The London Book of The Dead may sound at first like a startlingly morose title, but in fact it�s more whimsically humorous than morbid. It refers to the Bardo Thodol (or �Tibetan Book of The Dead�), which describes the passage of the soul from the end of one life to the beginning of another. �I thought it would be funny if there were a book like that for the English,� says Coates. �The album felt like that to me � a way of moving from one state to another, and all set against the backdrop of this city.�

Amongst the whimsy and humor are lyrical concerns drifting between such weighty topics as death, religious faith, honesty, drugs, and disease. The songs are informed in part by Coates�s own recent passage through several significant events: �Last year I became a father, and then two weeks later my own father died,� he says. �So I was in this kind of psychic spin between birth and death, and this album came out of that in some way.�