"The next movie would probably be Young Frankenstein. I remember going to see that as a kid. Because I loved all the Universal horror films, but I had only seem them on TV, like on Creature Double Feature on Friday afternoons. By that point I loved Gene Wilder, because I made the connection like, “Oh, that guy was in Willy Wonka. Now he’s in Young Frankenstein.” So that movie blew me away. And even to this day, I watch it all the time. It’s such an incredible movie because it’s really, really funny, with such incredible performances, but it’s so beautifully made. Nobody would spend the time now to make a comedy that well. Visually and technically, it’s so incredible. It doesn’t date; it holds up. Peter Boyle’s perfect, and Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder, and everybody. It’s just an incredible movie. It really captured the feel of those Universal films, like Bride of Frankenstein, yet it is really funny. It’s something that almost never works. You know, kind of look at the Munsters on TV, and the Addams family, where you could get into it and they have the art direction there and everyone’s funny, but it almost never works. It’s almost always a disaster, and that film is just so perfect. I think the fact that people were brave enough back then to release black-and-white movies."

"Like a lot of people of my generation, the first time I heard a Kurt Weill song was The Doors. You go half a lifetime without realising it was written by Brecht and Weill. Recently I went on a journey. I write songs with a guy called Reid Paley. He’s a very less is more, economical songwriter and you know there’s something about him that’s very tin pan alley. He wears a black jacket and a white shirt and has no problem banging out a song. He is not going to use a word like ‘thalossocracy’ in one of his songs. I felt I needed to get into the feel of Threepenny Opera - how has it survived all these years and spawned all these cover versions which are part of the jazz songbook? I really needed to educate myself and listen to that record ten or twenty times to hear the melody and the meter and the drama, what they put together, those dudes back in pre-WW2 Berlin. They were working really hard and we’re still talking about those records today. I was just enjoying it in and my wife was listening along upstairs. She was doing laundry and I was doing pots and pans. And she said: “I could listen to this all day long, whatever it is.” I don’t speak German so I’m missing a lot outside the English part of the libretto but I still love it."