In June 2014 I moved back to my childhood home in Battersea. It was intended to be a short stay whilst I looked for a place for my then-girlfriend and me, but the scarcity of affordable London flats meant that we ended up living there for seven months. This period marks a change in that I began writing more with the intent of releasing something to the public rather than doing it purely for myself. First though I would have to come up with a name. I christened the project Plastic Modern as it seemed to represent the Pop Art ideal I was pursuing. I had vague pretensions of making Pop music in the way that Andy Warhol made art, taking commercial song form and giving it my own touch. I wanted it to be affected and impersonal, the less of me (stylistically) on there the better. This attitude likely stemmed from my time playing in and alongside bands that I viewed as excessively earnest. In London and Los Angeles in the early 2010s Roots music had taken hold. It felt as though every underground band was making heartfelt Folk and Country Rock replete with banjos, double basses and - in the most objectionable cases - Cajon drums. Now, with creative control firmly in my hands, this was my chance to make music entirely devoid of sincerity (and folk instrumentation). Perhaps I was also hiding behind this veil of post-modernism, detaching myself from my songs for fear of criticism. I was still very unsure of my singing ability and by keeping the music conceptual rather than personal, any deficiencies could be explained away and any critique deflected. During this time I tried, and failed to find band members. One would think that working on London’s premier music street I would have easy access to the city’s best and brightest but very few people seemed right and those who did weren’t interested. I’ve always been overly-picky when it comes to prospective band members, with image and ability being of equal importance. So for the time being Plastic Modern remained a home recording project, but this was the start of the band concept, the framework within which the songs would be conceived. In December I finally found a place to live. It was a basement studio flat in Crystal Palace and though it was a modest dwelling (to say the least) it was a relief to move out. My half brother, step mother and her family had more or less taken over the Battersea apartment so I was eager to have a place to record without the noise of family life in the background, recording was frustrating enough without the cries of a three year old leaking into the microphones.