ultimately Leonard dismissed the idea as impossible: "it would have cost three-quarters of a million pounds or something and they would have lost the plot." Instead, according to Spin, the album was at least partly recorded in a small hut belonging to Maclean's grandfather in a remote northwest part of Scotland, where the group found themselves with no room to sleep as they filled the hut with an excessive amount of musical equipment and homemade instruments. Sawmills Studio, Rockfield Studios and Jacobs Studio were also recording locations for the album. In a 1999 interview, Mclean clarified that separate sections of the albums were recorded in different places: "Four songs here, four songs somewhere else. You know, break it up a bit?" As with the band's prior releases, The Beta Band co-produced the album with Chris Allison, who also engineered it, although the band's manager later admitted he felt the collaboration was not as successful this time. Ambient bonus disc In one of their attempts to "make something out of nothing", the band had originally intended the album to contain a bonus disc of two long-form ambient pieces, "Happiness and Colour" and "The Hut", both of which lasted over 20 minutes and represented the band's desire to "make a record of sound as a description for something like happiness, where a distinct first part gives way to a distinct second part". The band's idea to record The Beta Band in Maclean's grandfather's hut was so they could record the sounds of the ocean for these pieces, and during which they discussed the possibility of a quadruple album. After the band returned to London, they had with them several hours of audio that they had recorded, which were then edited down into the two tracks. According to Craig McLean of Spin, "both sounded a little random, like a radio scanning across the ether". However, the band ultimately decided to remove these tracks from the album. Jones recalled: "We liked some of what we recorded, but it's not really what we wanted it to be from start to finish. We felt the second part was lacking in direction." Nonetheless, this decision came several weeks after the band's record label had already included the ambient disc with promotional copies of the album distributed to various people in the music industry. Drummer Robin Jones felt the reason they dropped the disc was because they were