"It was the mid-'80s, I was in my early teens and Simon & Garfunkel came into play. A lot of the acoustic side to my playing comes from Paul Simon. He’s one of the greatest guitar players that ever lived and he’s done so many seminal guitar parts that I just fucking worship! “I first heard them very early in life because my parents had three Beatles records and Bridge over Troubled Water, but that’s not so much a guitar album. The album that changed my life as a guitar player was Sounds Of Silence, and it sort of opened the door into folk and folk-rock and then Bob Dylan. “Anji, the Davy Graham cover, is one of the first tunes I learned to play on acoustic, and it’s an amazing tune. I challenged myself to learn it and got my head round it. That whole album is full of really, really cool guitar playing"

"Fred Hersch is a hugely respected jazz pianist who was diagnosed HIV-positive in the 80s. He didn't talk about it publicly until the 90s. Then in 2008, he got very ill, and fell into a coma, which he stayed in for two months. When he came round he'd lost all his muscle memory, which is obviously devastating when you're a jazz pianist. So he had to learn to play again. This record was only made three years later, unbelievably.

I find this album very emotional. It's partly the music, which is very beautiful, but it's partly about what he went through. Having had a heavy hospital experience myself, I know how that can affect you. I managed to get a contact for Fred after he made this, and I wrote to him to tell him how much it had moved me. We wrote to each other for a while after that, which was really special."

"People who didn’t live through that period or weren’t old enough to know what was going on somehow imagine that there was this fantastic post-punk thing going on. That’s all made up in hindsight. Really, everything was pop of the most plastic kind. And a lot of it was quite terrible. Though I did like Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” which came out in 1984. There was a real thing in the early-to-mid ’80s about modern classical music; there was a lot of that stuff around, and those were the more interesting things. If you know Tabula Rasa and know anything about the music that I’ve been involved with, you might struggle to find how I would connect with that kind of music. But it’s not really experimental music. It’s very emotional. It doesn’t have the form of a song but it’s not far from the world that Eno was exploring with his Ambient series."

"Number one is easy, Bedazzled. The original 1967 piece with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It’s pretty simple. It’s really funny, and strange____. It’s like I think it was a big influence on my. I saw it in the ‘80s when I was a kid. I think it was on my grandma had, I mean she has seen it before we did, and she had few, we had video types, and I remember seeing the words all handwritten in ____ “Bedazzled”, and it big effect when I’ve seen it, and even the word interested me. Dudley Moore is a meek man who’s in love with this woman, and he makes a deal with the devil, played by Peter Cook to keep trying to change himself to be the kind of man that she would like, and I don’t know of course none of them are going to work. There’s always something wrong with the situation."