Above an otherwise empty stage at the September 2009 PICNIC Conference in Amsterdam, a video starts to play. On screen, a white-haired businessman enters an empty theatre and begins to speak in the rich, deep tone of a television announcer as a slideshow of classic Kodak images rolls on a screen behind him.

"For more than a century," he intones augustly, "the Eastman Kodak company has been part of our lives, our memories, our future, continually pioneering technologies that make the process of taking pictures easier… allowing us all to share the precious moments we treasure. Many of us fondly refer to those special times as Kodak moments."

It's all on-message — until the tone changes abruptly. "Yep, they shovelled on the schmaltz pretty thick, didn't they?" sneers the announcer."But that kind of crap doesn't work anymore. People want the latest digital things. Well, guess what, bucko? Kodak is doing it. You thought they were just hiding out waiting for this digital thing to blow over, didn't ya? Oh sure, for a while they were like: 'Oh, there's no way digital's gonna catch on!'. Hell, 20 years ago they palmed the first digital camera off on Apple. But now…Kodak is back!"

As the video fades, Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak's chief marketing officer, strides onstage."How many of you have brought a roll of film in the last year?" he asks the audience, then waits for a show of hands. "Thanks all four of you. How many of you own a digital camera or a digital camera on your cellphone? Welcome to my world."

Kodak is trying to reinvent itself, and Hayzlett — 49, with his bearlike stature, cowboy boots and self-deprecatory charm ("I'm just a guy from Sioux Falls, South Dakota") — is its cheerleader. At 44 conferences last year, he delivered speeches with the same message: Kodak stumbled, but it's back.

Speaking to the PICNIC audience, his points elaborate on those made so vehemently by the portentous announcer in what's known inside Kodak as the "Winds of Change" video — originally an internal morale-boosting film that Hayzlett has repurposed for the wider public. "I said: get [the video] out there," Hayzlett later explains to Wired. "Everyone was saying 'no'. I basically shoved it out, even though I didn't really have the authority at that point."Walking around the stage with a throat mic and a remote to advance his slides, Hayzlett speaks quickly and in perfectly turned soundbites: "This is one of the biggest business turnarounds in history. Sixty percent of the people in the last four years are new to thecompany. Forty percent of all commercially printed materials in the world are touched by Kodak technology. We have 19 products that drive 80 percent of our revenue."

The list continues: every Oscar winner for Best Motion Picture in the past 81 years has used Kodak film… 65 percent of Kodak's business now comes from business-to-business products and 70 percent of them are digital. Hayzlett's message is simple: every aspect of Kodak's business has been reinvigorated by winds of change.

Kodak has certainly transformed over the past 20 years. In 1988, it employed 145,300 people and made a profit of $1.17bn on $13.3bn in revenue. By late 2009, the payroll had dipped to 19,900, a level not seen since the Great Depression, with a quarterly loss of $111m. How could this happen? The usual explanation is that Kodak failed to see the approach of digital.

In fact, Kodak was more than ahead of its competitors: it invented the digital camera — even though it lacked the foresight to exploit it. Steve Sasson was a new hire back in 1975 when he was asked by his supervisor to research how to build a camera using a relatively new type of electronic sensor. Charged-couple device (CCD) sensors had been invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George Smith, who later shared the Nobel prize for physics.

Sasson found little existing research into digital imaging, although Texas Instruments had built an analogue filmless camera in 1972. He pulled together the lens from a Kodak motion-picture camera, an analogue-to-digital convertor and some CCD chips — and built the digital circuitry from scratch. By December 1975 he had a working prototype.

But the innovation failed to gain backers in the then sprawling company. "Some people talked about reasons it would never happen, while others looked at it and realised it was important," he tells Wired during a recent visit to London to collect an Economist Innovation Award for his services to photography. Now59,Sasson recalls his decision not to use the word "digital" to describe his prototype. "I proposed it as filmless photography, an electronic stills camera," he says. "Calling it 'digital' would not have been an advantage. Back then, 'digital' was not a good term. It meant new, esoteric technology."

Kodak's executives were not enthusiastic. "I was asked to estimate when we would be able to produce a 2MP [megapixel] image and at that point it looked to be at least 15 to 20 years away," recalls Sasson. Early objections were intellectual, but that changed: "By the late 80s they were coming from the gut: a realisation that [digital] would change everything" — and threaten the company's entire film-based business model.

Kodak was slow to capitalise on another of its inventions from 1975 — the Bayer colour-filter pattern used by all modern digital cameras. Kodak's first 1MP camera, the Easyshare DC210, was released in 1998. However, its first digital camera, the Quicktake, was licensed to and sold by Apple in 1994.

Kodak's reluctance to let go of the vast profits from film was understandable. In 1999, its film sales rose by 6.5 percent to $3.1bn. Todd Gustavson, curator of technology at the George Eastman House museum in Rochester, New York, says:"Kodak was almost recession-proof until the rise of digital. A film-coating machine was like a device that printed money."

Still, it recognised the threat. "Not a day went by when there wasn't a discussion about when film would go and be replaced by digital," recalls Dito Garcia, a 21-year company veteran who now runs one of its commercial-printing product lines, Prosper Press. "Then, in early 2004, I was driving to work and heard a news report — Kodak said film was declining. It was the first time we had officially admitted that."

By the time Antonio Perez (who joined Kodak in 2003) became its CEO in 2005, the company had spent years with too much technology in its labs rather than on the market. That was the first year when Kodak's sales of its growing range of digital cameras outstripped traditional film. It still recorded a loss of $52m.

Perez, who had spent 25 years at Hewlett-Packard, decided that Kodak needed a radical restructure. This would require job cuts — 30,000 in 2005 alone — and plant closures. So he toured film factories destined for closure to explain why workers were being let go. "I said, please stand up if you have a digital camera in your house," he explained to journalists. "Forty percent would stand up."

Kodak outsourced camera manufacturing in 2004. It was the first time since George Eastman founded the company in 1892 that it had ceded control of production to a third party. Film, meanwhile, continued to decline. Revenue from traditional film-based products fell another 15 percent in 2006-7 from $1.1 billion to $951 million. Kodak's time was marked.

Belatedly, though, its digital business was growing. By the fourth quarter of 2007, digital revenue was $2.2 billion, an increase of $288m from the same quarter in 2006. But the company was not out of danger: it also faced the wider economic downturn. After six straight quarters of growth, sales slumped by 24 percent in 2008 to $2.43 billion as demand fell for digital cameras and inkjet printers, and patent royalties declined. Perez believes the restructuring saved Kodak from collapse during 2008's slump: "If it had happened two years before, we would have been dead."

Perez's strategy has been two-fold: to rely more on Kodak's expanded commercial business, and to innovate with consumer products. Today 65 percent of its revenue comes from business-to-business products such as commercial printing, and ten percent from the consumer inkjet market.

Sometimes chance plays a role in corporate revival. Perez's decision to move into inkjet printers sprang from his first visit to Kodak's Rochester research labs. "He toured the labs looking for things we could work on with outside partners," recalls Steve Billow, an engineer in the inkjet division, "but then he saw our injector and ink technology."

Drawing on his experience at Hewlett- Packard, Perez realised that Kodak had most of the components necessary to develop a new inkjet printer — one that combined the advantages of the two competing methods of inkjet printing, pigment inks and dye inks.

In a product-lined conference room at Kodak's headquarters in the centre of Rochester — an early- 20th century building covered in scaffolding as part of a two-year renovation project — Billow holds up a series of test tubes filled with brightly coloured inks. "Dye-based inks are like food colouring," he says. "It's essentially a salt that dissolves in water. They're bright and easy to work with, but fade quickly — within ten years. Pigments are solid, tiny balls of plastic floating around in ink. They're good at resisting fade and attack but scatter the light, which can dull the colour."

While working on analogue film research, Kodak developed a way to mill material at a nano-particulate level — a technique that could be applied to inkjet printing. Terry Taber, chief technical officer, explains: "It was developed to manipulate silver halide and the chemical components for film layers. There are over 300 discrete chemicals in traditional film and, as we got to very fine grade film, particle size began to be more and more important."

Billow says applying the technique to inkjet printing was the result of pure experimentation: "This technology looked cool, so we said, why not attempt to grind up pigments?"By milling the pigment particles to a smaller size, Kodak could create an ink which would be more fade resistant but not at the expense of brightness.

But it was Perez's arrival which pushed the technology to consumers. The nano-milled ink was already being sold to commercial clients, but the firm's vision stopped there. "We must have had a yearly discussion about entering the [consumer] inkjet business from the late 90s onwards," Billow recalls, "but we were so focused on photos."

Perez knew from HP that home users of photo printers would also want to print documents. He wanted a product combining the vividness of dye and the longevity of pigment. In late 2003, Project Goya was formed, named in honour of Perez's Spanish heritage.

The project team was split between Rochester and San Diego, home to several experts Kodak wanted to consult with. Security was an issue — Hewlett-Packard has a significant corporate presence in the city. "It was so secret that when we got to the hotel suite for the first meeting, there were security guards on the door and the room had been swept for bugs," Billow recalls. "Each time we met we had to sign security and confidentiality documents."

Kodak launched its inkjet printer in February 2007, with the simple marketing message that its printers, by cutting ink costs, could save customers £75 a year. Hayzlett, with his eye for a good catchphrase, dismisses Kodak's rivals as "Big Ink". As he sees it, "The ink shouldn't be expensive, the razor blades shouldn't cost more than the razor. Our ink usage rates are double what the competitors are getting."

Such aggressive marketing has helped. Kodak has sold a million printers and sales are growing — by 128 percent year-on-year during the third quarter of 2009. Its multi-million-dollar commercial printing presses, like its inkjet printers, rely on technology first developed in the analogue film age. The Prosper Press line of commercial printers relies on a print head called Stream, which came out of Kodak's research into film coating.

Terry Taber explains: "We call it Stream because it dispenses ink in a stream at extremely high speeds, printing 650 feet [198 metres] per minute. It came from our understanding of creating coating heads for film. About 20 years ago we developed a coating head where the material was dropped in a stream. We took that experience and applied it to making a print head that can do that with ink or, in fact, materials of widely differing viscosity."

As with the inkjet business, the arrival of Perez was the catalyst for commercialising the technology. Jim Chwalek, one of Stream's inventors, recalls demonstrating it to Perez: "When he toured the labs, he instantly recognised how we could apply it. He has the right background — a combination of technical moxie and marketing smarts. I distinctly remember his reaction. He said: 'Wow! You've really got something here.' He has a great ability to look at a very basic early prototype in the lab and see how to apply it."

From a basic start as a control chip with eight nozzles, Stream has been developed into a commercial press with 60,000 nozzles. Kodak first demonstrated Prosper Press at the DRUPA printing conference in 2008. Its first product, the Kodak Prosper Black Press, aimed at the book publishing industry, is due to launch at the end of the first quarter of 2010.

Chwalek is enthusiastic about Prosper Press — it can deliver quality comparable to Kodak's digital plate offset presses, yet is flexible enough to create unique pieces." People say magazines and newspapers are dying, but technology like this could give them new life," he says. "It'll bring down the cost but also allow microselling of customised publications. It'll open up new business models."

Andrew Tribute, of print consultancy Attributes Associates, predicts the Prosper Press will be a "significant industry changing technology", but not right away: "Prosper will be the future of Kodak — it will not happen overnight. Kodak's investors will have to wait for [it] to make a substantial contribution to Kodak's revenue, but there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel."

Terry Taber also points to technologies such as the firm's work in anticounterfeiting materials research as future sources of revenue.

Perez may be driving the business's structural changes, but Hayzlett is the revival's most visible frontman. His methods are a world away from the slow moving "old" Kodak. A born salesman, he shoehorned 40 Kodak references into one US episode of The Celebrity Apprentice when he appeared a guest judge.

Hired in April 2006 as chief marketing officer in Kodak's graphics communications group, Hayzlett became chief business development officer before rising to overall chief marketing officer. That happened in October 2007.

Hayzlett's most obvious contribution to the change in Kodak's public profile is his use of social-media tools. His Twitter account (@jeffreyhayzlett) had 13,186 followers when Wired met him; Kodak's main Twitter account(@KodakCB), run by chief blogger Jenny Cisney, had 16,717. Kodak's fan page on Facebook, where it shares customers' photos and gives product advice, had 55,221 fans. Hayzlett's prominence on Twitter was also a driving factor in Kodak's sponsorship of the 140Conferences. It also runs two official blogs — A Thousand Words (taking and sharing pictures) and A Thousand Nerds (a more technical slant).

Leslie Dance, formerly chief marketing officer at Motorola and Burberry, is now Kodak's vice-president of brand marketing. With her Anna Wintour-style haircut and broad grin, Dance talks at length about Kodak's hypothetical customer, known within the company as "Katy".

"Katy's between 25 and 35, probably has a few kids, has very little time and loves Facebook," Dance explains. While Hayzlett focuses on Twitter and influencer favoured conferences, Dance promotes the brand on Facebook, YouTube and wherever else she can reach Katy, her fictional younger relative Kenza, and a more grandmotherly archetype referred to as Katherine.

Social sharing is at the heart of the team's approach to digital photography. Dance estimates that around 80 percent of those buying Kodak's digital cameras in the US are women, and much of its marketing is geared towards persuading that demographic that its cameras are easy to use. So as well as placing 70,000 Kodak Print Kiosks in locations such as malls as a simple way to create paper copies, Kodak is also pushing its online Kodak Gallery as a comfortable home for its mainly female market.

Kodak Gallery started out in 1999 as Ofoto before Kodak bought it in 2003. It currently stores more than five billion high-resolution images and has around 75 million registered users, making it one of the largest social networks (although Kodak won't say how many are active users). It's a photo-sharing site, but is also geared towards selling physical products — photo books, prints, photo cards and calendars. The site exclusively printed and sold The Official Obama Presidential Inauguration Album.

So where does all this leave the traditional business — photography? Besides selling its own digital cameras, Kodak still earns cash from its patents used by every other manufacturer of digital cameras. It is currently suing Apple and Research In Motion over alleged infringements of its patents in the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Yet Hayzlett still has a battle persuading consumers that Kodak is no longer a failed analogue company. Brian Lam, editor of the Gizmodo blog, recently summed up this troubled perception: "My first digital camera was a Kodak, because Kodak was the brand for imaging even through the late 90s, before the Canon and Nikon train barrelled past Rochester, leaving Kodak a ghost town. Kodak was invested in the past."

So the company has turned to low-cost high-definition digital video cameras to symbolise its renaissance in consumer photography. Pure Digital's Flip created the pocket digital video camera market when it launched in 2006 and its follow-up, the Flip Ultra, has topped Amazon.com's digital video camera chart constantly since it launched in 2007 (Cisco bought Pure Digital for $590 million last March). Kodak saw the burgeoning market as an opportunity.

It launched its first pocket digital video camera, the Zi6, in July 2008. Its successor, the Zi8, was released in July 2009, having taken just five months to design, build and release."Flip's a cool name, but let's get to the facts," Hayzlett says of the market leader. "It has a smaller screen, no image stabilisation and a lot less features. The first car was cool, but a Ferrari's better."

Taber says Kodak's decision to outsource its manufacturing allowed such a fast turnaround: We were once very vertically integrated, nothing outside the company really influenced us. Now we're thinking openly. If you're going to do something quickly, it's about bringing all the pieces together."

Kodak has also embedded marketing people in research teams, rather than separating marketing and technical teams. Taber says: "A cross-functional team develops the technology in the context of the marketing application." In the case of its pocket video cameras, Kodak's engineering team took their lead from the trends its marketing group was observing in consumer behaviour.

Cooperation created a well-reviewed product, but the choice of name was more problematic. An otherwise glowing review in the Boston Globe stated: "When George Eastman needed a name for his camera company, he came up with something short, crisp and memorable: Kodak. When Kodak needed a name for its new pocket video camera, its marketing geniuses came up with something dreadful: the Zi8."

Hayzlett immediately decided to launch a competition on Twitter to find a better name for the Zi8's as-yet-unnamed successor. Why not defuse the criticism by showing that the firm recognised its mistake? But he faced a stumbling block: the legal department told him that the company would face a fine if it didn't seek permission to run the contest. Hayzlett says: "For two days legal was saying we couldn't put out a contest because we'd get a fine. Finally, I said: how much could the fine be? $50,000. OK, let's go. Hit the tweet. We had thousands of entries. Then the form came. And the fine was…$300."

The follow-up to the Zi8, the more rugged PlaySport, was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and named by Twitter user @mikecolbourn. Hayzlett, meanwhile, has got plenty of mileage out of the naming story. He recounted it to Wired during two separate interviews (one during the 140 Conference in London, the other at Kodak's Rochester headquarters), at PICNIC in Amsterdam and at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Phoenix. The repetition shows the consistency of his message — Kodak's now leaner and meaner — but it also uncovers an occasional disconnection between Hazlett's style and Kodak's culture.

Hayzlett has talked both on stage and off about the difference between the time he thought it took to launch the contest and the reality: "I kept saying it took days and days and days, and the team had to take me aside and say, Jeff, it took 28 hours," he admits. His willingness to be the straight-talking social media CMO has ruffled feathers. At PICNIC,he announced that the Zi8 had" one of the stupidest names in the world". Both current and former Kodak staff told Wired that Hayzlett's criticism of his "stupid" team went down badly. It's a lesson he's learned. He still tells the naming story, but he no longer blames his team.

Hayzlett's open attitude extends to aspects of his personal life too. He stopped by to say an unscheduled hello during Wired's visit to Rochester. Arriving unannounced at the restaurant where Wired was eating with David Lanzillo and Nancy Carr of Kodak's PR team, he began to tell the story of chasing and catching a group of youths who had been attempting to break into a car outside his home in South Daktota. To people who follow Hayzlett on Twitter, it was not a new tale. He had tweeted it in almost real time:

> Can't sleep, waken [sic] in middle of night by four people trying to break into our car, caught two of them via a chase. Crime stopped 11.12pm Nov 28
> Ran after them in my underwear! what a sight! lol then came back, dressed, chased them down in the car and blocked them til police came 11:25pm Nov 28
> Two got away but its very cold out lol and they were without their car, got one of the guys and two girls waiting in the car. 11.27pm Nov 28
> I think the sight of me chasing the robbers in my boxers made them stop & laugh then I could nab them! Lesson: more boxers, less guns! 11.56pm Nov 28
> Deciding my need new title, no longer CMO, now CAO Chief Arresting Officer! 12:18am Nov 28

Hayzlett's big, brash approach might seem out of step with the character of the large, corporate beast Kodak had become by the late-80s. But his unorthodox style has quite a lot in common with the company's founder George Eastman. When Eastman founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company and the General Aristo Company, which went on to become the Eastman Kodak Company, its base in Rochester was a rural settlement with one main street. Through Eastman's patronage the town grew into a city with theatres, an orchestra and schools all named after him.

Kodak Park, the 900-acre manufacturing plant that grew up at the heart of the city, has now become Eastman Business Park following the staff cuts. Yet it still has its own power plants, a fire department and an internal railway system.

Though Hayzlett's speeches have often stated that the firm is now "not your father's Kodak", the stripped-back company has, indeed, returned to the principles that Eastman himself espoused. Hayzlett says of Eastman:"He was brilliant, especially in advertising and marketing. He said: 'Press one button and we do the rest.' We've brought those tenets back."

Still, the company's not there yet. Kodak lost another $111 million in the third quarter of 2009. Last September, New York private-equity group Kohlberg Kravis Roberts injected $300 million. It was a vote of confidence, but it gave KKR the option to own up to one-fifth of the firm and the right to levy a steep ten percent interest rate.

Kodak's official financial projections suggest it will continue to struggle in 2010 but return to profit by 2011. And analysts are beginning to strike a more positive tone about the firm. Ulysses Yannas of US analysts Buckman, Buckman & Reid says: "I don't see there's any fat left, which suggests that when this turns round, you're going to have a wild ride."

Perez and Hayzlett have certainly reinvigorated the internal company culture. All the employees Wired has spoken to both on and off the record report a rise in morale and a sense of hope for the company's future. And although its financial situation remains uncertain, it has come back from the brink. Even Hayzlett, Kodak's most ardent cheerleader, admits how dire the situation got: "Jim Collins [in his latest book How The Mighty Fall] says there are six stages of decline for business. But you can go to 5.5 and comeback from it. Apple did it. IBM did it .We've done it. We were at stage 5, for sure."

Will Kodak survive in its new, leaner configuration? It has two great advantages. First, the power of a recognised and trusted brand. Second, its proven ability to invent things. Hayzlett says: "I joke that Rochester's so cold, we've got nothing to do all day but sit inside and invent things." It's a quip, but it cuts to the heart of Kodak's biggest error — and its biggest opportunity. Kodak prospered because of invention and declined because it was too slow to capitalise on its research. Its next challenge is to put that spirit of invention at the heart of the picture.

Mannequins pose in the dusty factory, lines of Polaroid images spread before them, their careers as test subjects for batches of film seemingly over. This factory in Enschede, Holland, was for 20 years Polaroid's main European base, a complex of six buildings dedicated to making the iconic instant film. Today it is home to a team of just 15. Their mission: to bring instant film back to life.

In 2004, Polaroid decided to stop producing the negatives needed to create its instant film. It believed that it had stockpiled enough material to produce ten million films a year for ten years. It was wrong. Demand was far higher than expected, and by mid-2008 the negatives were almost gone. Sixty-two years after its creator, Edwin Land, had unveiled his first instant negative, Polaroid film was seemingly finished.

Supply problems had troubled the company from the start. Polaroid made only 60 units of Land's first instant camera, the Land Camera. Fifty-seven of that first batch went on sale before Christmas 1948 at Jordan Marsh, a Boston department store. The company estimated that the stock would last until it could manufacture a second run. All 57 cameras sold out on the first day.

Before Land, photography involved exposing light-sensitive material, developing, fixing and printing it. As a first-year student at Harvard, Land thought it might be possible to create polarising film by lining up crystals of iodoquinine sulphate and embedding them in transparent plastic to prevent them from moving apart. From there, he created Polaroid instant film. It held the developing solution in a hermetically sealed compartment bundled with the photosensitive paper. Pressure rollers in the camera spread the chemicals across the paper when it was exposed, activating the reaction that developed the print. Polaroid instant film was an immediate success. At its peak, in 1991, sales of cameras and films were close to $3 billion. But by 2004, the digital-photography revolution had led the company to refocus. The factory continued to produce, ship and sell films -24million of them in 2008 alone – but the scarcity of raw materials and the shift from film had numbered its days.

On June 14, 2008, Polaroid held a closing party at the Enschede factory. It was there that the man tasked with killing off Polaroid instant film met a man obsessed with saving it. By the end of the evening, they had a shared mission: to create a new instant film that would work in existing Polaroid cameras as well as a new model.

André Bosman was the man Polaroid charged with shutting down the Enschede complex. It was not a role he cherished. In 28 years with the firm, he had risen from engineer to factory manager. With his neat, scraped back hair, Bosman, now 56, is enthusiastic but extremely precise, choosing all his words with care.

Years earlier, he had drawn up a survival plan for a smaller-scale operation. The factory was equipped to crank out 100 million film packs a year, but Bosman had a strategy for profitably producing ten million. "They were not interested," he shrugs. "That's the problem with big companies – back then, Polaroid was still 5,000 people. If you draw up an organisation of 200 people making ten million films, whose interest is it in? The customer's, but not the top management's."

In October 2001, the original Polaroid Corporation had filed for bankruptcy in the US. Most of the firm's assets – including the Polaroid name and its profit-making foreign subsidiaries – were sold to an investment firm, One Equity Partners. The company's name was changed to the Polaroid Holding Company. On April 27, 2005, Petters Group Worldwide acquired the Polaroid Holding Company. The Petters Group had a long history of buying up failed companies to exploit prominent brand names, and Polaroid was an obvious target.

Bosman's role, with the factory's closure just months away, now came down to breaking apart the machinery, selling what could be sold, and handing over the keys to the buildings' owners. He also had to help the factory's workers come to terms with the end of jobs many had held for more than 30 years. Now, on that Saturday in June 2008, Bosman had been given another mission by Polaroid's US management. An entrepreneur and instant-film obsessive, Florian Kaps, had been badgering them about "saving" instant film. Bosman had to tell this lunatic to stop. "It was a stupid thing to ask me," he says. "I was one of the people saying: you don't need to stop!"

Kaps's fascination with Polaroid began relatively late. In 2004, he was working for the Lomographic Society, which promotes the cult analogue Lomo camera. "Everybody was scared because of the digital revolution," he recalls in his languid Austrian accent. "But I said, 'Hey, maybe this isn't the biggest threat but the biggest chance.' I started searching for the most analogue form out there." He settled on two possibilities – Super 8 and Polaroid instant film.

Kaps, 40, is wearing a T-shirt with a stylised sketch of the Polaroid SX-70 camera and the slogan "Golden Years". His long hair is tied into a messy ponytail, his stubble rough and scratchy. He is restless as he talks, repeatedly picking up Wired's voice recorder to inspect it and swinging back on his chair. His graduate thesis was on the structure of spiders' eyes – but he describes himself as "a salesman".

The complexity of Super 8 deterred him. "You need the camera, you need the film, you need to develop that and you need the projector." Polaroid was a simpler prospect: "It is the perfect medium. It is the most analogue film – it develops in the palm of your hand. It also has a lot of the advantages of digital – it's an instant picture. But it's more than just a picture. A lot of emotions are attached to it."

He found it fascinating that people shook the film. "Why do they do that? Even if it's the first time they've used a Polaroid, they immediately start shaking it." Kaps made inquiries and discovered that Polaroid had all but given up on the product that made its name. Film was difficult to find and the brand had little presence online. "I said – this sounds like something that should be done." Kaps bought an original Polaroid SX-70 camera on eBay. "I got this camera and took it out," he says, his eyes widening with wonder. "It had brown leather and chrome. I unfolded it and pushed the button. Film came out and began to develop. Even my wife, who is always suspicious of my new fantasies and dreams, said 'Wow! This is the most beautiful camera I have ever seen.'"

Armed with proposals for building a new online community for Polaroid lovers and plans to sell instant film online, Kaps made an appointment with Polaroid's management in Germany. The representatives he met were not enthusiastic. Tom Petters had decreed that the company must focus on selling Polaroid televisions and digital-photo frames. There was no budget for analogue. Kaps was told that he could become a Polaroid retailer if he placed a minimum order of €200,000. "I said, 'That's not what I was expecting.' I talked to my friends and family and raised the money." Together with Andi Höeller, a web designer he had met at the Lomographic Society, Kaps built Polanoid, a fan community, and Polapremium, an online film retailer.

"We bought the last remaining film for the Polaroid SX-70 camera and became a more and more respected outlet for expired films," says Kaps. "We found out that it's really the young customers who are discovering and rediscovering Polaroid film. Our customers all use digital cameras, but they want to have an analogue camera next to that. As with vinyl, they started rediscovering the old things. Everybody has CDs and an MP3 player, but that doesn't mean that they don't want to spend some money on a nice record player."

The first Kaps knew of Polaroid's plan to cease production came with the firm's official statement in December 2007 which declared: "Due to market conditions, Polaroid has discontinued almost all of its instant camera production." He immediately contacted the company hoping to reverse the decision. The only response he received was an invitation to the closing party.

Bosman by now had all but given up hope: "After years of fighting, you have to accept the reality and move on. But I had no idea of what I would move on to." Meeting Kaps changed that. "We immediately inspired each other. We're very different people – he's this marketing, sales person and I'm from a management, technical background. You can drive a train through the differences between us. But we both wanted the same thing – to save Polaroid instant film."

Kaps was baffled by Polaroid's decision to shut down a factory that both Bosman and he considered profitable. He knew that the buildings had been sold to a property consortium, so saw no way of stopping the closure. But Bosman knew differently – he had heard from the developers that the economic downturn had delayed its plan for at least ten years. "I said: 'We can stay here for ten years and keep making film?'" says Kaps. "But then I thought, 'It's too late – the machines are already destroyed'," Bosman recalls shaking his head. "'I'm responsible for destroying the machines, and the destruction team arrives on Monday.'"

Besides, the materials required to make new negatives were no longer available. Without them, there could be no more instant film.

Bosman had an idea. "I and my team have closely looked at this and maybe, just maybe, with some time and a small team, there's a chance we could invent a new form of film."

"That was it!"Kaps exclaims, bringing his fists down on the table in the Enschede factory canteen as he recalls that moment at the party. "We stopped drinking beer. I told him that I was selling the films and that there was demand. We agreed there and then: he had to stop the machines being destroyed and I had to contact the management and get them to talk to us." Kaps knew Polaroid would be reticent, so he fought dirty. "I said, 'Please talk to us – or we'll have to tell the press that there is a chance to keep Polaroid instant film alive, but you prefer to destroy it.'"

The next day, a Sunday, was Father's Day and Bosman's family gathered for a celebration. He wasn't home. He had sat all night in his office at the factory with Kaps, sketching out the plan to revive instant film. "I wrote a lot of emails," says Kaps. "The Polaroid management called me on Monday and said, 'OK, we'll discuss it, but don't do anything rash. The situation at the factory is out of control.'"

Paul Latka, a balding 51-year-old who began his 30-year Polaroid career in Enschede as a production engineer, recalls that dramatic day.

Bosman told the workers that the dismantling was to stop. The factory would not be sold. "It was a little bit strange for people," says Latka, now in charge of IT infrastructure for the revival project. "I had cried when I realised my job of 30 years was over. We knew for two years the factory was going to close. It was almost like when you know someone is dying. We were in shock. Polaroid had died in Enschede."

Bosman was the focus for a lot of anger and resentment that day. "It was an emotional explosion," he says frankly. "They'd known for years we were going to stop. Of course there were people who were angry with me. They felt I was fooling around with their emotions. Some people were angry, some enthusiastic, saying, 'Can I be on the team?'" Meanwhile, the Polaroid management were enraged. "I stopped the demolition first thing in the morning and then went to the directors," says Bosman. "By the time I got there, word had already reached them. There was no time to play by the book."

Bosman had the technical knowledge to assemble the team to revive instant film, and Kaps and a third member of the project's partnership, Marwan Saba, knew how to assemble the money and investors they would need. "We only had a short period to collect the money," says Kaps. "We needed funds to buy the machines and rent the building for a minimum of one year. We also needed money to heat the building – below a certain temperature the machines will simply not work." In three months, Kaps collected €1.2 million from a range of private investors. He already had a good network of investors thanks to Polanoid, his Polaroid site, and Polanoir, a gallery for Polaroid pictures which he had set up in Vienna (it now has outposts in Barcelona and Berlin). "The only thing missing was a better price for film or the chance of producing an exclusive product. This was our chance," he says, smiling. "Andre said we had a 50/50 chance of success, but that's a pretty good chance. We had the product, we had the demand, now we needed the machines and the people to make it."

Bosman and Kaps needed to secure the machines from Enschede. Bosman had done his sums and concluded that, even if it were possible to find a company that could replicate the machines, each would cost at least £10 million to build. So the ten machines remaining in the factory were worth, to him, at least £100 million. The blueprints to recreate the machines are still stored at Enschede, filling a huge cabinet with hundreds of drawers of microfilm.

Polaroid's management considered the factory plant to be essentially scrap. In their view, without the negatives required to produce instant film, the machines were useless. "We would go into meetings," says Kaps, chuckling, "and they would tell us: 'We cannot sell you those machines. We have looked at it closely. All the experts have looked at it and it's impossible. You cannot reproduce Polaroid film.'" Kaps jumped on this argument: "I said: 'OK, that's fine. If it's impossible, those machines must be incredibly cheap. Because if it's impossible, they're useless.'"

He told Polaroid's management that he would sign legal papers to that effect, and that it was not his plan to reproduce their instant film. The business he and Bosman planned had a different goal – to produce a brand-new instant film. And that very threat of impossibility suggested a company name: The Impossible Project. "I told Polaroid, 'Listen, I'll even call the company Impossible to make sure everybody knows you told me that this task is impossible,'" says Kaps.

Kaps knew the name was a great hook for journalists and investors itching for a challenge. "From the beginning we let the investors know that it was Impossible, but that it could become 'I'm Possible' too," he continues. Researching Land's life online, Kaps discovered a quote from a 1987 Forbes profile. In "The Vindication Of Edwin Land", the inventor had opined: "Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible." The Impossible Project had its mission statement.

Its goal was simple: within a year, create a new form of instant film that will work in old Polaroids. The time constraint was purely practical: existing film is fast running out. Bosman says: "We want the fading of the old inventory to be counterbalanced by us getting new film on to the market." The Impossible Project's first film, a black-and-white integral film (meaning there's no need to peel the film apart) uses a transparent sheet, a titanium- dioxide white pigment based developer and a negative with a black back coat. One frame leaves the camera with no separation required. Polaroid never produced this form of black-and-white film. Its own product was a peel-apart film. Though the Impossible film uses different developer chemicals to Polaroid's, the principle is similar.

In an open-plan area the team calls "The Lab", Martin Steinmeijer is working on the chemical formulation for the new film. Steinmeijer has a shock of messy Harry Potter-esque black hair and glasses that list to one side. He worked on chemical engineering at Polaroid for 23 years.

"The problem we had is that some materials that Polaroid used are simply not made any more," he mutters nervously. Steinmeijer's main task is to develop the various layers of material required to develop a photograph on the new film – a positive material to act as an image-receiving layer, a timing layer to control the length of development, and a neutralisation layer to end that process. "If you don't stop it at the right time," says Steinmeijer, "it will just keep on developing."

After much experimentation, the Impossible Project has succeeded in producing a black-and-white integral film. Steinmeijer reveals a series of test pictures, each showing his eager face staring inquisitively into the lens.

After coming up with a name for its product, the Impossible Project set itself six further challenges; designing the package for the chemicals and film; developing a photosystem; manufacturing a battery; creating a new plastic cartridge and spring; designing foils; and developing the film coating. Inevitably, there were unforeseen problems: the cost of materials and chemicals alone was £1 million up front. "That was not part of our equation on the first day," says Bosman, rolling his eyes. Typically, Kaps describes the list in a more esoteric way: "The original list we discussed with investors had seven points. We like seven, it's an evil number."

Negotiations to secure the plant and machinery were time consuming. Beginning after the meeting between Bosman and Kaps on June 14, 2008, they stretched to October 2008. In the meantime, Polaroid went through a period of extreme upheaval when Tom Petters was arrested by the FBI, accused of involvement in a $100 million investment fraud. The case is ongoing.

On October 8, 2008, The Impossible Project was founded as a legal entity. By January 2009, a team of ten had begun work. Now 15 are involved.
 
The black-and-white integral film will go on sale in early 2010 at a predicted price of eight shots for £15 – and the team has already moved on to its next challenge: colour film. Where black-and-white film needs four layers, colour requires at least 15. Colour instant film needs specific silver- halide compounds which react to each colour – blue sensitive, green sensitive and red sensitive. With each you then need a complementary dye – blue needs yellow, green needs magenta and red needs cyan.

Mixing those six layers creates an additional problem. Inter-layers are required to stop each colour layer from interfering with and influencing the others. In addition, a sealing top coat is required. "It's so much more complicated," says Steinmeijer with a resigned shrug. "If a picture is too blue, simply adding more yellow dye will always have an additional and often unwanted effect."

Henk Minnen, a quiet, grey-haired ex-merchant seaman, worked at Polaroid for 34 years. He's in charge of developing new materials. In another part of the lab, he spreads sheets of red foil and off-white masking. These create the bag that contains the reagent, a mix of chemicals that begins the development.

The mask, the iconic white frame that makes a Polaroid instant shot unmistakable, is metallised and has to be heat- and friction-resistant to withstand the force of the camera's rollers. Finding a supplier capable of producing such a specialised material was challenging but The Impossible Project settled on a British firm, Harman, via its Ilford Photo subsidiary. It's also charged with producing the negatives for the new film stock.

Despite standing still for almost a year, the vast machines that will produce The Impossible Project's film needed only minor maintenance-just a few parts rusted by moisture in the cold factory needed replacing. Paul Latka, a machine operator before he joined Polaroid's IT department, has partially returned to his old role. "It had been about 12 years since I last operated a machine," he says.

The process of producing a pack of instant film, he explains, involves "outside work" and "inside work". "On the inside you have the negative room, where it's completely dark. The first time you are taught to use a machine you see it in the light, but after that you find all the controls in the dark." From the negative room, the materials move to the work section where they come together and are melted into a complete pod. Then the frame is added and the assembly goes to the pack section. At the outside pack section, the spring, battery and outer shell are added before the pack goes back into the dark section of the machine and is loaded with eight frames. After being sealed to ensure it's light-tight, it's packaged up for shipping.

Although the creation of the film packs is the culmination of an extremely precise engineering process, the quality of print will be the product of feel rather than science. "I don't know if I want a perfect picture," Kaps says. "I prefer a changing, thrilling picture." "For many years I was a quality manager," Bosman says. "Polaroid measured the numbers but we'd take a whole picture series of test shots and see what looked right. There is a personal judgment involved in what looks right, although people tend to agree on certain colours. Cyan and magenta are not usually favoured, while reddish and yellow tones are usually fine."

The preference for colour tones in Polaroid pictures is not only personal but cultural. At one time, Polaroid had different machines producing different formulations to account for regional preferences. "A blueish tint on people's faces makes them look like chickens in a freezer," says Bosman. "But if you ship film to Japan, looking reddish suggests you're drunk, so they prefer skin tones to look more blue than red."

The project has also secured the services of other Polaroid alumni, including Paul Giambarba, creator of the original Polaroid packaging and branding, who will produce the new packs; and Henny Waanders, a former head camera designer for the firm, who will help to design the new camera.

Kaps met Giambarba, who blogs about the evolution of Polaroid's original branding, and solicited his help. "I thought it would be nice if the guy who developed the first packaging could contribute," he says. Giambarba had worked with Edwin Land ("a tricky customer") and was intrigued: "I knew I could tackle the packaging. It's good to be back in the saddle after all these years!" Waanders has begun work on the prototype for the new camera – a modern Polaroid film-dispenser unit grafted on to the quality lens and mechanism of a Polaroid SX-70 camera. Part of Kaps's dream is to produce a new instant camera to go with a new film. He expects this in the second half of 2010, and aims to make it "a modern camera. Nice to touch – and thrilling to use."

Following the launch of black-and-white film, colour is due later next year. And the new licencees of the Polaroid brand are getting back on board. In mid-2010 the Summit Global Group will reproduce several classic Polaroid cameras – all using a limited-edition Polaroid- branded film made by the Impossible Project. It's exciting news, but Kaps keeps things in perspective. "We're starting our own brand with our own products," he says. "What we call them is important – it's like having a baby. You need to give it a name. Once we've got the name, we can start building the family."

One challenge remains. Can they make instant-photography products pay? Kaps estimates that there are 300 million Polaroid cameras in circulation, but Polaroid's figures suggest that in their lifetimes most consume between only three and five packs of film. This time, Kaps believes, it will be different. His Pola Premium online store is selling between 30,000 and 50,000 film packages a year. "This is no longer a mass-market product," he says. "Our customers are buying film from us online at an average of ten packs per year. It's something you're into and celebrate."

Mic Wright is a freelance journalist and pop-culture blogger at brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com. Learn more about The Impossible Project at the-impossible-project.com.

I wrote this series of track previews for the Q Website

The Hours – Big Black Hole

La Roux – In For The Kill  

Jack Penate – Tonight's Today

Sky Larkin – Beeline

Blue Roses – Does Anyone Love Me?

Televised Crimewave – Listen And Repeat

Gary Go – Heart And Soul

The Airborne Toxic Event – Gasoline

Dinosaur Pile-Up – My Rock'n'Roll

Crystal Stilts – Crystal Stilts

Emmy The Great – We Almost Had A Baby 

After parting company with Gut Records, who released the band's previous album, 2007's One Day Son, All This Will Be Yours and the b-sides collection Alternative Endings, at the end of 2008, the band decided to release the Be Human in partnership with their management company, Raw Power, on a brand new label – Search And Destroy. “The music industry is changing and bands have to change with it,” says guitarist and vocalist Alex Westaway, “We realised we needed to be in control.”

That new found control has extended to the recording of the new record. After working with Colin Richardson  (Funeral For A Friend) and Matt Wallace (Faith No More) on their previous two albums, the band opted to co-produced Be Human with long time friend of the band, Laruso guitarist Carl Bown. Simpson says, “We were incredibly lucky to work with two of the best producers in rock. We learned so much from them that it felt like the time to try doing it ourselves. Carl did an exceptional job.”

The bulk of recording for Be Human took place at Treehouse Studios, Bown's studio, a small wood cabin in a field just outside Chesterfield in Derbyshire. Recording took place between August and December 2008, taking over seventy days in total – the longest the band has worked on a record so far – interrupted by touring and promotion. The record was almost not completed at all when drummer Omar Abidi broke his wrist almost halfway through the process.

“It was a full break, there was no touching bone,” Abidi says with a wince, “I had to have an emergency operation a week later to put two pins in my wrist.” Drums had only been recorded for six tracks – recording had hit a roadblock. But rather than recruit a replacement or delay recording, the band decided, as Simpson puts it, “to keep it in the family”.

Simpson immediately began training and took to the drum stool. “Omar wrote the parts and used me as the body,” he says. Abidi affably describes the situation as like “a director guiding a really good actor” and on one memorable occasion, the pair performed in tandem. On the album's most incendiary track, Damocles, Abidi handled the kick and snare drums while Simpson played the rest. But while the band coped, the loss of Abidi's powerhouse presence on drums was by no means easy. Westaway reveals how desperate things were: “We were running out of studio time. Charlie's hands were bleeding but we had to get it done.”

But while recording was a physical struggle, Be Human was free of the artistic frustrations that dogged the band's previous albums. Simpson says, “It was great to not have anyone breathing down our necks. With our second album [One Day Son, All This Will Be Yours] I didn't like some of the mixes the label had done and all hell broke lose. Carl was the one who redid them. On this record, we've nailed the sound we wanted to create when we started as a band.” And what a sound it is…

Already being touted as the band's most 'pop' album, Being Human grafts the group's trademark gift for darkness and ability to write killer hooks with a newly developed cinematic sensibility. Bassist Dan Haigh says: “We've always wanted to transcend scene. We're hoping the music reflects that. Our greatest influence in the last year and a half has been the music of [film composers] Hans Zimmer, Vangelis, David Mansfield and John Williams. Everything we've done musically has been about translating emotion in a filmic sense.”

To help them capture their vision of creating truly cinematic music, the band turned to celebrated arranger Audrey Riley (Muse, Coldplay). Simpson says: “Working with Audrey was a dream come to true. We had these ideas but she brought them to a whole new level. I sat in the studio thinking, how did we get to do this? It was an ambitious feat to get sixteen string players on the record.” Appropriately, given the band's filmic inspirations, Be Human's strings were recorded at AIR Studios in North London, Hollywood's home away from home when it comes to recording movie scores.  

Working with a 16 piece orchestra was the culmination of one of the band's biggest ambitions. Simpson says: “We'd always wanted to work with one. We grew up listening to album's like Silverchair's Neon Ballroom and knew how massive rock can sound.” But without the benefit of a label's deep pockets, the band had to use their initiative to realise their grand ambitions. To record the heartbreaking choral harmonies on the anti-war lament, War Machine, Westaway and Dan Haigh returned to their alma mater Rugby School to rope in the Sixth Form choir. Simpson says: “We stole them halfway through their homework and set up a recording rig in the chapel. It was guerrilla album making.” Meanwhile the boys of Lichfield Cathedral Choir supplied the soaring backing vocals on the anthemic single The English Way. Simpson took on the role of conductor for the first time but found himself dealing with a slight language barrier: “They're taught musical phrases from an early age and I was undermining all of that. It's built into their brains to sing a certain way but they were brilliant.”

Be Human also finds Fightstar in a more positive place. Its title is a call to arms. Haigh says: “It's about core human behaviour. Core morals seem to have been eroded in favour of the pursuit of material possessions and some kind of elusive cool.” But rather than focusing on the darker elements of life, Fightstar are trying to offer solutions and encourage their fans to ask questions. “This time our messages are wholly positive. There's a lot of negativity around in society but we're singing about coming together,” says Simpson.

And the triumph of Be Human is itself about a group of people coming together to create something great against the odds. As Abidi says, “Sometimes big budget records can really cloud things. When you have these constraints people are doing it for the love of music.” 

The 23-year-old songwriter creates music as multi-faceted as her gemstone namesakes, flitting nimbly from the heart stoppingly beautiful piano pop of Obsessions to the artful and anarchic sound of Mowgli's Road – memorably described by Popjustice as “a Siouxsie-fueled cross between Personal Jesus and [Girls Aloud's] Biology” – with an ease that must enrage her rivals.

And where once, trapped behind her keyboard, she introduced herself witheringly as “Kate Nash”, Marina has recruited musicians to translate her sparkling songs live, freeing herself to pursue dreams of a show augmented by Kanye West style gold lame dancers and a giant onstage diamond. This is a performer that takes the prosaic nature of every day life and splits it open to reveal the colour inside, producing songs that glitter like gems from a distance and reveal sharp edges and odd angles on closer inspection.

Marina is also entirely naturally occurring, a talent forged by the intensity of her own ambition and the peculiar stresses of modern life. After her parents divorced when she was four, she spent her childhood moving between Greece, South Wales and London. After studying for her A-Levels in Greece, she pitched up alone in London at aged 18. After dropping out of four universities (much to the chagrin of her father – “He wanted me to go to Oxford!”), she threw herself into a whirlwind of auditions searching for a way to satiate her untapped ambitions. She even turned up to a casting call for The Lion King. “I'd never even done ballet before,” she laughs. Eventually she found an outlet for her bubbling creativity – songwriting.

“I was never massively musical,” she claims unconvincingly, “But since I was about 15, I've known I had to be a singer.” After an ill-fated stint in a sock shop (“I worked there for about three days and spent the whole time planning what socks to buy next”) she supported herself by selling vintage clothes on eBay – “I used to find granny dresses and make them look good.” – and set about composing her first demos with the aid of her laptop, a keyboard and a copy of Garageband. Despite their rough and ready sound, those early bedroom compositions revealed a natural gift for nagging melodies, unusual harmonies and vivid lyrical imagery replete with visions of monkeys, angels and marching spoons. Live, her intensity drew interest from a riot of record labels but it was longtime supporter Nick Worthington at 679 Recordings who finally snagged her signature.

With a taste for whiskey straight, a love of fashion that can find her sashaying into a bar in a tasseled jacket that looks like it's been borrowed from Dolly Parton and rocking it, Marina might seem like quite the wild woman. But she's a bundle of contradictions too – a performer with a distinctly dark side and a strong streak of shyness that's at odds with her confident stage show.

One of her recent Twitter updates simply read “depressed” and, for all their pop polish, her songs often hide a creeping sadness beneath their shiny exteriors. Obsessions, her first single, released earlier this year on much fancied New York label Neon Gold, has been misinterpreted by some as the dissection of a one night stand (“I've never had one,” Marina says categorically) but is an even more unusual beast.

Morphing from plaintive piano chords into a bouncy verse, Obsessions draws on Marina's past obsessive compulsive tendencies to enrich its tale of a love affair gone wrong. The subject of her woes? Crackers. “That part is autobiographical,” she laughs, “I used to go into the supermarket, pick up the first packet and think there was something wrong with it. I'd go through the lot and keep finding things wrong with them.” As the song says, she'd often leave the shops empty handed.

Meanwhile behind its fairytale imagery, the glorious cacophony of Mowgli's Road finds Marina wrestling with her contradictory desires – the urge to be a mainstream pop act jostling against her independent streak. “I still don't know what I want,” she confesses, “So I'm going to let other people make that choice for me.” Currently recording her debut album with producer and collaborator, Liam Howe (Sneaker Pimps), and with a fistful of fantastic songs at her disposal (almost all of them potential singles) from the dancey Girls Girls Girls – a collaboration with New Order and Ladyhawke producer Pascal Gabriel – to the clockwork groove of I Am Not A Robot, it seems as if she may be able to tread the pop path without giving up the eccentric touches that make her music so compelling.

And while she's complimentary about this year's other crop of new female acts (including her label mate Little Boots), her fiery side comes out when talk turns to any notion of a nascent scene. “When Britpop was at its peak, all the bands were lumped together,” she notes. “But I do my thing; I write songs, I perform and I couldn't give two shits about what X,Y or Z are doing. If 15 girls rise to the top this year and they're all super-talent, brilliant. But good music is good music; who cares if you're male or female?” Given that this is the woman who socked a sozzled stage invader on the jaw when he tried to push over her keyboard during a show, you ought to think carefully about how you answer that…

In December 2005, before the latest strain of '60's style soul stormed the charts, The Rumble Strips arrived like a band of pop prophets with their debut single, ‘Motorcycle’ – a soulful brass-enhanced slice of ramshackle rock'n'roll. It was thrillingly out of step with the times. “In the early days, our fans seemed to be a lot of middle aged men who'd latched onto the Dexys Midnight Runners comparisons,” laughs multi-instrumentalist Tom Gorbutt. But soon the band had built a far broader fanbase, headlining the NME New Music Tour and gigging relentlessly to promote their 2007 debut album, ‘Girls And Weather’.

“We spent a long time on the road,” says Charlie, “We toured the songs on that record for so long before we were even signed and by late 2007, we were ready to move on but you kind of get out of the habit of sitting around and writing songs.” Tackling someone else's tune kick started the band on the road to recording ‘Welcome To The Walk Alone’. “We got asked to remix Amy Winehouse's ‘Back To Black’ but we'd never done one before,” continues Charlie, “So it just seemed easier to learn it, play it as a band and put her vocal on top. We recorded a version with me singing too but we didn't want to use it. The record company did.”

Enter Mark Ronson. Having made his name reinterpreting other people's songs, he was impressed with the band's twist on his work with Winehouse. He invited Charlie to sing with him at the Electric Proms and took the band out on tour with him. It was on that jaunt that he first suggested working together. “We didn't have any songs at that point!” laughs Tom. But in January 2008, the band returned to London and began to write new material.

“On the first album, we all did the music but I wrote the basic songs,” says Charlie. This time, he shared the burden, with trumpet and piano player Henry Clark contributing roughly half of the new tunes. The band also swelled to a five piece, recruiting Sam Mansbrige, who had toured with them throughout 2007, as their permanent bass player. Sam had previously played with Charlie and drummer Matt Wheeler in an earlier band, Action Heroes. The move meant Tom could focus on playing sax and additional guitar. “Sam had never even played bass before,” he says, “He actually played guitar and hadn't even done that for a few years!”

Sam also brought a love of French chanson music with him, introducing the band to Jacques Brell and Charles Asnavor. “It's like soul music but very un-American,” says Charlie, “It's passionate but so different from the kind of soul that had become popular again while we were promoting Girls And Weather.”

“The first album was a collection of songs written over a long time,” he continues. “This time we had to sit down and write an album so we were listening to things knowing we were writing. I listened to a lot of Harry Nilsson and The Beatles, who I hadn't properly listened to before. I put on a lot of Paul McCartney's songs and thought to myself, Bloody hell, these boys will do well!”

By the time the band reconvened with Ronson at The Joint rehearsal studios in Kings Cross in October 2008, they had a clutch of songs they were confident to play him. He was impressed, so much so that he told Q Magazine they'd make “one of the best records of the early 21st Century.”

Recording took place over three weeks in November 2008 at Avatar Studios in New York, which had recently played host to Bruce Springsteen, following the band's first headline US tour. While both producer and band have a reputation for horn heavy arrangements, brass is a more muted presence on the album but the introduction of strings has led to a fuller sound. “Before it was exciting to use a lot of brass but we've got over it a bit now,” Charlie confides, “I feel like there's a lot of bad soul music about and I didn't want it to sound American.”

The band had a clear vision for the album: “I wanted a cross between ‘Barafundle’ by Gorky's Zygotic Mynchi, and Adam And The Ant's ‘Kings Of The Wild Frontier’ – achingly sad melodies and baroque brass but with an instant sound,” says Charlie. Though the plan largely went out of the window once recording began, the finished product closely resembles that description. The album's strings were composed and overseen by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire, The Last Shadow Puppets) and recorded in January 2009 in Prague. Charlie says of Pallett's startling arrangements: “I'm glad we went with Owen. A lot of people sent us strings that sounded cheesy, like the songs had been dipped in money. His were more inventive.”

‘Welcome To The Walk Alone’ is actually a more anguished album than the band's debut despite the fact that most of the band has settled down (Charlie and Tom are both married and Sam has a longtime girlfriend). “Being domesticated doesn't necessarily mean happy and bored,” sighs Charlie, “In fact, being married has opened up a whole lot of new things to write about.”

Such as giving a glimpse of just how tough his wife can be on future single, ‘Not The Only Person’. Though it's a summery Tom Petty-ish pop song, it recounts a distinctly darker tale – an attempted mugging in Shoreditch. “We were in the middle of an argument and my wife sent the muggers packing. She had a go at them and they ran away!” Charlie felt sorry for them. “It must have hurt their pride. At the end of the song I tell them I'll come back the next night and give them the money anyway.”

Sadness and the city is a theme shared by several songs. ‘London’, with its fizzing strings and galloping drums, finds the Capital getting in the way of love with Charlie plaintively asking, “Why can't I love you in London?”. Meanwhile on the dramatic ‘Daniel’, a song that owes more to the soaring strings of John Williams and Ennio Morricone than it does to old fashioned rock'n'roll, the stars are blocked out by the streetlights. And while he's now settled in Tottenham, Charlie can still feel like an outsider – an experience typified by ‘Douglas’, a song he sings to his Jack Russell.

“Douglas is from Tavistock [in Devon] just like me. We're both country boys out of place living in Tottenham,” he says almost wistfully, “The song is an apology for making him live in the city. He's happy now but moving was a shock for us and a shock for him.”

With striking piano and a beautiful guitar line that evokes Springsteen's ‘Hungry Heart’, ‘Douglas's deliciously sad singalong melody takes up residence in your head and refuses to budge. Elsewhere, the album's anxious and lovelorn mood is lightened by ‘Sweetheart Hooligan’ (which Charlie calls “a proper love song”) and reinforced by ‘Backbone’ (“Paranoid and edgy with twanging guitar and strings that give it a strange quality as if you've just taken bad pills.”)

“People always talk about the 'difficult second album'” Charlie says, “but second albums should be better.” That's unquestionably true of ‘Welcome To The Walk Alone’, with its nagging melodies and soaring choruses testament to the band's big ambitions. “I want this record to mean something to people,” Charlie says, “We've been doing this for a long time and we've put our lives into it.” While the orchestra is real this time, the most important part of any Rumble Strips song is still the passion with which they play it.

Games based on swine flu have spread rapidly online. Are they in bad taste, or do they fulfil a cathartic role?

Despite the thousands of column inches dedicated to it, swine flu has not spread as much as the rash of browser-based Flash games it has inspired. In its first week, the most high profile of them, Swinefighter, amassed more than 3m plays, helped by the viral clout of Twitter and Facebook.

The game, created by the web entrepreneurs Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila to promote their company Heyzap, features a doctor wearing a surgical mask inoculating flying pigs with an oversized syringe.

Using an existing game engine, the pair were able to put their idea into practice almost immediately. "We had the idea at 8pm on Monday and were finished by 6am the next morning," says Akhund. He claims they were conscious of the potential for offence, given that there have been deaths as a result of the outbreak. "A lot of games are about spreading the flu," he says, "We were careful not to do something like that. We wanted to keep the subject matter light and funny."

Sombrero note

A league table on the game's website suggests its biggest source of visitors is Mexico. But Swine Flu: Hamdemic, from the Australian developers 3RDsense, may appeal less to those countrymen, featuring a sombrero-clad Mexican tossing pigs across the border using a giant slingshot.

Colin Cardwell, the firm's chief executive, says its intention was humorous "It felt to us that the world was taking the whole thing a little too seriously."

He draws a parallel between making topical games and more traditional humour. "We question everything," he says, "but it's like being a comedian. A lot of jokes come from quite a dark place."

The ability to quickly pull together Flash games means they are frequently made in response to news stories. Recent events that have received the treatment include the conflict in Gaza (the supposedly satirical Raid Gaza!) and Somali pirates (Foxy Sniper Shoot).

So far, the games inspired by swine flu are neither particularly shocking nor satirical. But several more realistic existing games have found themselves co-opted as commentaries on the situation. Sneeze – originally commissioned by the Wellcome Trust and Channel 4 as part of Routes, a series on genetics – illustrates how viruses spread. The game awards points for infecting as many people as possible with a single sneeze.

But as result of the headlines, the American Flash games site Miniclip renamed the game as Stop Swine Flu. The new title was misleading and led to a New York Times story wondering how appropriate it was to get points for infecting children.

Alice Taylor, a commissioning editor for education at Channel 4, has asked Miniclip to amend the details to restore the game's original educational message. "Sneeze is about how viruses spread," she says, "And knowing that children and older people are more susceptible to them is a good thing."

Total wipeout

Pandemic 2, a darker take on viral epidemics, has received a more welcome dose of attention. Though released last year, the number of players has soared in recent weeks. The aim is to engineer a virus that wipes out humanity.

The game's creator, Dan Archibald, of Dark Realm Studios, says developers should be allowed to tackle controversial themes: "I have no issue including content, no matter how sensitive or controversial, if it contributes to something noteworthy in the game."

Another more educational game, Killer Flu, has also had an upswing in interest since the swine flu story broke. Commissioned in 2007 by the UK Clinical Virology Network, it too casts the player as a virus attempting to infect as many people as possible. Unlike Pandemic 2, the underlying message is how tricky it actually is for viruses to spread.

Ian Bogost, the co-founder of Persuasive Games, which designed Killer Flu, explains: "Pandemic flu is actually very similar to ordinary flu. Our game is about increasing information and reducing panic. Pandemic 2 is gruesome but gratifying. Playing out worst-case scenarios is how we make sense of things."

Though some question whether games are an appropriate medium for examining topics such as disease, Bogost does not believe that any subjects should be off limits. "There was a time when we asked the same questions about the novel," he says.

In fact, he strikes an optimistic note: "Games have a unique power that other media don't. They allow you to understand how systems work. Epidemiology may actually be better explained in game form than by a pamphlet or documentary."
Infectious activity

Swinefighter

Inoculate the flying pigs to turn them from a sickly green to a healthy pink.

Swine Flu: Hamdemic

End threat of pandemic by throwing pigs out of Mexico with a slingshot.

Aporkalypse Now!

Unsettling first person shooter where your enemies are brutal zombie pigs.

Pandemic 2

Try to eradicate humanity with a killer virus. Not for hypochondriacs.

Sneeze

Try to infect as many people as you can with a single sneeze.

Killer Flu

Game in which you infect residents of a randomly generated world.

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