Most of Flotation Toy Warning met for the first time whilst working in North London in a sprawling old grey brick building enveloped in trees - a former women’s refuge, then place for injured soldiers to convalesce during World War I.

Choosing a name from words written on beach balls and swimming rings, they agreed to live together in a warehouse with no windows in East London. Converted from an old clothes factory it was ideal for making as much noise as you wanted, whenever you wanted. Which they did, whilst constructing a sound by plugging things into other things that shouldn’t rightly be plugged into anything. Then singing through them until something interesting happened.

This lead to a series of performances in churches, boats, art galleries and someone’s living room, two EPs then an album called Bluffer’s Guide to the Flight Deck. They subsequently became distracted for a considerable amount of time by something interesting they found written on a wall.

Thanks to some choice words of encouragement from a handsome French admirer, they finally came in from the cold in early 2016. After many years spent daydreaming whilst accumulating an impressive collection of unusually shaped novelty shoehorns, a sudden and overwhelming sense of urgency pushed Paul Carter to lock himself away in an abandoned church in North Wales. Here he frantically scribbled words to accompany musical ideas – some new and others that had been finely balanced on a shelf in an outhouse at the bottom of Ben Clay’s garden for several winters. This return from musical hibernation encouraged his fellow bandmates to wake up too. A realisation that ’some time later’ had become ’well, right now actually’ inspired all of Flotation Toy Warning to dust themselves down and finish the job. So it came to be that ’The Machine That Made Us’ was completed in early 2017. Parts of it were happy. Parts of it were sad. But everything that was difficult had come to an end. Much to the relief of a certain Gallic gentleman with a well chiselled jawline...