"Nobody had been doing intricacy and harmony, arrangements and detail in the recording studio as much as Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. He just made us all think again, certainly to stand up and listen again too, just like The Beatles did with Sgt. Peppers. Pet Sounds was also influential in my career because Mike Hurst, the producer who discovered me if you like, was absolutely infected with this album. So when it came to recording me, he tried his best to make it sound like Pet Sounds. That’s why I have such large arrangements in my early songs. It was not really something that was connected to me, but rather to that record, so it was quite interesting about the history of that."

"I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days. It’s from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles’ work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? (singing) ‘I am the carpenter…"

"If you want to persuade people to give Frank Zappa a second go, you play them 'Trouble Every Day', it's one of the greatest songs ever, and it sounds like it could have been off one of the first two Velvet Underground albums. Again this is an album that Mark Smith played me. Just the other day I played 'Concentration Moon' in which he's having a go at the VU. He hated everyone, the Velvet Underground, the beatniks, the hippies… it was a landmark album because it was the end of hippie culture. People say it was after the stabbing at Altamont but musically this was it. It has the Beatles referenced in the pastiche on the cover. It's really fabulous, really cynical."

"It was one of my cassettes but I think that this is my favourite Beatles record. When I was really young my older brother were really into them. There was a very small selection of records in the house so we just listened to those records over and over again. Two of them were The Wall and Dark Side Of The Moon, one of my brothers was big Pink Floyd fan. Another was Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, and Don McLean's American Pie, and the White Album, which led me to other Beatles stuff. But I love Abbey Road because it's so clearly an album, in that there's clearly a first song and a last song and all the songs in the middle are in an order. You couldn't listen to Abbey Road on shuffle and I like that. I think we've lost a lot of that these days. Things end up just being these singles and no one really buys albums anymore. Albums just aren't constructed that way as much anymore; the whole, the complete package, a narrative, an arc. The first copy I got had somehow been fucked up in the manufacturing process or something because side B was on side A. I remember the first time I listened to it I was listening to it out of order and it sounded weird to me, it felt weird. Then when I realised that it was backwards I listened to it again in the correct order and I was like, "oh, I get it". I also feel like the songs on that record, save for 'Octopus's Garden', also have some darkness about them, which I really like."

"Woody Allen movies are like Beatles songs. I can’t name my favorite without you immediately naming a better one. But this one tops the list for me. It invented the modern romantic comedy while simultaneously deconstructing it. It’s skeptically romantic, like most of us. Like a child’s imagining of what adult life is probably like, it’s filled with the kind of hilarious nonsense that defined Woody Allen’s standup and early writing, which I also loved. I recognize the mastery of Crimes and Misdemeanors. And Manhattan. Hannah and Her Sisters. I was floored by Blue Jasmine, which I’d put up there with his best. But this one, man it just nailed a tone I’ve never seen again. I immediately applied to NYU with every intention of meeting a woman who wears a tie."