I never meant to write lots of songs about mothers. I must look like a therapist’s dream. One is probably excusable, so 2010’s Bedlam Six single “Mother (why did you raise me this way?)” didn’t raise too many eyebrows. Then the Jocasta musical based on the myth of Oedipus. Okay, that does seem like an odd choice but I just wanted to have a stab at tragedy and there’s no tale more tragic than that one!

But then being commissioned to write the songs for the Coraline musical where the villain is a monstrous toxic mother figure? Well, that’s just destiny playing its weird games, I can’t be blamed for that (and we’ve all been subsequently punished enough for working on that show).

But this UK Mothers’ Day I’ve teamed up with my old comrades in The Bedlam Six to record a sequel to that ungrateful complainathon from 2010. This song is called “A Mother’s Love” and is even more unpleasant. Well, no, you’ve guessed it, there’s more to it than that. The song was obviously written for the ill-fated musical in the last paragraph, it was the big villain number from act two. In the show the verses were split up to provide punctuation in a long action sequence, but for this version I just squeezed it all up together into a rock song. It felt like a perfect excuse to get the band back in the studio so let’s not read too much into it!