Nick Cave reflects on his "special and groovy relationship" - and breakup - with PJ Harvey

A fan wrote into Nick Cave's mailing list Q&A to express their delight that he has included the song on the recent tour setlist. "Brompton Oratory" features on his 1997 album, The Boatman's Call, and Cave notes its importance as marking the "shift from the third-person narrative songwriting style of the first half of my career to the more personal, confessional approach that continues to this day."

Having previously thought that "the confessional style [of songwriting] was overly self-absorbed and inward-looking", Cave reveals that his circumstances at the time were a turning point. "I was going through a break-up, things were very fraught and the events started forcing themselves onto the page," he says. "I wrote Brompton Oratory the morning after I had been unceremoniously defenestrated from what I thought was a rather special and groovy relationship, and in the high tragedy of the moment, I found myself seeking consolation in the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, also known as Brompton Oratory."

"It is perhaps indicative of the enormity of heartbreak to want to dress up this routine human event in all the pomp and tragic glory of a vast neo-classical, late-Victorian Catholic pile," he continues, explaining that he began writing the lyrics into a tear-stained notebook on the "seventh Sunday after Easter". He describes composing the music on a cheap Casio keyboard that he bought at Portobello Market, but became stuck as the song felt incomplete – "it needed another verse that would pull the whole thing together - its religiosity, its carnality, its self-abasing, elephant-sized anguish. Nothing came, though, so I parked the entire thing and forgot about it," he revealed.

Months went by, but eventually the song found its way back to him. "I was made merry in that moment, even saved, in the way we are when we are helped along in our work," Cave says. I closed my eyes and gave Saint Cecilia, martyr and Patron Saint of Songwriters, a great big imaginary kiss. With a sudden spring in my step and the newly completed Brompton Oratory going around in my head, I pulled up the collar of my coat and continued happily on my way. Brompton Oratory, that simple six-verse heartbroken song, perfectly circumscribed the break-up of a relationship, from chaos back to order, and heralded in a new way of songwriting."