Following on from a busy 1986, we went in search of new songs, and knocked these up loosely in a rehearsal room, before moving to The Enid's studio, The Lodge, at Claret Farm in Surrey. This was the first time we effectively wrote in the studio, working from bare bones ideas, which we filled out as we went. Also recorded in this session were Family Life and, after an evening in the pub, The Mermaid. The engineer was Nick Davies, who went on to make a lot of money out of Genesis.

Another attempt at breaking into under exploited territories, this is the White Coats EP with some added live tracks from Nottingham Rock City. Each territory did a variation on the sleeve, the worst of which was the German 'alternative' sleeve, an abomination of heat sensitive blue images and a lot of tacky fonts. Although it never got the Japanese and Americans beating a path to our door, it did pretty well, and the live tracks helped a lot with that. Despite this, the US tour of 1987 was not the barnstorming success predicted by the advisors who spent all our money on legal battles for work permits. However, I had a particularly good time and remember the tour very fondly, because no matter what went wrong, and many things did, it was bloody good fun.

I've little to no claim to be on this album, as the radio sessions in question pre-date the time I joined. Officially, I'm not on this album, but Edward Christie wanted a version of The Cause on here, and the one that had been recorded was missing in action. Consequently, we made another one in the style of the original. A lot of time was spent trying to reproduce the rushed production of the original sessions, most of which were done in as little as half a day. It's hard to make something sound raw when you're bust doing an album and have spent days getting everything to sound big for the production. Guitars were turned down, microphones were placed further away and technology was switched off. We didn't succeed in matching the energy of the early versions, or the sound. In fact, The Cause sticks out like a sore thumb on this archive of the band's early history. Not a bad version in itself, but lacking the raw edge of a young band hungry for success, the New Model Army I grew up on, not in.

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