"I suppose this is another more upbeat song. I feel like I can remember it from one of those Best of the ‘80s compilations from when I was a teenager, but unlike a lot of the songs from that era, it has a lot of real lived experience and heart to it. “Although these songs are in chronological order, this had an influence on me when we were touring with Klaxons in 2007. At the end of the tour I stayed in New York to write on my own for a few weeks. I’d read that Mike Scott from The Waterboys was living on the East Side, and I would walk around that area every day listening to “The Whole of the Moon” hoping I’d bump into him. Which I never did, unfortunately. “I love the story behind this track. Essentially, one night Mike Scott had been out drinking and he met this girl. As he walked her back to her apartment, he told her he was a songwriter and she said “Well, then write me a song now.” He looked up at the sky and there was a half crescent of the moon, and he wrote the first half of this song on the walk home, just to impress this girl. I was so blown away by the romance of that. “I would sit on this bench at a dog park and think ‘How do I summon that greatness in a song.’ A few days before I flew home, I wrote “Two Doors Down”, sat on that bench in that dog park. And I feel I’ve got Mike Scott to thank for that."

"Romeo and Juliet is on my list because I saw it when I was at a very formative age. I think I was 14 or 15, and at that age, girls are very dramatic about romance and they’re just starting to get those feelings, and love is very painful and very important. It’s overwhelming and you have these huge crushes, and so Romeo and Juliet is all about that huge first love. And you couldn’t have found two more beautiful teenagers than Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting… and that was the first time I had ever seen Michael York and he was stunning — he was stunning. The costumes were gorgeous. Zeffirelli was a beautiful artist. He designed theater and opera and sets, so it was just beautiful. I think why I love Italy so much now is because of that movie, and it made me fall in love with Shakespeare. That’s one of the first times that Shakespeare became not just some dusty old English thing that you had to study in school, but it became really alive. You know what else did that really well? Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet… So, Romeo and Juliet was my first introduction. I walked around pretending I was Olivia Hussey. I had my long dark hair parted in the middle, and we had these, like, hippie baby-doll blouses that had the empire waist, so I would wear that all the time and I’d sorta stare at myself in the mirror. Of course, there was nobody in Cleveland, OH who looked anything like Leonard Whiting, so it was all in my head."

"I was probably about 17 [when I first heard it] and this one for me is very much about falling in love. I didn't realise for ages how much it must have influenced me because of the phasey synths, the layers of phasey guitar, the romance and the gloominess and depression, but within that depression there's always those bursts of euphoria and that sad/happy line. In music I tend to really enjoy the sad/happy dichotomy; they've been put together and it breaks your heart but you love it at the same time. You want to cry but you want to smile, and I think really hearing phasey guitars, massive intros, really lush, long droning synths, and Robert Smith for me, on 'Lullaby', it's just such great storytelling: "Quietly he laughs and shaking his head / Creeps closer now, closer to the foot of the bed". It's just like weird, dark, gothic literature or weird Roald Dahl stories or kids' stories about adult anxiety but told through Charlotte's Web-like fables and storytelling. 'Untitled' has harmonium and stuff and then it kicks into massively reverby drums, quite shoegazy, and 'Disintegration' is such a great song, I absolutely love it, and there's loads of really long intros where he just sings at the end and when you hear him yelping, "yeeeeah!". I felt like him and Björk at the time were both really exploring feral, expressive vocal sounds - and I think Robert Smith is a really underrated vocalist, not even underrated but I think he's like [mimics Robert Smith] and it's really free and endearing, just very unique I think."