The Noctorum project began as a way to bring Dare Mason into the writing process. We had made lots of records together but generally it was me that wrote the songs. This record was written and recorded at Dare’s VIP lounge studio in Penzance, Cornwall in just one week but you’d never know it as it was a lush production. It was a more sophisticated record mostly leaving behind the acoustic elements although it continued on an eclectic path with some long experimental tracks. It featured the moody My Museum and the poptastic High As A Kite, the hit that never was. The cover art by Greg Daville was composite images put together to form an unlikely reality. The device featured in the picture is called an orrery and is a real thing – a working mechanical model of our solar system. The title has no connection to the picture, it was simply the name of one of the roads in Thingwall that connected our parents houses to each other when we were growing up as teenagers. It seemed appropriate as this was our first writing collaboration since our school band in the early seventies. We were called Opal Butterfly and were influenced by the more progressives bands of the day, then in the late seventies we had a new wave band  called  The True 100’s named after a cigarette. Later I discovered that the name Opal Butterfly was already taken but for some reason the True 100’s name is still available?