"I’ve always had a soft spot for those artists that came out of the sort of psych-folk scene in Canterbury in the late ‘60s, but of all those performers Kevin Ayers is probably my favourite. “‘Lady Rachel’ has a real Englishness about it, which is kind of alien and almost exotic to me, because it’s a place I don’t really know much about; I never lived there. There’s something so far removed about the way he sings and pronounces words, like he’s from some far-off land. It feels like it’s come from the world of King Arthur and Alice in Wonderland and maybe a little bit of Mary Shelley or something. It’s a little bit Victorian and again, the themes are dark - it suggests death in the water. I liked that section of the ‘60s, where the psychedelic stuff was becoming a little bit more playful and wacky. “I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get really obsessed with songs and hunt down every version I can find of it. With ‘Lady Rachel’ I always felt like no one take of the song completely captured everything that was good about it; instead, each version captures one element of what I loved about it. The one that ended up on the album, Joy of a Toy, is really full and rich and very produced, but it’s played too fast and it loses a bit of the suspense - that glittery other-worldliness that gets lost in the speed of the performance. “There’s an amazing rendition of it that he did on The John Peel Show in 1973. Again, it’s a really beautiful version but there’s just this one line where he kind of steps out of character - he says “at least not very much!” in this kind of dorky, jokey voice and it undermines the mood of the rest of the song. It’s like going to see a play, getting to a critical moment and then the lead actor turns to the audience and says, ‘Hey, everyone - I’m actually just an actor.’ I’m always going, “Oh, man! Why did you do that?” Anyway, what the fuck am I doing, chasing perfection in music"

"I first heard Alan Lomax's work while I was at university. I did music with visual art and film, but luckily at that time, it was just before this tutor left that had run it for 25 years, and he was quite old school but great because it was still fairly shambolic as a course and there was some good soulful stuff. Alan Lomax did lots and lots of field recordings around America and archived folk, blues and negro music and porchstep music. This particular album is when he went to Mississippi and Louisiana state penitentiaries and documented the prisoners as they were working in cotton fields. They've got music in their blood and that's what came through, I think. It's just absolute badass, amazing rhythms and there's a sort of sex to the music - they're singing about [sings] "be my woman and I'll be your man!", because they're obviously randy as hell and stuck in a fucking prison and working under really difficult conditions in the heat. There are different tracks where you can hear a load of axes and chains, and they would sing along to the axes hitting the stone, choirs of beautiful voices of men. 'Old Alabama's a really good one and 'Rosie' and what's so interesting is that I would listen to that and instantly there'd be a spider diagram going out. PJ Harvey on To Bring You My Love's 'Goodnight', she just stands there with a stick and hits it and there's a guy doing slide guitar. Moby, embarrassingly, sampled loads of it for free. Nick Cave and loads of artists I've loved, you just see bits of it in their music, it's that deep, dark, gothic soul, blues music. This is the raw, concentrated, original bit. There's a kind of spiritual rawness to it, they're spiritual songs about missing love and family. "I'll spend the rest of my days in these four stone walls." The fact that this mad white guy from somewhere decided to go and capture all of these voices - I know there are a lot of rights issues surrounding Alan Lomax, but I think just in terms of being an archivist, I think a lot of that stuff would've been completely lost, so it's great."

"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."