Dear Sara and Maria,

‘Brompton Oratory’ is an important song for me as it marks the shift from the third-person narrative songwriting style of the first half of my career to the more personal, confessional approach that continues to this day. Most of my work until that point had been fictional character-driven narratives, and I had just recorded an entire album of such stories called Murder Ballads. I felt that the confessional style was overly self-absorbed and inward-looking, but perhaps that was my way of avoiding the discomforting task of writing about myself, I don’t know. Still, ‘Brompton Oratory’ marked a significant leap into unchartered waters.

It was my circumstances at that time that changed everything. I was going through a break-up, things were very fraught and the events started forcing themselves onto the page. I wrote ‘Brompton Oratory’ the morning after I had been unceremoniously defenestrated from what I thought was a rather special and groovy relationship, and in the high tragedy of the moment, I found myself seeking consolation in the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, also known as Brompton Oratory.

It is perhaps indicative of the enormity of heartbreak to want to dress up this routine human event in all the pomp and tragic glory of a vast neo-classical, late-Victorian Catholic pile. And so there I was, sitting dismally in the back row, the seventh Sunday after Easter, with a tear-stained notebook on my lap, writing the song in real time. ‘The great shadowed vault’, ‘the reading from Luke 24’, ‘the Pentecostal morn’, and ‘the stone apostles’ unfolded before me and spilt onto the page. The only thing I dreamed up was the controversial fourth verse as, in a bit of a state, I left before Communion. Instead, I sat on the steps outside, ‘forlorn and exhausted’, and wrote –

A beauty impossible to endure

The blood imparted in little sips

The smell of you still on my hands

As I bring the cup up to my lips

Later, back home in Basing Street, I composed the music on a cheap Casio keyboard I had bought down the road at Portobello Market. But the song felt incomplete, it needed another verse that would pull the whole thing together – its religiosity, its carnality, its self-abasing, elephant-sized anguish. Nothing came, though, so I parked the entire thing and forgot about it.

A few months later, as I describe in Faith, Hope and Carnage, I was wandering around Notting Hill ‘with nothing much to do’. The weather had turned and it was windy and cold. I stopped outside the Kensington Temple, the Pentecostal Church in Ladbroke Grove, and as I stood there listening to the joyous, communal singing coming from inside, these words seemed to drop out of the sky, fully formed –

No God up in the sky

No devil beneath the sea

Could do the job that you did

Of bringing me to my knees

– and I was made merry in that moment, even saved, in the way we are when we are helped along in our work. I closed my eyes and gave Saint Cecilia, martyr and Patron Saint of Songwriters, a great big imaginary kiss. With a sudden spring in my step and the newly completed ‘Brompton Oratory’ going around in my head, I pulled up the collar of my coat and continued happily on my way.

‘Brompton Oratory’, that simple six-verse heartbroken song, perfectly circumscribed the break-up of a relationship, from chaos back to order, and heralded in a new way of songwriting. Sara, I am glad you like it.

Love, Nick