Living and Growing (part 1)

I haven’t mentioned on this website that The Felt Tips debut album, Living and Growing, is being reissued on vinyl by London-based label Unspun Heroes on 17th October 2025.

The Felt Tips is the band I’ve been in since 2006. We sometimes joke that we are the band who couldn’t even manage to split up properly. In reality, we never seriously thought about it and there was always a feeling we’d be back for more at some point.

The reissue came out of the blue more than a year ago when Simon, who runs Unspun Heroes, wrote a thoughtful retrospective review of the album on his website. We quickly got in touch to ask if he’d be interested in putting out the record – the concept of Unspun Heroes is to release great, and perhaps underappreciated music on vinyl for the first time – and, happily, he said yes.

I imagine a lot of musicians only really appreciate what they achieved years after, and that’s how I feel in regard to Living and Growing. My best memories are of the excitement of getting Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) funding to record the album at CaVa in Glasgow, the flurry of writing and rehearsing a new batch of songs to put on it and, of course, the recording process itself.

I’ve sometimes thought of making albums a bit like having children. Not that I have had to do the difficult bit of giving birth, but I think people will know what I mean. There’s a lot of joy and pain that goes into them before they’re released into the world. And, even once they’re out there, they still need to be nurtured and loved in order to fulfil their potential. That sounds like a good theme for a song, doesn’t it?

So to start with, I’m going to say a little about the lead up to the album – call it the foreplay. In future I’ll do something on the recording and release.

At the start of 2009, we’d released 3 well-received singles and had been accepted into the international indiepop scene which was burgeoning at the time, but didn’t have concrete plans for what to do next. Obviously an album was something we dreamed of doing, but we didn’t know where to start. We didn’t have any ongoing support from a label as our singles were one-off releases. We were playing a few gigs here and there, including the one in the accompanying video, but my memory is that we didn’t have anything really exciting on the horizon.

Another ongoing challenge was that of keeping on coming up with songs that met the high bar we’d set with our singles. Including those singles, we had enough older songs for an album, but we didn’t want to rest on them as we’d been playing a lot of them for around 3 years already. We just wanted to be as good as we could be, and writing more and better songs was an imperative!

But that’s easier said than done, and I was only just managing to write enough songs that myself and the rest of the band were really happy with. The only two from the previous year that we had agreed to work on were Dear Morrissey and Engaged for a Visa. I’d also written Garden of Roses, but I hadn’t felt sure about sharing it, maybe because it was written on piano (which we didn’t use in the band) and had such a different lyrical theme to usual.

If we were on a boat we could be described as becalmed. But, to continue on this metaphor, we were keenly looking around for any hint of wind. And one idea was to apply to the Scottish Arts Council for funding to record an album. Having worked in the voluntary sector I was good at writing applications for funding, and I knew I’d made a decent case for getting the £4000 (approx.) we’d asked for.

It was June and my wife and I had just come back, on a boat, from a holiday in the Western Isles. Feeling refreshed, I had a new surge of creativity and wrote Silver Spoon (see video) which I knew would make a perfect Felt Tips song. A few days later we got the news that we’d been successful in our funding application, and all of a sudden we had something clear to work towards.

We started planning things with Peruvian label, Plastilina who had agreed to release the album if we got funded, got booked into CaVa at the end of the year and began working on new material in rehearsals. My creativity picked up and I wrote songs like Double Bluff, Iron Lady and Whipped Off – we didn’t have time to get the last two ready for the album.

In all, we worked on six newish songs which hadn’t featured on our early singles. We were getting better as a band at arranging songs and Kev and Neil gave songs like Dear Morrissey, Double Bluff and Garden of Roses more of a solid rhythmic foundation than I’d managed in my initial demos. I remember Miguel sending us over the updated band-demos with his new guitar parts pretty late on and knowing we were onto something.

Parts 2 and 3 to come…

Find out more about the reissued album at Unspun Heroes bandcamp page.

Visit The Felt Tips bandcamp for more links, including gigs in London and Glasgow to promote the reissue.