"Obviously we gravitate to those we love, and I suppose the B52's did all the groundwork for the campy disco rock a la Scissor Sisters that followed decades later. They are true originals and may have been the soundtrack to a John Water's movie. I lost count of the amount of times I danced to ‘Rock Lobster’ and tried to learn the who's who list of names on 52 Girls. The brilliant thing about being a pop musician is that you get to meet all of your teen idols. We toured with The B52's and I stayed in Woodstook at Kate Pierson's Lazy Meadow's Silver-line Caravan site, where I consequently felt the drums of an Indian pow wow coming up through the water of the river through my feet (which I often hear on the intro to ‘A Little Respect’ but it isn’t actually part of the music… spooky!"

"This is my alarm clock; I wake up to it every morning. It’s so brilliant because it begins with this... and then I listen to it when I read books on a loop and it’s enough for me. It’s all I need. I have like one song for every mood. “I heard this way before I watched the movie American Beauty. It was many, many years ago and it was one of the first songs I had. I had an orange iPod which I got for Christmas and I only had this song on it for years. I still think if I went into that iPod now, this is the only song I would have on it. I haven’t had it for years though, and they were such nice colours. “It’s good for walks in the forest, it’s like everything is still. Another is the Finding Nemo soundtrack which is also good for timeouts or when you go for walks. It’s really lovely.”"

"I don’t sit here, in my dad’s flat listening to my dad’s music, it’s not a fucking séance, but I don’t try to avoid it. I listened to a song of my dad’s the other day, a song he wrote called ‘Pam’s Moods’, and it’s so unbelievably brilliant writing. It’s a bit naively recorded and he’s got this faux-Jamaican-American accent going on, so he hasn’t quite found himself yet’ he’s not relying on who he is yet, so you can hear a bit of anguish about that. That muddies the brilliance of the song, but the song is so fucking good. The lyrics are so good, ‘Making wormwood of my soul,’ and it’s absolutely unbelievable delivery, and makes use of ridiculously long constructive narrative that still rolls off phonetically and scans well. That style of music got a bit rejected when he leapt to the more successful thing, but I more prefer that. It’s psychedelic."