrating I think Flood actually gave up music for a while! There were two options: ‘We’ve had a great run guys, but let’s knock it on the head.’ Or: Ed, Russ and I believed in the songs. And even though it was fucking grim, we had to ask Chris to leave so the band could move on. That was at the end of 2011. In summer 2012 we had the Werchter headline slot but Chris had left and there was only three of us so that was a bit of a worry. We decided to get in two new players, Elliot and Justin. Initially it was to rehearse the old songs, but we had all this material we’d been throwing around, trying to make them work, and something started to happen in the rehearsals. The Wercher show went really well so we decided: let’s be a band and let’s do a rock record. The five of us hooked up with Jacquire King. We loved what he’d done with Kings of Leon and I had in mind those mid-Eighties REM albums with Scott Litt. We went to Nashville and ended up with The Weight of Your Love, which is a slightly confused record but the high points are really high – like the first single, A Ton of Love, which is a balls-out, slightly old-fashioned song in its presentation. But I listen to it now and I do hear the sound of a band with an identity crisis.