well i hate to skip the hellos and how are yous, so i shant, i do hope you are well, understand its exam time for some of you uni folk out there, good luck, remember to relax and simply do your best, for any of you graduatin this yr, theres plenty of time to fret about careers moves til exams are done so please dont pile too much pressure on yourselves, for the younger and older, dont frown cos you get worry lines and grey hair ;p

ok, right how to start, where to start, some of you may already now, some of you may not, some of you figured it out a while ago but sadly its the end of the miocene era though if you want to get technical & like me searched the dictionary for the meaning of miocene when you first came across them, you will of course know that the miocene era was the fourth epoch of the tertiary period, 23.3 to 5.2 million yrs ago when the first apes appeared, this is therefore the end of the second miocene era for some of us and the first for the most of you ;p

miocene (rip) 1998 - 2006

So you're all smart people. I imagine most of you will have figured out by now that Miocene is no more.

There's logic to announcing it now of course: there's no point touring a record that's a year old. There's no point finding a bassist who doesn't fit as well now as Alex did then. There's no point insulting a record which I spent three years of my life on, with a substandard live rendition.

But ultimately, what it comes down to is the fact that Miocene has been our personal priority for six or seven years, and none of us are in a position to continue that anymore - we haven't been for some time. Miocene never made us any more, and it was a time-consuming beast - Leo has a child, we all have our own personal responsibilities, and even with a bassist, we couldn't work full time and give Miocene the time it deserved.

I'm sorry we didn't announce this before; for the last year or so, we couldn't announce it officially without screwing our label out of money - and though we formed this label with Harvey B/Martin Calculated, the financial responsibility was entirely theirs, and they deserved the chance to make their money back for having the balls to take a chance on us.

I have a few hundred emails in my inbox, ten pages of new friend requests since I signed in a few weeks ago. The support we've received over this time is incredible and I thank you all for it. It's been an awesome ride and now I'm at the other side of it, I don't feel empty, I feel elated - that I've met so many good people, that so many people were affected by us, that we got to tour with bands we respected and loved.

More than anything, I feel proud to know that we never compromised anything we released, we never put music into the world that we didn't think was the very best we could do at that time, irrespective of style or genre or concept - and the reason we felt able to do that was down to you, the people who bought our albums. We knew you were smart enough to get it and I'll never stop being grateful and astonished that we were able to get away with it for so long.

Running at you with the future in my fists.

Incoming.