On the decision to issue New York Suite as a separate CD

Rob: I wrote the songs for the single “Home” album as you hear it now, but then I started to worry that it wasn’t progressive enough. I didn’t want to alienate all our fans, so I went back and wrote a few more tunes, and all of a sudden it was a double. However, in the end, with the extra 4 songs making an extra 40 minutes of material I was worried that people wouldn’t listen to it in one play. So quite late in the process we ended up taking out all those songs and making the New York Suite out of them.

Does the New york Suite stand up in its own right?

Steve Reed: The single album works very well as a single listen, but obviously you need to listen to the second disc to get all story. The whole New York Suite section is a very strong part of the story, because you get the whole self-destructive descent into drink and drugs and the final accident, which leads to her road trip. The beginning of the album, which is set in Liverpool gives quite a lot of detail about her emotional state, and it’s The New York Suite which really does that for her stay in Manhattan, so it’s very important.

Rob: I think the four pieces stand up on their own, there’s a lot in each of them and so they work fine as individual pieces. With Home it’s the song writing that makes the album to a certain extent, these are more complex pieces of music. The important thing is that musically these four songs are not so attached to the story, whereas all the music on “Home” is directly related musically and emotionally to what is going on in the story. We weren’t originally going to release the four songs until later in the year, but when I went back and played them again, I realised how good they were, so we decided to put them out as a complimentary disc to Home. We’ll definitely play one or two of them live at some point, too.