The album grew out of a theatrical project the band undertook, a version of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel Kidnapped, staged in Edinburgh.

There is a very sharp contrast between the sweet acoustically-driven "The Ups and Downs" followed immediately by the funky distorted loud guitar in "Robbery with Violins".

"Cam Ye O'er Frae France" explores this tension in a different way, both in its lyric denouncement of political changes and in the contrast between the poem's traditional Scots language and its sharp electronic guitars.

[citation needed] Two of the songs on this album originate in Hogg's Jacobite Reliques, while "Rogues in a Nation" is an adaptation of Robert Burns' poem denouncing the Act of Union in 1707 that united England and Scotland.

The sleeve shows a milkmaid on decorated tiles, possibly alluding to the recording venue: "Sound Techniques" studio, a former dairy, which still has a statue of a cow on the wall.