The relative commercial failure of Folk Songs resulted in a lay-off from recording which was originally intended to be a year, but gradually extended itself. Martin Parker had moved to London to work in graphic design and photography, and William Jones moved there in late 1999. Coincidentally both ended up living in Walthamstow in North East London. Even more coincidentally, so did Edwin Pearson, the bass player in a very early line-up of Friends, and the three started rehearsing together.

Through five years off the radar screen the band had been far from inactive, writing and arranging and making rough recordings of the new songs, developing content for the new Summerhouse website, and preparing the Best Of Friends compilation. By this time they had built up an enormous stockpile of about thirty songs, intending to record them at Fairview in summer 2002.

In January 2001 William Jones had spent a day at Fairview recording the almost-entirely instrumental Downstream, which would appear the following year on the Special You CD single. The origin of the song was an amateur production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, for which Jones wrote incidental music including the Downstream theme which started the play. As a Friends track it does actually include very minimal lyrics - a 13-word verse at the very end.

That summer he also spent a week of intensive writing in North Wales and emerged with a mini-album's worth of purely acoustic songs. Then in early 2002 he came up with a further batch of new songs for the full band which displaced much of the backlog of material built up over the previous five years and planned for the new album. With Edwin Pearson now on bass, Friends finally started to develop the set that would appear on 2002's Beautiful You.