Mainstream

The search for a producer was difficult. The band started with Chris Thomas, then brought in Stewart Copeland, with whom they recorded one track, Hey Rusty, before settling on Ian Stanley, known for his work with Tears for Fears. Donegan said in 2004 that after the rushed Easy Pieces the aim was something more powerful, but that the record took so long the band lost its vision, and that Cole's songs had become more introspective. It cost 300,000 pounds, ten times as much as Rattlesnakes, and took five months.

Blair Cowan had left before release, so he is missing from the photographs on the artwork and is thanked in a dedication on the inner sleeve. Donegan had been accepted on a journalism course, and the band decided to split once the album was out, though they first had to promote it and tour for a year. Cole said he wrote My Bag one drunken night about a cocaine-fueled stockbroker. Mr. Malcontent draws on the character Daniel Day-Lewis played in My Beautiful Laundrette, and Sean Penn Blues, about an incident in which the actor was invited to a poetry reading set up to mock him, opens with dialogue from Robbie Coltrane and Katy Murphy taken from the BBC series Tutti Frutti. These Days has a bassline copied from a track on Laurie Anderson's Mister Heartbreak.

It reached 9 in the UK and went gold. The singles were My Bag, Jennifer She Said and From the Hip. Q thought it put Cole on a hat-trick of excellent pop albums, NME praised its wit, intelligence and use of strings, and Record Mirror called it a slightly flawed masterpiece. AllMusic's William Ruhlmann was far less impressed, though he liked Hey Rusty.