"I adore this song, my wife and I played it at our wedding and it’s a ringtone on my phone. Every now and then you hear something and think ‘I wish I could write a song like that, something that gets to the essence of what it means to be alive.’ I remember the first time I heard ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ on the radio and I was like ‘Damn, I wish I’d written that song.’ The strings work so well with Richard Ashcroft’s singing and lyrics, which sum up a lot of the complicated feelings you have as an individual trying to get through each day. It’s a perfect wedding of the two of them. It’s wrapped around this glorious production and the sound of the band is really minimal, it’s mainly the string arrangement, which of course was from The Rolling Stones. If they’d just cleared it ahead of time they probably would have done a 50/50 deal on the publishing, but they didn’t, it was too late and they didn’t have any control. The Rolling Stones didn’t need the royalties as badly! I also admire ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ from a producer’s standpoint because I love its simplicity. The drums are the same pattern over and over, I think it’s a drum-loop, for the bass it sounds like they got a two or four bar loop, because the chords don’t change, and the guitar overdubs are all textural, it’s just these blips, bleeps and little echoes flowing through the mix. It’s a brilliant soundscape, it doesn’t really sound like a rock song, where you have blazing, loud distorted guitar amps, it’s got this atmospheric vibe to it and I think that fits the lyrics and the singing perfectly."

"Roy was about the same time. The Old Grey Whistle Test was on later than Top Of The Pops, and you had to be a bit older to stay up late and get away with it. I got my first sighting of Jobriath on there. I don't know if I saw a flash of Klaus Nomi on there too, and of course David doing 'Queen Bitch', Roxy doing 'Ladytron', and the New York Dolls was quite a moment for some people. It was via Genesis doing 'I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)' from Selling England By The Pound, that I became interested slightly in that longer haired world. I didn't go for Pink Floyd; I thought there was something not quite right about hippies, and you were either a hippie or not a hippie. Somehow, I heard the track 'Hallucinating Light' by Roy Harper, and was amazed by the quality of his voice. And of course, he had Chris Spedding playing guitar - David Gilmour plays guitar on the album also - but Chris had a sort of slightly Roxy Music edge to him as well. It is just a great album. 'The Game (Parts 1-5)' is a brilliant song sequence and it just appealed to me, as a perfect artistic statement. None of my other friends got into it, it was almost a guilty pleasure, but there was nothing to be guilty about because it was just a great record. The track where he has the colliery band - 'When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease' - is beautiful. It's hard not to shed a tear - it's a lovely song. He also had connections with Led Zeppelin, who I wasn't interested in at all, but a lot of people only know him because he sung on one of their tracks, but for me he was something outside of that."