Recorded in Ilkeston and elsewhere in 2001 and self-released in limited numbers in lovely cardboard sleeves shortly thereafter.

Tagged "the miserable one" by the few who heard it at the time, recent listenings have revealed the prettiest thing we ever did.

Having recorded for years on 4-tracks, we were always concerned with getting as much STUFF on the tracks - even though we were recording at home we wanted things to sound as big as possible. As such when we moved up to the dizzying heights of 8-tracks for "Players", we wanted to fill every bit of tape at our disposal.

The cool thing about "The First 100 Years" is that it has the most space on it of all our recordings. The lyrics are less cryptic and more direct - as we said in an email interview / editorial in City Lights at the time:

"The First 100 Years is definitely less abstract, maybe a bit more emotional - it's our soul album.

Giles wrote most of the lyrics on this album and feels that it was written and recorded over a very weird period in his life. That probably had a big influence on its downbeat feel. This kind of music is definitely required sometimes and we think we've made a good downbeat album here. We wrote the songs quite slowly and practiced them up as a group for quite a while (but not too much) before committing them to tape. We've started getting more experimental with the sounds lately and that process started sometime when we were recording this stuff. There were some arguments, especially between the Domino siblings, Steve and Giles. Much tea was drunk. We made it the best we could... It's fun. It's what we do. It's an endless cycle of writing and tea and rehearsals and biscuits and recording.

In some ways we've come a long way. In others we've moved nowhere. We're still friends. We've been through a lot of stuff together. Made a lot of tracks. We're still some obscure group. We still take the piss out of each other like stupid kids. We've progressed in the sense that the music has developed / is developing and that's kind of the point."