What a fantastic debut album. I think it's interesting how they managed with such a sparse and minimalistic production to paint so dramatic/filmatic pictures. Obviously it owes much to Mark's excellent songwriting, but the music is spot on. In my opinion, they were much more than a pub band, or, as Mark likes to put it, a "little beat group".
I don't mean to derail the thread, but it would have been so wonderful to hear those four doing music together again (in a parallel universe where they all still were friends). They had that "band" thing, where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Oh, well.
