I dedicate this song to Alexei Navalny. When I learned he intended to go back to Moscow after an attempt on his life I was in awe of his courage and I wanted to show my respect. The vibe of this song fits perfectly with his situation so it seemed more than just coincidence when Chris Olley sent me his remix during the news of Navalny's return.

I think this was the last song written with Eddie Tempest. He used to play a little Casio keyboard that had an arpeggio function. At one rehearsal he switched it on for some reason, he then randomly hit the four keys that became the chord progression for the song. It had a naive charm about it and I said half jokingly, let's develop it.

I'd just watched a documentary on TV about Kim Philby, the infamous British spy who defected to Russia. The arpeggio in the music suggested a vast, snow-covered Russian landscape for me so I wrote the lyrics with a spy story in mind. As we worked on it I thought it was progressing really well but then Nige came up with a blistering guitar riff at the end of the song that convinced me it was special. I believe we performed it live only once (at Henry Boons in Wakefield, if my memory serves me well) before the band split up.

Fortunately I'd kept a rough Portastudio demo of it that I would occasionally listen to over the years and think, at some point it deserved a really big production (that demo can be heard here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIkcFvYX1L4 ). I really loved the build up to the epic guitar drop towards the end.

Then a few years ago, I reestablished my friendship with Chris Olley. He heard some of the musical ideas I’d been working on and he started to suggest I write an album. He then offered to help and asked me to send him all the stuff that I thought was any good. I sent him the demo of Snow.

As soon as Chris heard it he got in touch with me and said it was a monster that needed a bolt of lightning sending through it - could I send him the body pieces? By this time I had access to Logic Pro so I could produce quality recordings. And as luck would have it, decades before, I actually bought a version of the old Casio that Eddie used to play purely for nostalgic reasons. This meant I could sample the arpeggio off it.

So that’s how I got the authentic sound of the original recording. Nige took the samples and recreated the structure of the song. He then re-recorded the guitar parts. We sent all the separate tracks to Chris who remixed it.

I’m so pleased that after all this time in hiding, Snow is finally able to come out of the cold and reveal its true splendour.