Mile After Mile was my first release, back in 2002. I wrote it in 2001 in between two gigs. At that time I used to do two and sometimes three, or even four, gigs in one evening. This particular night I’d been in either Watford or St Albans I think. I then had to get down to Surbiton/Kingston for another gig and I wrote the song in the car on the journey. Of course if I did the next gig it would have been lost in the mists of time. So I phoned my home ansafone and left the song on there. I recorded it in 2002 at Scarlet Studios in London. My band at the time was American Dave Hadley Ray on bass and German Joachim Greve on drums. Dave produced the recording and he suggested instead of doing my original plan of making a demo, why not spend a few pounds more and make a radio quality recording. Good idea that. So we did. Wan was the sound engineer and he captured the real ‘live’ sound we were looking for. Himself a drummer he was in a band called Auburn who supported Sophie Ellis Bextor that year on tour. It was a largely analogue studio. The other musician on this song was a guy called Paolo on harmonica, who I’d met at Tony Moore’s legendary Kashmir Klub when he played for Caroline Lost, who then inexplicably changed her name to Caroline Lofts. I never saw Paolo again, probably because Dave gave him a really hard time in the studio! Now I had a radio recording it seemed the thing to do would be to call up radio stations. So I did. I started by calling every radio station in Sweden. Many times having to speak Swedish to them – I’ve been going to Sweden since I was 18 and at that time my Swedish was pretty good. I got played by an FM station called City Radion and after their listeners requested the song it went A-rotation (which simply means it was played 8 times every 24 hours). So I was doing a lot of gigs and radio stuff around Sweden and also, since it was the summer and most companies virtually shut down to make the most of it, I was doing my own distribution. I’d be gigging in the evenings and then taking boxes of CDs to send to local record shops around the country. In many cases that would mean the petrol station! I got airplay in Finland as well on YLE, thanks to DJ Ole Holmberg. And on an online Rock station in the Netherlands. Meanwhile the UK was not so accommodating. I tried the two independent radio stations in Hertfordshire at the time as I had some band tour dates there in Watford, St Albans, Hitchen etc. I duly sent the CD off and got positive feedback about the song though neither radio station would play it. The first said they’d pledged to their listeners never to play rock music! The other said they could only play my songs if I was from Hertfordshire. I pointed out that Madonna and Prince didn’t live in Hertfordshire but they still played them. To no avail. So I never got played there. I did get some airplay on random FM stations in the UK, like Resonance FM. I think the reason Mile After Mile did well was because it’s a song that has a beginning an end and a middle. It’s under 3 minutes and is lively. Basically the perfect formula for a radio hit! People have often asked me what chart position I reached in Sweden. The simple answer is no one knows. When I had the CDs pressed they asked me about add-on options. One was a bar code. I declined but that’s what they use to determine chart position. So no one knows. For this 15th anniversary release I wanted to make it different somehow. Marky is a great vocalist and loves the song, so it seemed fairly obvious to have him sing Mile After Mile. Every other part remains as per the original version except that producer Mike Peters re-engineers the track for the new vocal. Mike gets a great poppy vocal sound whilst keeping the rocky feel of the song. Mike's worked with many artists including B*witched and Liberty X. Marky is just 25 though so he has everything ahead of him still!