LK 254, The Miracle of Shame e.p. AD 2000. It's quite an odd release, I know, especially since till Yesterday Rules came out four years later there was nothing, leaving this as an awkward apparent "swan song." In fact, it hadn't been meant to stand alone like that for so long. It was intended to be a precursor to a followup album, and a sort of test as to how well it might work to take tracks I'd recorded at home and import them to a real studio and make them sound all big and proper. (Which pretty much did work at least to some extent, for what it's worth, which ain't much as I am well aware.) Now I think this is the norm, to an extent, this bouncing and sharing around tracks and patching them together, but then it was still pretty weird. And cumbersome. We had to sync up my ADAT machine to the reel tape when we did the drums at the real studio, e.g., and we didn't know what we were doing which didn't help. The planned album was to be a rather deliberately grandiose "art pop" album, probably too ambitious for a guy like me execute all the way, as usual. And I knew everyone was going to hate it. Somehow I took a sort of grim satisfaction in that prospect. In the event this e.p. didn't go over all that swimmingly, though I hear from people who say they like it now. At any rate, we did a tour of Europe with the Queers in late 2000, and then everything (band, self, label, world) disintegrated and all thoughts of recording an expensive, ironic magnum opus deliberately engineered to be unsuccessful went out the window, quite properly one might say. By the time we regrouped in 2003 with a new line-up, the next step seemed better cast as a rock and roll album, hence Yesterday Rules. As I said, we used a lot of the tracks I'd recorded on ADAT in my bedroom. We did the drums and bass and some guitars at Sharkbite on tape. For the vocals, as an experiment and to keep the costs down, we borrowed a fancy Neumann mic and did them in my kitchen, with Kevin Army s...