Just when I was starting to think all the songs had been written.
Like the human experience had been well documented and maybe we’re all just writing in circles, re-hashing the thoughts of our elders with varying degrees of sophistication or else paddling in the shallow waters of pop poetry.
And then in the space of a few days and weeks, the world is changed forever.
A million new conversations are born.

Here is the first of my songs about life in the age of coronavirus.
It was immediately inspired by a post I saw on social media by the employee of a bookshop, enraged at the customers for defying advice by gathering in one enclosed space to browse for books. I shifted the setting to a bar – specifically my now romanticised idea of O’Sullivan’s – because it’s a location more conducive to balladry, because booze is a more tawdry pursuit than literature, and because as the songwriter, I can do what the hell I like.