Songfacts®:

• This song from Tales Of Us finds Alison Goldfrapp singing about a Hollywood actress, Laurel Grey, and a misogynist serial killer. The album was inspired largely by Alison Goldfrapp's love of noir fiction and this track was inspired by Dorothy B. Hughes' 1947 crime novel, In A Lonely Place.
• In A Lonely Place was filmed in 1950 in bowdlerised form with Humphrey Bogart. "Do you know what," Alison Goldfrapp told The Independent, "I can't stand the film, and I don't really like film noir. I think the books they're based on are way more exciting and evil and gritty and explicit. I got really into Patricia Highsmith, too. There's just this sense in them that something's about to happen, or maybe it has just happened, there's a psychological fear running through them. Brooding, but quite romantic as well. And those books are very visual, there's a simplicity there. You can hear the fog and the sea, and you can smell the dampness in the air, and you can feel yourself going round a corner in one of those great big Fifties cars, going slowly down a dark street, by the rolling sea, and a feeling of doom, and you're just immersed in it."
  
  "I really wanted it to have that feeling in 'Laurel,'" she continued, "with the harpsichord in there and the reverb, and the feeling of being sleepy and losing consciousness, which is how that world seems to feel. David Lynch's Lost Highway is like that too, where he just has a camera hovering, looking at a room that's empty, and you don't quite know why you're looking at it, and s--t, what's going to happen? I like the idea that the dread doesn't really arrive. And that's a nice feeling in music as well. Sometimes you don't want things to be resolved, or explained."