That's why I'm bringing it up.

That's really cool.

That's very cool.

And yeah, when we were recording it, we knew like, holy shit.

You know, just like one example of it is like, okay, the end of Violent People, I have a really long drum fill.

i've been doing that for years that kind of stuff recording it and then it would be gone but like that's the beautiful thing about like what eddie and i that was the initial thing making sure that we had our creative freedom was our goal that was the goal because like the goal was to meet up and try to create and see what happened.

But like, while we're doing it, we're going to do whatever the fuck we want to do without any outside influence.

Or his.

That's

great.

This is where a gay guy was creating the branding of Bond.

When you just see a single ace of spades or a diamond with a bullet, you'll think Bond.

You're putting those two things together.

Suddenly that speaks of Bond.

And I think it also fed into the title design and the film posters later on.

You know, that is gay life at a certain time in a margarine tub, encapsulated in that.

What first attracted you to the sexy strapping spy who is James Bond?

First off, plaudits for pop culture clutch bag.

I love that.

I will use that.

I will use it.

That's a great one.

Please do.

Yeah, I mean, obviously the

happens.

everybody everybody's put everything on the line for this band yeah every everybody not just everybody in the band but casey our manager uh you know neil neil and his family and neil our bass player and his family like everybody um involved has really put put their selves you know like really dropped everything because It's that special.

Like when something is so, when you just know it and everybody knows it, like, there you go.

Everybody just, we don't know if it's going to turn into money still.

Like, we don't know what, we don't know what comes in the future, but we know that this is so special that in my mind, I am saying out loud, like, I was told maybe don't say that we're going to be the biggest band in the world anymore to people out loud.

But when I have said that in the past, I have meant it in a way of I'm so excited.

It's another way for me to say I'm so excited about this new band.

There was a lot to it.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name is Mark O'Connell and I'm the author of Battle of the Botanic Garden, The Horticulture War Roiling the Isle of Wight, which was published in The Guardian Long Read in January 2023.

This is a story about a dispute over a beloved botanical garden on the Isle of Wight.

The garden was bought by a wealthy American businessman who took a kind of a rewilding approach to the botanical garden, which proved extremely controversial, in particular with the charitable organization that partly funds the garden.

Like a lot of my sort of favorite things that I've written over the years, this story idea actually came from an editor, in this case David Wolfe, the Long Read editor.

If I remember right, David was on holiday on the Isle of Wight and was like looking through the local newspaper and saw this small kind of, you know, local news story about a dispute over the direction being taken by this botanical garden in Ventnor and thought it might be something that I would get my teeth into and he was completely right.

The story, to me, seemed to have a very appealing quality or set of qualities.

Yeah, with all the stuff coming in.

Thank you.

So, yes, we are going to be touring, like...

The excitement is, man, once you hear this album, I wish that you heard it so you had a grasp on it.

It is hands down, and I'm going to go ahead and say this, by far the best thing that Eddie and I have done together.

It's just, it's really, we sound liberated, we sound set free.

You could hear the creative freedom that we haven't been able, like, a sound that we once made that was so beautiful that, like, it was a sound that people loved, it's back.

So,

It all works, right?

Yeah, it's great.

Neil, let me tell you, like, Eddie is no, like, Neil and I have been friends since we're five years old.

And so Eddie was in the movie life with Neil's older brother, Alex.

So when me and Neil were little young, you know, teenager punks, during her 40s and smoking our blood smoking our blood like the crazy kids Ed would be at movie lab practice and always like talking shit but the thing is like we like Neil had the job to play bass for the band before he even picked up a bass like he yeah And I knew, like, we all, like, I was like, yo, this dude is going to be able to pick up, like, he's going to be able to learn how to play bass while we're making this album.

And Mike and Ed, like, the motherfuckers that they are, and Casey also being down, like, they're all just, yeah, cool.

Like, Neil's the best.

so many interesting stories like that that leave him more questions.

Could you, could you describe this a little bit for us and what, what you make of this entire aspect of scientific research of UFOs?

Yeah, it's a fascinating story, and it's, it's kind of an interesting case in, um, uh, a case of, of beware unintended consequences because the Invisible College came about at a time when institutional science was essentially, um, killing ufology once and for all.

And while they were doing that, the Invisible College sprung up and kept ufology alive, um, in s- in spite of science's best efforts.

So it's, it's a very curious story.

What happened was long series of events that started out with the 1966 Michigan swamp gas case.

Eventually, that case led to the Colorado Project, which refers to the US Air Force hired the University of Colorado, gave them a $300,000 grant in, uh, 1967 to do the final, ultimate, authoritative analysis of the UFO problem and decide, number one, um, do UFOs pose a threat to our country? And number two, do they represent any sort of-- do they actually represent any sort of interesting alien technology that we're not aware of? So those were the kinds of things the Colorado Project was looking at.

Um, and what they did basically was, uh, after, after a couple years of very public infighting and scandal and embarrassing news leaks, um, the Colorado Project finally came out with a final report that said, "No, there's nothing to this.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Just working and without any outside interference of any kind.

And, like, with Eddie, like, you know, like, Eddie, like, would leave a couple days earlier, but, like, the trust that Eddie and I, I have for, for each other in this creative process and, like, knowing what we love, knowing what we love, knowing how we wanted this to go down and, and, you know, like, if you have a respect and love for somebody, you could leave them at the studio because they're, they're actually your brother.

Not, they're not gonna go behind your back like the motherfucking snakes that we all know we have surrounded around us, trying to hurt and shit.

But, like, me and Eddie, like, so, like, with that [laughs] I, I don't mean to go there.

But with that, um, Eddie, yeah, like, there, like, when it was his turn to go in and do his shit, I was, you know, I was just there to listen because I got to hear my old friend doing the old dope shit that he wasn't able to do, uh, 'cause, you know, whatever the fucking, the reasons.

But, um-

Mm-hmm

You two were working on already? Yeah.

So, so the whole thing with, with Eddie and I not, not wanting a singer, whatever it was, was like we didn't, we didn't want, we, we were unwavering in no one's, no one, we, we were s- no one's allowed to come in and fuck with our songs at all.

Like it, it's-

... and, and, and, and knowing-

knowing-To when you need to bet on yourself.

When you, when you just, when things aren't going, like Mike said, when things are not going exactly the way that you see and there's issues happening around you.

You know, all of a sudden one day you're in this corny little village with a bunch of corn balls doing corny ass shit, and you don't wanna do that anymore.

How are you gonna break free?