1. Octopus tentacles

Having waxed lyrical about how profoundly personal all these things are, we start off with perhaps the only ingredient here that is almost purely aesthetic. I realise now that tentacles are a bit over-done but I didn’t know that at the time and they still look good to me. I do however, like many folks, have a strong love for the mysteries and romances of the sea, and I may well write a record on the theme one day.

These tentacles are a nod to the tentacles my agent Ross Warnock has tattooed on his ink–crowded arms – I remember he turned up at the Astoria with them one night and I thought they were amazing. They also bring to mind the horrific fantasies of H.P. Lovecraft, whose work you should definitely sample.

At one point I was going to limit the tentacles to one side and mirror them with empty autumn branches on the other, but I had so much fun drawing the tentacles I just whacked them everywhere.

3. Miniature portrait of my wife Katie

Even though I look like I come from the fifties, I don’t actually regard my wife as a possession, however valuable she is to me. This little passport photo though, in its tiny frame, kept me company on many a long night at the chip shop when we were living 200 miles apart.

Even when she eventually came down from Durham to live with me, I’d have it on the bar looking at me during my shift. As I write this, it’s pouting at me from my desk (it’s a moody shot). Katie herself sang on two songs from the record, so it’s doubly relevant here.

2. Deputy Head Boy badge

I used to be good at school, and even when the band had sort of taken over my life I found it hard to let go of things like The Sixth Form Council, organising activity days and whatnot. Unfortunately for me, the collision of grunge and the concept of ‘Oxbridge material’ resulted in an awkward fallout and I went to the interview for the post of Head Boy wearing a green jumper through which you could clearly see one of my nipples.

I was stunned when the captain of the rugby team was elected in my place, and I suspect they might have invented this dubious subordinate position purely to mollify me. As I remember, I still ended up doing most of the leg-work for things like The All-Teachers Celebrity Karaoke Night, whilst Scrumhalf Simon went on all the official visits and got his square-jawed mug in the Camberley Herald. (His name wasn’t really Simon)

4. Replica tudor coin

I was twenty nine and still a young man when I made this album, but even then I was regularly visiting National Heritage properties on the weekends, and let me tell you, it’s never too early to start. It sounds boring and sometimes it is (I went to an excavation open-day at Woking Palace last week and I thought I was going to disintegrate) but most of the time it’s awesome and they’ve usually got replica coins in the gift shop.

I can’t resist them. They don’t take up much space but they’re an incredibly potent link with the past, something you can hold in your hand and appreciate instead of gawping at from behind velvet ropes. I love the way coins used to be a sort of news-service in those remote and isolated times... imagine it – you’d go to the market, look at the shiny new coin in your handful of change and say, “Blimey! Constantine’s Emperor now is he? Well I never!”

5. Snare drum

This is just an ordinary snare drum. I found a picture of one on the internet. There’s nothing particularly special about it, but it features quite heavily on the album so I thought it should be represented.

7. A british police box

This 1920s public call kiosk as designed by Mackenzie Trench is in no way associated with the BBC television series Doctor Who, for which I have a life-long passion bordering on obsession, to the point where it informs many of my most basic life choices. Nope, not at all. Totally different, rights-free thing.

6. My guitar

I think we could probably call this my main guitar, it’s the one I’ve played on every record I’ve made and at most of the shows I’ve performed, although I have used others from time to time, usually when this one was being repaired. I’m not one of these people who get all excited about instruments, much less so guitars, which are barely even instruments in the first place, but I do love this one. It’s been with me through all sorts of mess and it’s got the scars to prove it and it still sounds better than any other guitar I’ve ever played.

I bought it at a knock-down rate from the boss in ‘Good Luck’ (who was actually very supportive) but even at the bargain price of ninety quid or whatever I still couldn’t afford it so I convinced Mark and Jon that it was technically a band expense (since I’d broken my previous guitar) and they agreed I could take a third of the price out of the band account. Great lads, eh?

For what it’s worth, I don’t actively intend to abuse these guitars, it’s just that by the time you’ve given all of yourself to a really good rock show, you should be ninety percent adrenalin and I can never manage to calm myself down enough to daintily remove the strap and hand it to the guitar tech (if there is one), I just wop it on the floor and off to the dressing room (if there is one). This guitar is basically a zombie – it looks like a corpse and technically it is dead, but it keeps on growling. I noticed the other day that one of the tuning pegs is at a right angle to all the other ones. Still tunes though!

8. Brighton Pier prize tickets

I used to carry these around with me in my wallet because just looking at them reminds me of Brighton and makes me happy. Specifically, I love the ‘whack-a-mole’ games at the end of the pier, which I play with such ferocity that there usually forms a small frightened but fascinated crowd of children around me.

It is my fond hope that one day soon, when this double album of thrash metal/folk and jazz goes triple-platinum, I’ll be able to afford the astronomical house prices in Kemp Town and there make good my retreat.

9. Uncle Arthur’s Trumpet and Trombone

Whilst I’m aware that "Uncle Arthur’s Trumpet" sounds like an inconvenient if non-life-threatening medical condition, I did actually have an Uncle Arthur and these are instruments he owned, passed down to me through the family. Family was one of the themes of the record and when I knew I’d be needing some brass instruments on there I asked if I could use these old heirlooms and it worked out great (well, I did my best). The trumpet, I’m told, is of very fine quality and is worth a lot of money, whereas the trombone is a clapped out piece of junk. Makes no difference seeing as I can’t really play either. More on Uncle Arthur later.

10. Fox tie pin

My wife gave me this tie pin, a genuine Edwardian antique, for my birthday a few years ago. There’s not much to say about it other than it’s beautiful and it gives me that same sense of connection with the past that the coin and a few other items in this tableau do.

When I had a look at these things and realised that a lot of them are historical articles from within the UK I thought about why that may be and I reckon it’s because after my wedding in Las Vegas (more on this later) I became terribly afraid of flying and haven’t got on a plane since. This means I’ve focussed inwards on our little island and all it has to offer, particularly its traditions and its history.

Maybe I drew those tentacles because these days I spend my holidays gazing not at the red sands of Nevada but the grey seas of Cornwall. I don’t collect tiny facsimiles of The Statue Of Liberty, I trip home with a model of Winchester’s Alfred monument and set him on my PC tower. Perhaps?

11. Bakelite radio

I’m a sucker for Bakelite, as you might imagine. I like the romance of the radio, the way the family used to gather round and stare at it, even though there was nothing to see! I have a replica in my house but it’s not as nice as the one I’ve drawn here.

12. Heart and Brain

The thematic core of the record - the muscular heart-led visceral songs on the first disc and the cerebral, head-lead delicate songs on the second disc. Heart and brain, muscle and memory.

These aren’t my own heart and brain however, I just found them on stock websites. My own heart has been a source of trouble since I was a young lad and diagnosed with Aortic Stenosis, which basically means a slightly thin aorta, which theoretically might get blocked easier and kill me. Perversely, eighties doctors decreed that the best way to avoid valve-blockage was to stop me partaking in any sports, meaning I ended up getting very little exercise and put on a lot of weight. Great for the heart! I was a fairly normal five-year-old boy up until that point – I loved football and running about and all the usual stuff but then they told me I couldn’t do any of it anymore and so I ended up getting fat and reading science fiction books all day.

Recently I went for a checkup and the doctor told me it wasn’t really a problem and had probably been misdiagnosed. That’s my whole bloody life they misdiagnosed! I could have been an athlete!

As for the brain, it’s always the joke that weirdoes like me were dropped on the head as a baby but I genuinely, actually was. You make my mum a cup of weak tea and she’ll gladly tell you how I rolled off a table-tennis table when she had her back turned and landed on me bonce. Thrill as she tells you how she earnestly believed I was mentally impaired for life until my eyes un-crossed on the ambulance ride to the hospital. Great stuff.

13. Uncle Arthur’s Banjulele

My Great Uncle Arthur was my granny’s brother, and he was he black sheep of the family. He’d been in the navy but then he’d got an unmarried girl into trouble and could never hold down a job, and no one knew what to do with him. I didn’t know any of this when I was a kid, I just knew he was a sort of extra Grandpa who’d come round unannounced every now and then with a big load of instruments and everyone would have a go.

There are two pictures of him in the album inlay, one in his sailing gear as a young man and a later one taken at one of these impromptu jam sessions, where you can see me hammering away at that very same banjulele, the one I played on the record and on the tour, the one that hangs on my study door. My Auntie Christine gave it to me as a Christmas present one year – I don’t know if she was aware of the grip that pre-war blues had on me at the time but if not it was a great coincidence, just perfect.

I loved Uncle Arthur and I love that photo of us together. Although the one featuring my brother playing a kazoo-trumpet solo in a nappy whilst seemingly half-asleep is also good.

14. My father’s pipe

My father was a difficult man to buy gifts for – he used to ask for a Terry’s chocolate orange every year and when we cleared out all his possessions we found boxes of them mouldering away in his cupboards. In later years I tried hard to find things that might actually mean something to him and I think this pipe might have hit the spot. I’m not sure he ever smoked it but it’s a lovely object and it was one of the things I kept of his.

15. Racecar Is Racecar Backwards LP

In the same way that I don’t really go nuts about instruments, I don’t usually care much about vinyl but when my friends Hundred Reasons and Vex Red brought their albums out on 12 inch, I rushed out and bought them, and to be able to add my own debut effort to the pile was really special.

I don’t believe any of this guff about superior sound quality and whatnot (in fact I’ve seen it disproved in several blind tests) but one thing about putting on a record as opposed to a CD or an MP3, I’ve found, is that for some reason you pay it more attention. You listen harder, it’s more of an experience. It might be because it’s a big physical thing and you can actually see it happening, you can see the grooves that connect with the needle and arm in way you can’t see the lasers or the binary codes, I dunno. But I do like to listen to vinyl copies of my very favourite albums, of which this is necessarily one.

16. The ring of Aethelwulf

Aethelwulf was a ninth-century king of Wessex, one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that eventually became sort of the main one, with its capital in Winchester. His son Alfred (the Great) went on to become king of most of those kingdoms, except the ones held by the Danish at various points. Anyway this ring is awesome and I’ve gaped at it many times through the glass at the British Museum, plotting various ways to slip past the infrared laser-lines and bag it for myself.

Actually I could probably just lift up the case and take it, I don’t think anyone would notice. It’s not particularly prized as far as I can tell. I just ain’t got the guts.

18. Sutton Hoo helmet

Wikipedia can tell you more about this but one of the biggest hordes of Anglo Saxon finds in archaeology was a huge ship-burial in Suffolk, unearthed just before The Second World War got going.

No one knows whose burial it was and therefore to whom the helmet belonged, but whoever it was, his moustache will last forever. I’ve been looking for a good commercial replica of this for years but so far no luck.

19. Las Vegas poker chip

It’s not an actual poker chip, you’re not supposed to take those, but I suppose I could have if I’d thought about it (see guts; lack of, above). When I went away to get married in Vegas, I brought home these poker chips for everyone in the hope that they would serve instead of a huge expensive/pointless ceremony and ensuing awful piss-up. In many cases they didn’t, and my address book got a lot smaller that year.

I carried this one around with me until the constant rough-and-tumble of life in my pocket threatened to wear it away to nothing.

20. My banjitar

When I realised that this record was going to have a strong trad-jazz flavour I knew I had to get my hands on a banjo, but grabbing a four or five-string would’ve meant re-learning all kinds of complex chords, so I wimped out and plumped for a six-string, which is played like a guitar, hence the name.

As a result, it doesn’t really sound like a banjo, but it does have its own distinctive twang which I think lent an important flavour to the second half of the album. I ended up giving it to my producer Sean, although this was probably because I couldn’t be bothered to carry it home rather than genuine altruism.

21. A propelling pencil

As if this whole piece wasn’t a big enough nod to my real life as an illustrator, I thought it’d be good to include the tool of my trade. It’s not even a cool, real pencil, it’s a crappy plastic one, like a disposable razor. But I’ve found that these guys are perfect for the sort of work I do, they’re always sharp and you can get a huge variety of different lines and tones out of ‘em. I completed this entire illustration with several of these humble pencils.