English indie-rock band BrakesBrakesBrakes, as they're known in the U.S. (they're simply Brakes in their home country), have reached the point in their career where it's finally time.

Time for what, you ask? To record a corny Diane Warren song a la Aerosmith? Uh - no. To release a greatest hits CD? Nah, not just yet. To break up? Of course not. After years of gigging, BrakesBrakesBrakes' Eamon Hamilton says it was time to record a live album, both for their fans and for themselves.

"We've played over a thousand gigs now, and we wanted some document of it, more to remember what we were doing than anything else," Hamilton explains, "songs tend to grow and change and improve when you play them so many times, and we wanted to show that in the recording."

The most difficult part, Hamilton says, wasn't the live shows themselves - but picking which ones would be represented on the disc.

"There were so many to choose from, we were a bit swamped at the start," he says, "there was a great audience recording from Edinburgh in Scotland, where all you could hear was the crowd singing and it sounded like a riot - but we ended up concentrating on two recordings we had, The Concorde from Brighton and the Essigfabrik in Cologne. We chose the Brighton concert because it is our hometown, and the sound desk that they have meant that we could separate each track and mix it like an album (each track is live, but it meant we had some control over drum sounds and microphone levels.) The Cologne gig was just a recording straight from the desk - we couldn't mix it or mess with it, and we thought it sounded great, so we used that one too."

Drummer Alex White was the man behind the mixing of the Concorde show ("he set the desk up at the show itself and took the tapes away to mess around with," Hamilton explains), which was recorded onto a digital desk with each track separated and converted into Pro|Tools files and later mixed through a Neve desk in The Metway studio. And the band's sound engineer Ric Peet (who was in band in the '90s called Candyflip) recorded the Cologne show via an iPod stuck into the mixing deck. "We didn't touch it afterwards," Hamilton says, "it is exactly the same as the gig."

Hamilton has not one, but two favorite songs from the live album; "The song "Hi How Are You" was written about watching a band called The Tenderfoot playing at a Brighton venue called The Freebutt, so playing that song in Brighton is always more meaningful, and we nailed it that night," he says, "and I think from the Cologne show, we got "Hey Hey" pretty much spot on."

The band will be getting even more collective live experience as they continue to tour, with UK, European, and Japanese tours all on their schedule, which will keep them busy up until the holidays. But first, they've got to wrap up their slate of U.S. dates, about which Hamilton couldn't be happier.

"It has been too long since we last toured the U.S. - about two years - and we're touring coast to coast," he enthuses, "we're sharing the driving duties and living off road food. We couldn't wait."