Songfacts®:

• This song came out of a conversation Guy Garvey had with a friend back in 2005. Sitting in her garden at 3 o'clock in the morning, Garvey's pal told the story of how her local church had burned down when she was a child.
  
  "She described the smoke being illuminated through the stained glass windows, the crazy shapes in the sky above the church, and then how the roof collapsed and what looked like birds made of fire coming out in a plume above the church," he recalled to The Manchester Evening News. "It was pages of hymn books, on fire. I just verbatim wrote that down and put it into meter."
  
  Garvey kept the song in his back pocket for ten years before recording it as the closer on Counting The Squall.