A STOCKING FILLER. THAT’S HOW I THINK OF SOME SONGS. It’s a fun little item, but it’s not your main Christmas present. I can get a bit perfectionist about things and think, ‘This is just not one of my grand pieces,’ and often I’ll get a bit down on them. I remember being very down on a song called ‘Bip Bop’ and thinking, ‘Oh God, how banal can you get?’ But I once said that to a producer named Trevor Horn, who produced Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Grace Jones and a lot of cool recording artists, and he said, ‘That’s one of my favourites of yours!’ And then I could see what he saw in it, which is what I saw in it when I wrote it and wanted to record it, so he made me feel better about that.

‘Someone’s knocking at the door / Somebody’s ringing the bell’ – I’m imagining this is in Liverpool. A party of some sort. When we were in Jamaica, all the Jamaican guys would say to Linda, being blonde, ‘Hey Suzy, Suzy!’ To them a blonde, white woman was ‘Suzy’. So, Linda got a group and called herself Suzy and the Red Stripes, after the beer brand. So, ‘Sister Suzy’ – that’s Linda. ‘Brother John’ is either her brother, John Eastman, or John Lennon, ‘Martin Luther’ is Martin Luther King Jr, ‘Phil and Don’ are The Everly Brothers, and then you get ‘Brother Michael’, so that’s my brother, or it might have been Michael Jackson – the timing’s right for that, as we’d invited The Jackson 5 to the Venus and Mars album party on the Queen Mary the year before. And then ‘Auntie Jin’, which is spelt with a J rather than a G because her name was Jane. But in Liverpool that sounded too formal, so she would say, ‘Just call me Jinny.’ Then ‘Uncle Ernie’ – my cousin’s name was actually Ian, but they called him Ern. And by this point, I’m not really fussed. I’m just playing with words. ‘Uncle Ian’? Oh, come on guys, you’re just not paying attention. Never mind. There is no Uncle Ian . . . and he certainly was not married to Auntie Jin.

With Susie Shevell, Nancy and Merissa Simon, 2011

Then the strangest of strange happenings: fast-forward a million years and I marry Nancy Shevell, whose sister is named Susie and whose brother is named Jon. So, suddenly I’m singing about Nancy’s family: ‘Sister Suzy, Brother John’. It’s quite a coincidence.

It’s been suggested that ‘Martin Luther’ is here because he’s associated with banging on a door, nailing the articles of faith to a door. That’s not something I was aware of when I wrote the song, but out in the collective unconsciousness, maybe it’s possible. It definitely does happen that songs can come from some mysterious place. Much of the time, if you’re lucky, the words and music come together. You just sit down and start. You’re blocking stuff out with various sounds, and eventually, you hear a little phrase that’s starting to work. Then you follow that trail. As artists, we seem to instinctively know that if we’re open to it and if we play around enough with this bunch of words or notes, something will come of it. Something will come in. You don’t even have to let it in.