“I was just left to my own devices, wandering around the house, looking in the attic and going through all the band’s old cuttings and posters. It made me realise how long a journey it’d been,” he recalled.
“So much so that, when I came off that last tour with the ‘Phonics I just wanted to stop, I didn’t want to do any more huge arena shows and all the rest of it.
“I’d been repeating the same ‘make an album, take it on the road’ routine for a long time; 22 years, in fact. That’s over two decades of living on buses and in hotels, and, even though it can be the best job in the world, I just felt done with it.”
Having felt like throwing in the towel before his surgery, shortly afterwards Jones had a change of heart and instead felt like hitting the road on tour more than anything, and explaining the background to the songs he had written over the years.