They say he walks the beat
Out on deserted streets
Snap wide awake
A face at the window pane
He’s got a heart like leaves
That crumple under feet
Get swept aside down by the railway line
And the mist fell like a cloak
In the lamplight
She seemed to glow before his eyes
A streak of white against the sky
The frozen air crackled into life
And when she hits the deck
It’s to protect herself
He’s at her back
Shielding her from the blast
She shivers in the freezing cold
And it’s like the death of hope
I can feel it in my aching bones
And when it all came tumbling down
Like a landslide
And then he found she was his own
The only one to ever know
The only fire that could melt him down
I can’t think of this song without thinking of the person I sing it with on The Fire Stairs, Michelle Hendry. I met her at university. We appeared as husband and wife opposite each other in a student production of the musical Cabaret. I can vividly remember the moment I first heard her sing. My jaw hit the floor. It’s just the most ridiculously pure, beautiful sound. I wrote this song for us to sing. I thought of the tune in my house in Bunyan Road in Walthamstow. It came to me while I was watching the telly with my mother (ROCK. AND. ROLL.) and I snuck upstairs to the spare room to work it out. There are a couple of lyrical steals here which I feel I should acknowledge. The line about ‘a face at the window pane’ was coined by my brother, who is an extraordinarily talented poet. The line about a ‘heart like leaves’ came from a regular in the West End pub in Sheffield (except in his version, it was his liver, not his heart). And the title was inspired by this article in the Independent about the traditional shape of the Valentine heart. The middle eight features my favourite ever chord change in any of my songs.
