"Prince is just one of my absolute, all-time favourite artists. He was a genius. I remember the first time I heard ‘Kiss’ and it's so special, because it's so minimal. It's so intimate and it just grabs you. He's singing so quietly and he's got so much space in between all of his little phrases. It's just so good! “It's a style all of his own and he made that sound his. It's one of those songs where it's become so iconic, and that style has been so distinct; so many people have been inspired by it and you can hear it in their music! I think it's just a great touchstone. For me as an artist, and as a singer, and as a music lover, just hearing that song for the first time, it's such a fundamental song."

"Yes, that's the one. I know both recordings, and the movie too, but I think the one I listened to mostly was the later one. In a lot of ways Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and this piece in particular, represent what I'd ultimately like to do as an artist: bringing opera together with popular music; classical singing with everyday life. I've written a couple of operas, I've worked with Shakespeare's sonnets, I've made pop records, and I have this folk background, and I feel that Kurt Weill with The Threepenny Opera was the pinnacle where all of the elements that he was influenced by joined together to create this other animal. Lotte Lenya was the one who interpreted that. It's a really good touchstone to keep in mind in terms of what I do in the pop world and the theatre world."

"And I don’t want to leave this list without alluding to The Long Day Closes. It’s about many things; it’s about the strangeness and disorientation and passions of youth, but most of all it’s about vocation, the calling of an artist and how early in one’s life that vocation comes. As a boy, Richard Avedon, the photographer, covered the entrance to his bedroom with a dark curtain, punched a tiny hole into it, and watched his family all day long. And in The Long Day Closes, in myriad, tiny details, often easy to overlook, Terence Davies is showing how filmmaking comes to a very young man who one day will become a filmmaker. For some weird reason, Davies is relatively unknown, especially in this country. Why? The cinematography is so poetic. The shots are like great music."

"And of course there’s Fellini, who has been with me most of my life. I remember seeing La dolce vita in the sixties as a kid. I couldn’t follow all of it and dropped off a few times, but some scenes stayed with me forever. Like the sea monster with the staring eye at the end of the film and the young girl shouting something to Marcello, who can’t hear her. Later I fell in love with Amarcord and 8½. The latter has become one of these comfort films I go back to watch every now and again, to reassure myself about the point of it all. It’s about being an artist and an impostor, and the endlessly complicated relations between men and women. There’s a freedom and honesty about these films, and each one has a form all its own."

"And of course there’s Fellini, who has been with me most of my life. I remember seeing La dolce vita in the sixties as a kid. I couldn’t follow all of it and dropped off a few times, but some scenes stayed with me forever. Like the sea monster with the staring eye at the end of the film and the young girl shouting something to Marcello, who can’t hear her. Later I fell in love with Amarcord and 8½. The latter has become one of these comfort films I go back to watch every now and again, to reassure myself about the point of it all. It’s about being an artist and an impostor, and the endlessly complicated relations between men and women. There’s a freedom and honesty about these films, and each one has a form all its own."