"Whitney Houston, what a phenomenon! Now that she’s gone even more so, I think maybe the world just didn’t recognise what we had. Maybe in the 80s and 90s people understood, ‘cause she was just this shining star. When I watch her performances – there’s one in particular, where she’s singing to the sailors that’ve come back – and she sings “All The Man That I Need”, I just think it’s the most perfect performance I’ve ever seen! I can’t believe it’s live! “'My Love Is Your Love' is probably one of my favourite songs ever. I heard it once on the radio – I must have been 12 when it came out – and I fell in love with it instantly: the voice, the track, the production. My parents and I went camping in the Lake District, and I went to Woolies and found the CD. I was so excited, but we didn’t have a CD player! ""For a whole week of camping, I remember staring at this CD with the memory of how incredible it was on the radio from one listen, and the excitement of ‘I can’t wait to get back! We have to drive nine hours to get back! We have to finish the camping trip!’ Getting home, I just ran to the CD player to listen to it! ""I love the accessibility of music through streaming, and now everyone everywhere can listen, which I think is a wonderful thing. The one thing I do miss is the anticipation of music, and the listener having to make more of an effort to hear it. For me, the appreciation was more. When you’re a kid, you don’t really have money to spend on anything, so you were investing everything you had on this feeling. I always think back to that every time someone asks me about streaming. I want that feeling back, of really having to make a physical effort to listen. I just remember cherishing music in such a different way. ""It’s a hard one to balance. It is great that we can all hear everything we want all the time, but for me as an avid music lover, I feel a difference. If there’s something I really love, or an artist I really appreciate, I will always make sure I go and buy the vinyl. I’m really excited about my next album – I’ve been told they’re going to make cassettes of it! Just for nostalgia’s sake, I think that’s so exciting! Beyond the physical aspect to listen to it is the maintenance of it. You have to keep your CDs safe; you can’t scratch them! You have to be careful when you rewind the tape! That care is all part of the experience. ""Every artist that I’ve fallen in love with has been because I’ve been able to see all sides of them, and some sides of artists aren’t going to be as popular or as streamable as others! I think it’s important to have a full sense of who someone is. For the artist, to have the anchor of an album is quite stabilising: if you’re thinking in singles that can get quite confusing and go in so many different directions"

"It’s early 70s, with the Master Musicians of Joujouka. That’s partly why I chose it, because they’re on a couple of tracks. That record is one of the earliest jazz records I found myself listening to a lot. Somebody handed it to me and I was really impressed by it. I didn’t know anything about these Joujouka guys at that point except for the fact that their name always came up in relationship to the Rolling Stones and Brian Jones. At that point I don’t think I’d even heard of that Pipes of Pan At Jajouka record that Brian Jones recorded but I started to get really interested into Dancing In Your Head. Ornette went to Morocco with this music critic named Robert Palmer. Palmer was a really important music writer and I’d read some of his stuff, so when I saw his name on the back of that record I was even further intrigued. It was a kind of an early avenue into free jazz for me, because this record led me to Miles and to Coltrane and to Thelonious Monk and Albert Ayler and all this other stuff. I think probably at the same time I was also listening to African “world music” as they called it later, and a lot of Gamelan was really important to me. I was looking for world music that I felt I could find stuff in, that could inform my interest in rock & roll and certainly the Gamelan music had a lot of that just because it was metallic and loud and it had these furious beats and Dancing In Your Head did too because it was really drone-y in ways that reminded me of the Velvet Underground and was also really loud. It also tied directly with jazz music because The Master Musicians of Jajouka playing those rhaitas were circular breathing in the way the jazz players were, just going around, you never felt like the music broke for breath. They were just going around in this endless loop, which also tied it in with my interest in tape music and tape loops and things like that. It wasn’t really until I went there and played with these guys in the 90s – we went to the village and spent a couple of days there and kind of played all night long with them – they had a cheap generator and an electric guitar – I could see that it was loud and kind of stomping in a way that related to rock & roll but it also had this circular trance-y thing where you started to lose track of time. Had it been going on for ten minutes or forty minutes or whatever it was? It had a very druggy quality with or without the drugs. There was just something about Ornette Coleman and when I heard this record I felt like I was hearing someone who was a great force. He did all these amazing ground breaking records and it opened up the whole world of jazz for me."

"My first gig I ever went to, when I was nine, was at Wembley Stadium to see the Bad tour. When he died, I was in my bedroom in Brighton and I heard it on the radio and I just spontaneously absolutely burst into tears. Michael Jackson, when I was little, was just this God-like being. You know when you're little and you're singing in the car with your mum and your brother and the sister, the world is so good, there's nothing more fun and nothing better. I don't think I've ever listened to someone singing something with that much joy, he was channelling something so fucking out there and it's like he constantly had a bolt of creativity running through his body, like the way he danced and the way he moved. A consummate dancer, referencing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and James Brown and all these people that he channelled but made completely and uniquely his own. I saw a Spike Lee documentary the other night about Bad. Someone else wrote 'Man In The Mirror' but he took and did all of his - [mimics Michael Jackson] "I'm gonna make a change" - and all of that shit. It's just like, who else would do that? Who else would wear plasters all around their jacket? Who wears white socks with loafers and manages to make it look cool? Nobody was telling him to do that. He's just this fucking eccentric one-off. When he died, I thought the climate of music will never be like that again. It was like he was a child and his brain was a playground and anything he could think of, he bloody manifested that in the world; not many people can do that. The arc of music that he lived through, his education and his training all the way through, coincided with all these revolutions in music, music videos and dance. I just think that that was a one-off thing. I'm getting philosophical now [laughs], but I was watching Brian Cox the other day and his astro-physics thing and he put 50 stones all in a row on a desert floor and he was like "each of these stones represents billions of years in the history of the universe and where it's going to go." Then he went "here's one stone" and he showed about a millimetre of that stone: "in this bit, this is where the conditions were perfectly right for mankind to exist, this is this time, we're here now". When you think about culture and popular music from the 50s through 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, it does feel like there has been a bit of a cycle, and I've been lucky that I came in at the end of that cycle. People that were born in the 50s had it amazing, because they got to see fucking David Bowie and punk music, but Michael Jackson was a guy that happened in our lifetime. I get really passionate about music, but music, for some people, it's like a religion and he was like a fucking icon."