Julianne: "Being deeply lazy where household chores are concerned, I've rarely even used a broomstick, let alone jump one, so I can only hazard a guess at how life pans out after the honeymoon's over. In AAE's case, once we'd eaten all the icing off the cake and made ourselves sick, we picked out the last flecks of confetti from our (voluminous) hair, and got down to the serious business of recording the second album.

Where we'd had a life-time to gather songs for our debut, we quickly found ourselves in a situation where record company release schedules, (things put in place to make sure that we didn't release an album at the same time as Bon Jovi or Def Leppard!) dictated the deadlines. It was decided that the four of us, Mark now having joined us on a full-time basis, should be bussed out to the Surrey countryside, this time to a place called Stanbridge Farm, (or, the 'Not Funny' Farm as I like to call it. The reasons will become apparent later).

We set all our gear up in a big barn, chose our bedrooms, visited the local oak-beamed pub and got a brief but deep night's sleep in preparation for our first day of 'writing'.....However, it wasn't really 'writing', it was 'jamming', and I wasn't at all into working that way at the time. I was 'Miss Precision'. I liked the controlled kind of spontaneity that bedrooms and 4-track recorders and ticky-tacky drum machines afforded me, not million decibel rock-outs with big noisy drum-kits in cavernous barns......It wasn't that I was averse to a bit of pomp and volume per se. I used to irritate people to distraction by over-playing the video of Led Zeppelin's 'Song Remains The Same', and, for my sins, drooling on about how great Metallica and Whitesnake were! On the tour bus at that time, Andy and I could often be found plugged into the same Walkman listening to Heart! (......and we were supposed to be 'Indie'). From time to time I'd pop over to the barn, choke on the crashing waves of testosterone for a few minutes, then shuffle back to the cottage to watch 'Neighbours' with Adam our guitar technician, or sulk under a tree with only Nick Drake or David Sylvian on my Walkman for company.

Although a couple of promising pieces of music had made their way to me in the form of 'Gold and Silver' and 'Tuesday's Child', I was soon climbing the walls with boredom and frustration. Weeks passed. I felt left out. It wasn't my way of working, and I didn't know how to join in. I was also having a lot of trouble coming to terms with the magical but unholy trinity of Tim, Andy and I having had to evolve to incorporate a fourth person. In truth, I was stubbornly against 'evolving'. I just wasn't sure of this guy who'd come along and banged drums, started shooting air-rifles with Tim, dated my sister and generally, although unintentionally, rocked my boat! It wasn't Mark as such, it was just that it was an extra person...... Yes, this was all very unreasonable of me, but then, I was at my most reasonable around about then. To make things even more fraught, Tim and I were hardly on the best of terms, conversations between us being rarer than a French steak! (Sorry vegetarians).

If I knew then what I know now, I reckon I'd have tried the 'grown-up' approach of voicing my concerns and trying to find a solution to the problem. But I didn't know, so, I didn't try. Instead, I had a spectacular 'rock-star' tantrum ,and, pre-empting Ikea's rallying cry to 'chuck out my chintz' by over a decade, threw great lumps of Laura Ashley style furniture around our cottage, reducing an apparently idyllic hidey-hole into something resembling a Euston squat. I know now that this was neither big nor clever. But, it felt fantastic for those few frenzied minutes!

Only half-knowing that I had seriously lost the plot, I slipped back to my attic room in the 'big house', got into bed, and lay there waiting for my colleagues to come and shoot me with their air-rifles. No, I'm not joking, I was by then so detached from reality, so thoroughly unhinged, that I genuinely thought they were going to kill me. The next morning I awoke to find that the others, on discovering my demolition handiwork, had done a moonlight flit back to London. Who could blame them ? Still, I felt devastated and deserted.

Unsurprisingly, our manager called me that afternoon to ask me if I'd go up to London to see a psycho-therapist. The next day , I was on a train to see her, once again with David Sylvian on my Walkman, listening to the same song over and over again, the one on the 'Secrets Of The Beehive' album where he sings about 'bottles that crash on the stairs' and all the people he 'knew never cared'. I was drowning in self-pity. Sad and pathetic.

With an Elastoplast on my psyche, AAE resumed some semblance of normality. It was actually 'Martha' that brought this about. We had resisted fierce record company opinion to have this song released as a single, so, we had to band together again to make it happen. We had a pleasant enough time filming the video in the South of France...Well, Andy and Mark had a brilliant time whizzing around in a speed boat while Tim and I had our retinas burned out by some sadistic ex-Marine type camera-man who insisted on our staring directly into the sun.

A few months later, in the wake of the mad Summer that 'Martha' had spawned, we got back to the bedroom method of writing. During these sessions, 'More Than The Blues' was written at Tim's house and Andy fashioned together the greater part of 'December' back at his place. In the tradition of 'Martha', who was born beneath a willow at Ridge Farm, Tim and I wrote 'Scarlet', under some other kind of tree.

We recorded the album with Paul Samwell-Smith at a studio in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire. We lived a fragmented and strange existence while there. It started of with a vaguely rosy hue, but when the apple went rotten, it really went rotten. I can almost pinpoint this as the beginning of the end. Tim and I versus Andy & Mark, dragging the band into a folkier/ bluesier direction than was sensible....(to this day, Andy breaks out in a cold sweat at the very mention of 'Bl*nd L*m*n S*m', and Mark simply leaves the room). Then, it was me versus Tim, and Phonogram versus us. It was the Summer of conflict, stress, fights, panic, anger, chocolate and alcohol.

On a personal level, there are few fond memories to be salvaged from those glum months. Musically, we had our moments. For no reason that I'm sure of, one of my favourite songs from that album is 'Hard Spaniard'. Perhaps it's something to do with it having such a uniquely sleazy atmosphere and a kind of dis-jointedness that makes perfect sense to me. I also love Tim's lead acoustic guitar on 'Pearl Fishermen', although I wished I'd sung it in a more relaxed way...Oh well, spilt milk, we've got oceans of it."