Thanks to some choice words of encouragement from a handsome French admirer, they finally came in from the cold in early 2016. After many years spent daydreaming whilst accumulating an impressive collection of unusually shaped novelty shoehorns, a sudden and overwhelming sense of urgency pushed Paul Carter to lock himself away in an abandoned church in North Wales. Here he frantically scribbled words to accompany musical ideas – some new and others that had been finely balanced on a shelf in an outhouse at the bottom of Ben Clay’s garden for several winters. This return from musical hibernation encouraged his fellow bandmates to wake up too. A realisation that ’some time later’ had become ’well, right now actually’ inspired all of Flotation Toy Warning to dust themselves down and finish the job. So it came to be that ’The Machine That Made Us’ was completed in early 2017. Parts of it were happy. Parts of it were sad. But everything that was difficult had come to an end. Much to the relief of a certain Gallic gentleman with a well chiselled jawline...
