Why has it taken me so long to watch this? Strictly speaking, it’s a no brainer and I should have been first in the queue at the cinema but I wasn’t. Maybe I was away.

Its times like these I wish I had a TV the size of The Hanging Gardens Of Babylon.

I love del Toro. He’s made some of my favourite films - The Devil’s Backbone answers to nobody - but this is in a different league. It may have drifted into the public eye as a ‘fairytale love story’ kind of thing, but it’s not really. What it’s getting at is how The Monster Is Not Really The Monster In The Monster Movie. All of my favourite films are about that, whether there are monster-looking creatures in the movie or not - and that probably says more about my psyche than I care to dig into.

Footnote. Somebody asked me just a few days ago what my songs were about and I couldn’t explain them very well at all... but now I’ve written this, there’s my very succinct answer to all of it: They’re about The Monster Not Really Being The Monster...

Hey, that’s as close as we’re going to get right now.