When your first album's sold more than 1.5m units in the UK and is still in the Top 40 17 months after issue, expectations for the follow-up are understandably high.

For Polydor, the Lighthouse Family's Postcards From Heaven is - along with Portishead's eponymous second album - one of two big releases in this year's all-important fourth quarter. And while the Tyneside-based duo of Tunde Baiyewu and Paul Tucker were given all the time they needed to put together their quintuple platinum debut Ocean Drive, there was no way Polydor managing director Lucian Grainge was going to risk losing the impetus. "I always wanted to come back with new material this year. Their last single came in January, so they've been away from radio for five or six months," he says. "The fourth quarter is a very buoyant time - and, strategically speaking, a single-album-single sequence and a British tour, all before Christmas, takes care of everything."

It takes time to evolve a trademark sound and the duo, signed to Polydor back in 1993 on the basis of a snippet of the Ocean Drive demo played down the phone to A&R director Colin Barlow, were given a £250,000 development deal to go away and develop theirs at leisure. It is little surprise, then, that the second album's emphasis is very much on evolution, not revolution.

Keyboardist Tucker and vocalist Baiyewu have shouldered more of the songwriting burden this time round: Tim Laws (writer of Gabrielle's Dreams) and ex-Kane Gang member Martin Brammer were both involved again, but 80% of the songs bear the performing duo's names alone.

Scottish producer Mike Peden has been retained, underlining Barlow's belief in continuity. "Why change for the sake of change? Mike has a very good understanding of Paul's songwriting and Tunde's voice and I didn't want to break that team up," says Barlow. "He's great at making dynamic soul-pop records, as he's shown with the Chimes and Shara Nelson. An American could have blanded it out - it's important to keep a cutting edge to the sound."

The mix has, however, been varied by drum programmer Ben Healey whose introduction of New York musicians has, says Barlow, helped make Postcards a more accomplished, more mature record than the first. Tucker sees Raincloud, the lead single released on September 29, as a hallmark Lighthouse Family track, and cites Question Of Faith as a bridge of continuity between first and second albums. But he considers Let It All Change, a loping groove reminiscent of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On with a monster chorus, as exemplifying a growing songwriting skill. "We're making the music we love a couple of years down the line - a couple of years older and with a lot more experience behind us," he says.

As the musicians prepare for a month-long UK tour kicking off in Sheffield on November 17 and including two nights at the Royal Albert Hall, Polydor's senior product manager Greg Sambrook is preparing a £500,000 marketing plan to cover all the bases. He says, "To sell 1.5m records you have to have a very diverse audience, so we're attempting to reach as many buyers of Ocean Drive as quickly as possible."

In the UK, 1998 is planned all the way to the summer, with the long-delayed US assault scheduled for April. By that time, however, Polydor's Grainge wants to see the label's biggest-selling debut album of all time followed up in the UK by a success that puts down a firm base for the kind of long-term career enjoyed by Simply Red and Wet Wet Wet. "One of the key reasons I wanted the album to come out this year was that, had they waited till 1998, they would have been 1996's success story," he says.

Although their sound remains as unhurried as ever, the Lighthouse Family's timing seems impeccable.

Michael Heatley

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