began affecting the band's ability to play live, as former guitarist/vocalist Jamie Murphy recalls: "When it was 3rd album time, I think we'd been away from it all for about a year and we had a tour while we had nothing out. We were doing 2000 capacity venues and there'd only be 400 people there. So we were going onstage every night going, "What the fuck's going on here? What have we done wrong?”. Eventually, the album were scrapped in July 2001. By that time, the band had terminated their contract with Gut. According to frontman Tommy Scott, it took the band a year to get out of it. "One of the problems we had in the past was that we felt we were being pushed in the wrong direction – like they were trying to turn us into The Beautiful South or something, when in fact we never wanted that at all, we just wanted to be a cult band". Meanwhile, Jamie Murphy, who was growing estranged from the others, was dismissed from the line-up. According to Murphy, because tensions were running high at the time, the exchange was never made face-to-face between his bandmates, and was informed only by the management that he was out of the group. The recordings for Love You More than Football primarily existed as a bootleg, courtesy of a promotional CD-R which circulated around May 2000, before an official remixed version was released in 2019. As a result, Space, now reduced to a four-piece and out of a record label, retreated to the studio for a couple of years, sporadically releasing several songs as MP3s free of charge to download through their website, becoming one of the first major groups to do so. These tracks showcased a more experimental side to the band, and were eventually collated as the Music for Aliens EP. Recording The recording sessions for Suburban Rock 'n' Roll took place between June and July 2002 at Highfield Street Studios in Liverpool. Stephen Lironi, who had previously worked with the band on their debut album Spiders, was brought on as producer, as well as contributing additional guitar and keyboard parts, with Gerald "Ged" Lynch providing percussion. In comparison to the fraught Love You More than Football sessions, the band found the experience "cleansing" and recording with Lironi productive. As the band were still unsigned at the time of recording, they