Songfacts®:

• This sad, sturdy rocker finds Stuart Murdoch singing of a teenage girl whose perception of a troubled world turns inwards:
  
  When there's bombs in the Middle East
  You want to hurt yourself
  When there's knives in the city streets
  You want to end yourself
  
  Murdoch explained to Drowned in Sound: "I suppose it's a song about a person on the slide to some sort of madness, someone who has cut herself off, whose support network has abandoned her or is no good to her at all. This is the sort of person who has been radicalised by the comments' section of Guardian articles…"
  
  "If I could think of a character in a film most like Allie it might be Jane Horrocks' character in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet. She's angry with everyone and everything. Her boyfriend berates her saying: 'What is it you stand for anyway? What are your politics?'"
  
  "She says nothing"
  
  "'Just like I thought. There's nothing there.'"