"The last one, well, I think for me — at the moment — it’s Come and See, the Elem Klimov film about the Russians fighting the Nazis. I’ve only ever seen it once, and I don’t know if I ever want to see it again, but it is an incredibly, profoundly affecting and terrifying experience. I just thought it was amazing. I saw it maybe two years ago, and it’s just stayed with me so much. It was a film I had and I was scared of watching. I don’t know why I bought it. I buy a lot of films all the time, and I’ve just got cupboards and cupboards of movies. I saw it on the shelf and looked at it at like midnight one night and thought, “I’ll just watch five minutes of it and see what it’s like,” and then at two in the morning I was still watching, going “Oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like this.” What I like about it is that it’s a mixture that shouldn’t work on so many levels, because it’s very arty and it’s very self-conscious, but yet it’s utterly realistic, and it feels emotionally realistic. It feels like you’re totally transported into that situation. I’d also double that with The Ascent, the Larisa Shepitko movie. She was married to Klimov and made a movie 10 years earlier on almost the same subject, and her film is just unbelievable as well, you know. It’s well worth checking out, that Criterion box set. Mind-blowing stuff. Have you seen Come and See?"

"With some of the other songs here I said ‘I wish I’d written that song’, but I did write this one. I figured I had to at least put in one song I wrote, so if nothing else it’s a guilty pleasure. “‘Even Though Our Love Is Doomed’ had a long birth on Strange Little Birds and it’s an important song to me. I came up with the title when I was driving. I called Shirley and said ‘I have this title’ and she loved it. I said I’d work on it but all I had was the idea for the chorus and for the longest time it just sat around. I made all these different demos of it, an alternative-rock one, a clubby techno one, another sounded kind of hip-hop and a folk version and I hated all of them. Shirley asked what happened to it and I told her I hadn’t found anything that fitted what I’d heard in my head, so she said I should just bring in a simple demo to hear. I got home that night and panicked, because all I had was the chorus, I figured I had to put an arrangement together, even if it was just a temporary holding pattern. I picked up a bass and played the riff at the start and for some reason I wrote all the lyrics, they just came out in five minutes. The lyrics work on a bunch of levels. It refers to our band, the things that we have to work through, trying to survive and understand what’s going on, and it works for me in terms of my personal relationships with people where there’s been difficult times. That’s really what the song is about, trying to realise that it’s worth fighting through difficult times if something’s worth holding on to. It’s a really personal song to me. I liked the sonic template of it and that was a big inspiration for Strange Little Birds. We wanted to make more of a cinematic, atmospheric sounding record and less of a rock record. I liked the way the sound of the music and Shirley’s voice worked together. The song is important to me in that sense and the lyrics mean a lot to me, they’re about people I know, our band and myself."