Sitting Pretty’s story begins in August 2003, although it wasn’t known as Sitting Pretty then. One rather wet night, Andy Chittick, of the Honethieves and local youth leader, arranged a jam for three new musicians. Paul Smith with his £50 spanish accoustic, Liam Young, armed with the church organist’s bass and Adam Dow, playing Andy’s own drum kit, began to meet and jam regularly. To begin with, they would just play U2 and Dire Straits covers.

When Andy’s work commitments meant he could no longer make the jams, the band began to grow more ambitious. Liam introduced Iain Batho, a mutual friend of the band, to the position of lead vocals and the band began to mess around, trying to write original songs.

On the minibus back from an October weekend spent somewhere ‘up north’, Liam and Iain set about, writing a lot of lyrics that turned out to be the basis for the band’s first complete song, Trailers. It was at this point that Iain also came up with the name Sitting Pretty.

            “It’s a pun,” he explained, “cos it says we’re both handsome and we’re at the top of the tree!” Armed with a song and a name, SP began to rehearse for a Big Idea Band Night set for March 13^th 2004.

SP opened the night with Trailers and a second song, Pause. While the night was a success, both Iain and Liam felt that the band could go no further with its current line up. Liam approached his friend Ben Traynor (who he played with in Autocracy) but a second guitarist was found instead in the form of Stephen Clark.

The band began writing and practicing a lot more productively, aided by Nic Ross, who Adam brought along to teach him new drum beats. Iain and Liam came up with what was to be one of the band’s early trademark songs, Still Here, in Liam’s bedroom before practice one night and this song marked a certain maturing of the SP sound. Other songs from this period were Some Kind Of Phobia, Worn Out Smile and Over Time.

May proved to be a very productive month for SP. Using Stephen’s tape recorder, they made the Sleepless EP, seven songs recorded live with Nic on drums as opposed to Adam. All the old songs were on it, along with some new love songs provided by Liam’s rather angsty views on his own love life! (Insomnia and Latest Dream, also Boxing Day and Distraction that didn’t appear on the EP) Nic’s creative talent was aso revealled in his anthem, Hollow Earth, and the collaboration with Liam that provided ‘An Hour’.

Nic’s presence on the second EP, Future Chains, began to create rifts in SP’s line-up, which was dangerous as SP were due to play their first full-length set, backing for the Llynwood Berkovich band at RTS on August the 23^rd. Arguments regularly flared up between the contrasting characters of Adam and Stephen. This came to head a week before the gig when a particularly bad exchange led to Adam being dropped from the set altogether and Stpehen refusing to ever play alongside him. A few days before RTS, Nic was confirmed as SP’s new drummer.

RTS was a great performance. SP gained the support of the crowd (although this was partly because they’d brought all their friends along!) and impressed onlookers with their confident stage presence, banter and the quality of their original material. After opening with Get Off By the Dandy Warhols. SP ran through a set of Ten original songs. Still Here got the crowd up and jumping, Latest Dream, Pause, Boxing Day and Over Time allowed a brief calm period for the audience to reflect while Trailers, Future Chains, The Happy Song, Some Kind Of Phobia and the finalle, Insomnia proved to be great crowd pleasers. The band closed with Elvis’ Can’t Help Falling In Love, much to everyone’s amusement and at some early hour of the morning, Liam and Iain staggered back to Iain’s house following the ‘after party’!

Following RTS, SP went through a boom in creativity. More songs were being written than could be practiced. What To Write, Killing Time, Prima Dona, Mary and One Day On were all worked on and SP’s style began to develop and mature once more.

September saw SP going into Banana Row recording studios to make their first album. They proved to be rather too optimistic and ended up recording only four songs. 50 copies were made originally of the ‘And Then You Fall’ EP and their release was timed just before SP’s next appearance, in another Band Night in November.

All the CDs were sold before or on the Band Night and the band’s versions of Trailers and Future Chains were greeted with audience participation. The new song, One Day On, also got a good response. The band weren’t at their best though. Liam had broken his arm only three weeks before and during Trailers, Stephen’s amp went very loud and drowned out the other instruments. Even so, they expected to be awarded the first place prize and the Judge, Jo Mango, admitted that her decision would be “contraversial” when she awarded it to Yellow Car instead. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. Unfortunately, the band and their fans felt robbed. The forum was rife with claims of the judge’s bias and fingers of blame were pointed as to who had turned up the amp.

The split between Stephen and the rest of SP was made worse following the break down of another potential gig at Tranent. Early in December, two weeks before the gig was due, Iain phoned Stephen, questioning his absence from the practice. Stephen was in Tranent, the gig cancelled. Once again fingers of blame were pointed. SP claimed that Stephen had gone behind their backs and ruined their chance of a gig while Stephen claimed they were too scared to perform as Liam had suggested delaying the gig a week so that more of their fans could come and in order to practice new songs. Stephen ended up quiting the band, deleting the website and preventing his SP logo from being used on t-shirts and their new website. The band found a new guitarist in the form of Eddy van Bart.

Following a break for the rest of December, the new line-up formed again in the new year, armed with new songs and a sense of unity that hadn’t been felt since before ‘And Then You Fall’. Eddy learned fast and the band begun by focusing on the songs from ‘And Then You Fall’. New versions of all these songs were practiced and perfected, along with the practicing of new songs "Welcome Back", "What The Cat Caught" and "Something…"

And here’s where we are!