At the start of this series of reflections on Living and Growing I compared making an album to having children. Well, once your baby is out there, you’ve got to name it and dress it up, both of which can be hard to agree on as parents. For us, the naming part went smoothly. We wanted something which alluded to some of the lyrical themes in the album. ‘The Facts of Life’ had already been taken by Black Box Recorder a decade before but I was keen to think of something similar. Neil and I had been in the same class in primary school in Aberdeen, and the sex education video we were shown was called ‘Living and Growing’. Once we’d thought of it, there wasn’t any real debate and I think we may have agreed on the name before the recording was finished.
The artwork – the dressing up part – was a different story. Ideally, a band has one artistically-minded member who can take a lead on that side of things. The Felt Tips live up to our name in that our art and design skills are, to be honest, a bit rudimentary. And because there’s no obvious person to take charge, it makes it harder to come up with good ideas and then, if any do come, make decisions on them. Without going into the details, we went through a few months worth of ideas and discussion back and forth between ourselves and with the label, Plastilina, before we finally settled on something. In the end, Emma Sanderson, who we asked late on to do the artwork, did something we would never have thought of ourselves, focusing on one track, Garden of Roses, over others. But since the song linked well with the album title, Living and Growing, the eye-catching image she came up worked brilliantly as the overall album artwork.
There were also some issues with the final product. The artwork was quite dark coloured, so some of the text on the back of the CD case didn’t show up so well. More significantly, the sound quality of the printed CDs wasn’t perfect, although I remember I was the only person who could hear it at first, which reassured us to an extent. Ideally we would have had a test-printing to check, but it was a small release by a small label and probably quite normal not to consider this.
We did most of the promotion ourselves, sending promo CDs to, or emailing, everyone we saw as relevant. I know from my solo stuff how hard it is to generate interest so, in retrospect, the reaction was really good. Although you generally expect bloggers and online review sites to give favourable reviews (since they understandably tend to prioritise music they like) the level of positivity about the record showed that it had really hit the mark for a lot people. The only mediocre review was in the NME which gave us 5 out of 10 (I’d rate the quality of journalism in the review as a 4), but we were just impressed to see we’d attracted the attention of the mainstream.
It felt like momentum was building, not just for us but for indiepop in general, and Roque Ruiz from Cloudberry Records (as well as Plastilina) says something similar in his excellent sleeve notes for the reissued record. We were playing with loads of great up-and-coming bands around at the time, from Standard Fare to The Cavalcade. There was a healthy indiepop scene in and around Glasgow and it’s a shame it wasn’t picked up on more widely. Some bands, such as The Just Joans – with their own brand of witty social realism set to brilliantly catchy music – are, thankfully, still around.
On a side note – it’s possible that not everyone reading this will know what indiepop is. Well, it revolves around a DIY ethos and a love for melodic, energetic and thoughtful pop music. When we first formed The Felt Tips in late 2005 it wasn’t a term we were familiar with either, although it’s fair to say we did like a lot of bands that would be considered as being indiepop. We had no idea there was any indiepop scene out there, but were very happy to be welcomed in by most who were already in the tent so to speak.
Due to the artwork saga and other delays, we’d played most of the gigs we’d had lined up in 2010 before the record was out, which was around November I think. Live appearances included our second and last appearance at the Indietracks festival where we first aired some of the newer songs. The festival was growing in reputation and size, and it felt like it was at the heart of the afore-mentioned scene. At the same time, it was frustrating not to have the record out. I’m not sure how much of a difference the timing of things made in reality, but everything felt a bit uncoordinated, which is in stark contrast to how we’ve planned things with Unspun Heroes for the reissue in 2025.
Reflecting on it all now, my view is that we were probably at our peak as a band with Living and Growing. When Kev, Neil and I (Miguel lives in London these days so couldn’t be there) sat down to listen to the test pressing of the remastered album it reminded us how magical a record we’d made. There’s so much music being released all the time it’s easy to feel overwhelmed (as a listener and artist), but some records, instead of being buried forever, end up poking back out of the ground over time – maybe we created one of those.
More
Read Living and Growing part 1 and part 2
Listen to and buy Living and Growing
See details of live shows by The Felt Tips in London and Glasgow in November 2025