Although the line-up was not complete, Fragile Creatures were starting to become a band in late 2011, rising from the ashes of Adam Kidd Band, under the guidance of David Vatchnadze. We'd recruited James Crump on drums and had Ousman Beyai still standing in on bass. 'Looking For Love In Inappropriate Places', the unreleased album Adam Kidd Band had recorded, was to act as a basis for our first shows as a band and, it was expected, forming most of the songs we would work up for recording.

Meanwhile, in the bedroom studio, between 2010 and 2011, I was cooking up this batch of songs. Although I had been left a laptop with recording capabilities to 'look after' by my good friend and long-term collaborator Andy Haines, for much of this time I still didn't have any way to make beats beyond a simple hi-hat loop/click track. When I recorded the songs for Sketch there was a drum kit around, so, apart from not being able to play drums very well, I could manage. For this album I ended up banging on guitar bodies and using whatever I could find for percussion, until, by the last few tracks I put down ('5-4/6-4' and 'Drink The Cup') I was just beginning to get my head around programming MIDI drums. 'Down In The Basement' drums were actually played on the keyboard: but by that point I at least had a drumming programme to learn!

'The Balancing Act' was a re-working of 'Rough Music' from B2 which features my Fragile Creatures band mate Aaron Neville, playing organ. I'd had 'Rough Music' for a while but never really felt right about any words I'd written for it. Then a whole story popped out of my head and I put it down, it's pretty weird and dark. I wasn't sure about it, but Aaron seemed to think it was cool, which is probably the only reason I ever finished it!

My good friend Tristan McClenahan helped with 'Drink The Cup'. He heard what I was playing around with, I think he was living in our house briefly at the time, and liked it. I was trying to make sense of a song with a ridiculous amount of chords in a long-winded progression. We worked together to re-record my original sketch, which was all guitar and layers of vocal, only for the computer to crash on us. It was a third time treat, with Tristan playing the piano (chord by chord as we worked out the jazz chords for the keyboard), the bass on the choruses (I insisted on having the verses!) and some brilliant electric guitars.

I actually had an overlying theme for this set of songs - at one point I guess I was trying to make it into a concept album. I was going a bit crazy working the cash desk at a local council housing office. It was slow going so I spent a lot of my time reading macabre news stories of real crimes, through court cases and reports I was slowly filling in the blanks and discovering these dark stories. 'Dear Michael' was written about poor Michael Gilbert, who was abused and murdered by his foster family. 'Peter Wallner' was written about a murderer who had his wife in a freezer for years, taking wood ash to her parents in South Africa to scatter as her remains. 'Down In The Basement' follows the Josef Fritzl story. 'Drink The Cup' name-checks Raol Moat, but I don't think it's really about him: it's about not becoming him.

Besides the dark current affairs songs there are others about my own dark moments, or fantasies, mostly all on theme. When I played these odd recordings to David, who I'd signed a publishing deal with, he was blown away, which actually really surprised me. These recordings were rough and messy but he could see the potential in the writing and, in some ways, was more impressed than the recordings we did as Adam Kidd Band.

So yes, between Sketch and Skeletons In The Closet all the Fragile Creatures early material can be found ('The Stumbling Block' was retitled as 'The Chemicals', it was originally named after a Jeff Wall image, where A Stumbling Block is a municipal worker who trips us up when we're going about our day to bring us fresh perspectives). At the same time I started, for the first time, to think that my dodgy home recordings might have some sort of merit, beyond simply being writing exercises.