"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."

"I think it's because when I was 12 I had Debut and I really liked that because I was just dancing around singing and enjoying it, quite an innocent record that had some beautiful moments. But really for me Post is an album I heard that was unlike any other at the time which was combining electronic and organic elements and I just really enjoyed delving into that sonic universe that she created, it's so experimental and forward-thinking and unique to her, but it perfectly fit into that time and landscape. I think it's really timeless. I think she has become a certain thing now but on those first four or five albums, for me, she was such a pioneer and so fiercely dedicated to her art and so unique and so closely linked to themes of nature and passion and love and the body and raw childlike feelings, and using all these really exciting instruments and sounds to put across her pop songs. 'Army Of Me' was the first single that came out - [sings intro] - POW! Clanging, massive drums and Michel Gondry was making the videos and I think the album just sonically draws in so many amazing, London early to mid nineties influences. But then having songs like 'Cover Me'. I remember hearing an alternately recorded version of 'Cover Me' which she actually did in a bat cave! You can hear the bats squealing and flitting about, so there's all these kind of sub-bass, deep 808 beat noises that I got really excited about, but she's got like bloody harpsichords and harps and stuff like really archaic chamber music sounds mixed with really heavily electronic digital sounds. So that was a real education, combining those things, because for me, if it's too much of one or the other I miss them a bit. Even on Berlin there's a lot of real instruments but there's synths and stuff going on too - I love it when people combine those things. Also, the eclecticness of the record: she's not afraid to travel from songs like 'I Miss You' which is that type of fanfare to 'Army Of Me' which is dark and techno and 'Hyperballad', which is like fucking four-to-the-floor, but just with all these strings it's super-emotive, a Technicolor dream."

"There isn't really one definitive album in that series. We were completely addicted to those Electro albums when they first came out. One of us had one album and we used to trade them between the lot of us. I bought Electro 2 and I was a bit pissed off at the time, but it's one of my favourites now. Electro 5 has got some of the best tunes on it. And Crucial Electro has got 'Clear' by Cybertron, which is amazing. Jerry Calliste, Jr. is a genius I think. He was the man behind 'Al Naafiysh' and High-Fidelity Three's 'B Boys Breakdance'. That's one of my favourite tunes on Electro 5. 'Breaker's Revenge' [by Arthur Baker] is a killer. Beat Street – the film and the soundtrack – was huge for me. I was a terrible breakdancer. Embarrassingly bad. I had a couple of moves and I could barely do those, but I loved the culture of it. UK Electro was also a key record – I found out recently that it's all by one guy. It's perhaps easy to see this in retrospect, but there are lots of parallels between Detroit and Sheffield and Manchester. I can remember looking out at the cooling towers from my bedroom window. They were maybe two miles away. You could see a big urbanised bit to the side of it. It made the landscape magical listening to that music. I think this was probably what Kraftwerk were getting at originally. Talking about it now it seems obvious, but it adds magic to your own mundane landscape. You need that. That's what happened with Detroit techno. You've got this utterly bleak landscape and the only way to make it palatable is to lend it some kind of majesty. I think we were very lucky growing up when we did. We had lots of momentous moments. Things are very fractured now. Back then, everybody had an opinion on something like Star Wars – especially boys, well, men now. We all have this notion that we were privy to something amazing. It's very rare now that something is that omnipresent. The whole thing with the electro scene was that it was a bit left of centre. I got a lot of stick for it at school. I can see why, looking back now. It was such a huge thing. It pushed you in a certain direction. I've grown up a bit now, but it used to be quite extreme. Y'know, like, "If you don't share my taste in music you can fuck off.""