The First Day Of Spring had already been recorded and was released in April 1990, while Jones had started to commute from Nottinghamshire to rehearse in Newcastle, where Moffat was now based. Cover star was Nikkat Saddique, a friend of the band from Stockton. Eventually Moffat dropped out, and there was a one-year hiatus in live work until mid 1991. During this time the sessions for Songs Without Tears, the third album, took place, Jones travelling to Darlington on weekends and days off to add to the drum, bass and rhythm tracks that had been put down.

"This was the least satisfactory album to record. Because I was coming up one day a week we could never get any continuity going, and being the sole surviving band member was a lonely experience. I think this shows in the record, which for me never quite makes it either in performance or recording quality. We would get so far and then always have to stop when I had to catch the last train home. Lindsey was a good addition to the line-up, but there isn't really any band feeling to the record."

Living in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, Jones saw a local band, the Desperate Smarties, performing at the wonderfully-named Frog and Nightgown. The band was forgettable, but the drummer was memorable, and Jones approached him shortly afterwards to leave his current band and join Friends. The answer was initially no, then eventually yes. Martin Parker replaced Graeme Robinson and began to work with Jones on a new set of songs in the house they shared in Worksop and a rehearsal room at Retford Little Theatre. Parker became intrinsically involved in arranging the songs, which were worked out on a Portastudio, with Parker on drums and Portastudio engineering, and Jones on everything else.

"Martin was the kind of drummer and collaborator I had been looking for for a long time. When I saw his band he was a punky kind of drummer, but with an obvious musical intelligence, and he brought this to arranging the songs, which started to become a lot better worked out and less predictable. Around this time too the songwriting was starting to branch out from the very poppy stuff and the gothic rock side to our work, to include some more acoustic numbers, and a style I would describe as "psychedelic anthem" which appears on a couple of songs on Bluishness and Folk Songs."