Hope

We played it at (British outdoor festival) Glastonbury with (African kora player) Toumani Diabate, and it was incredible. But then I don’t think people were listening to the lyrics, it was more an emotional thing.

For me, writing the lyrics was an emotional thing. Obviously, it’s about such a traumatic event and then to put it in a ballad I found really funny. It’s just my warped sense of humour singing a ballad and singing something that would be [puts on her best warbling Celine Dion voice]</font ’I love you, I want to have dinner with you’ and then you’re actually singing about a pregnant suicide bomber, I just find that very funny.

There is sort of irony in it but it deals with facts, the situation you read about and you can’t grasp it. You can’t get your head around it. I felt at the time I was just trying to get into that woman’s head, what she was thinking and what would drive her to do something like that.

The media who should be neutral but there was so much fury first vilified the woman for daring to play with something so sacred as pregnancy and fool us with what was assumed to be a fake pregnancy. But then when it was realised later that she had been pregnant, they were kind of forgiving because it must have meant so much to her that she killed her own baby. This song is sort of about that double-sided standard.

theage.com.au, 19 January 2008