Greetings once again, pop pickers. As you've come to know over recent years TBTG aren't the most active of rock bunnies these days (our batteries aren't Duracell so we wear out easily), but we have a bit of news for you this time round.

As we said in our last update (many years ago), we've been writing some new stuff. And then throwing it away. And then writing some more, and throwing that away, and so on. But recently we've been throwing it into a computer - yes, remember we mentioned we had some new recording software and we were just getting into it? Well, we finally found the "on" switch and we've been banging in all sorts of ideas. And then throwing them away. Oh - and did you know you have to press "save" occasionally? They could have told us! Anyway, we've been getting in touch with the modern world (we're in love with the modern world, and the neon when it's cold outside, cos we've got our radio on. And so on).

And so, as a result of all this digital tomfoolery we've got a couple of new songs for you to hear and we're gonna put them on this, our web site, in what I believe you young people call "The MP3 Format" (or MPEG audio layer 3 - it's a compresssed format specifically for storage of audio signals, utilising an idea called perceptual noise shaping as the basis of it's compression algorithm, or so our boffins tell us - actually, we've put them up in streaming RealAudio format, go to the MP3s section, website ed). Anyway now we've got a computer it's much easier to make these things. You wouldn't believe the hours of work we had to put in to writing them before, waving a magnet over a floppy disk. With any luck we'll be adding more tunes as work progresses, and you may even get updated versions of these two if we decide to do a remix. For the time being you'll get "Doggy Disco", so called because it's got a touch of the dancefloor (late 70's) style about it and it's about people who get to know their pets rather well, and "Never Decide" (at least I think that's what it called - we could, errr, well you can fill in the rest of the joke yourselves), which is the product of Ellis's "everything must sound like Sparks" phase, and sounds nothing like Sparks although it's pretty daft.

In the meantime our David has been beavering away in his bedroom and has come up with a solo album under the pseudonym of Shoebill. The album's called "Wild girl and crazy dog" or "Wild Bill and crazy horse" or some such (you were right first time! - website ed). He's sold a copy to the rest of us and it's really very good. It kind of takes up where "...And The Ugly" left off and, well, you can find out for yourselves. If you want to know more, or even buy it, you'd better talk to the old bugger in person by e-mailing him on shoebillstork [at] btopenworld [dot] com. And here we conclude another TBTG update. Keep an eye out for updates and future additions to our little MP3 family.

And if there are any gaps in your TBTG collection then now is the time to fill them as we're having a bit of a sale on oxfordmusic.net. 7-inch singles for £0.99, CD singles for £1.99 and albums for £7.99.

Webmaster note: if you don't belong already, please join Popex where you can trade shares in bands including our very own The Bigger The God.